Alan Noble > Quotes

“Don’t do the next thing just so that you can keep doing the next thing. Do the next thing because it honors God and testifies of His goodness and the goodness of your life to your neighbor.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“This is precisely why we must see that each choice to do the next thing is an act of worship, and therefore fundamentally good. Feeding your pets is an act of worship. Brushing your teeth is. Doing the dishes. Getting dressed. Going to work. Insofar as each of these actions assumes that this life in this fallen world is good and worth living despite suffering, they are acts of faith in God. Choose to do the next thing before and unto God, take a step toward the block. That is all you must ever do and all you can do. It is your spiritual act of worship.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Sometimes that’s what peace is: an action based on faith and not an emotional state.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“We are not free to pursue whatever brings us the most personal fulfillment. We are not free to define our identity in any way we wish. We are not free to use people or creation as tools for our own ends. We are limited”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“We all suffer silent crises, carrying burdens that are incommunicable to those closest to us and occasionally even opaque to ourselves. Some suffer from diagnosed mental illnesses, some from undiagnosed, and some from mental suffering that has no medical categorization yet is no less real and terrible and hard. But your existence is good.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“There’s a kind of unspoken conspiracy to ignore how difficult life is, or to reframe it as something romantic—a heroic challenge we overcome on our way to the good life.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Why does our avoidance of slow, careful introspection matter? The gospel is cognitively costly. It upsets our innate and cultivated assumptions about power and guilt and existential validation. It presses down on our values and hopes. It decenters our perception of the world. Life ceases to be our story and is revealed to be his redemptive story of glory and love. It convicts us of our sins. It reveals our disordered desires and reforms them into Christ’s image. Paul urges his readers to “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2), and that renewal is the proper work of the Spirit through the gospel. The kind of work the gospel does in our lives tasks our minds with unsettling assumptions and habits.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“If you take away one truth, the one thing in this book I know with certainty, let it be this: your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“But what if our contemporary society is not actually built for us, for humans as God designed us? If that is the case, then sometimes anxiety and depression will be rational and moral responses to a fundamentally disordered environment.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“This is the fundamental lie of modernity: that we are our own.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The most fundamental decision is the decision to get out of bed. And it too communicates something. The decision to get out of bed is the decision to live. It is a claim that life is worth living despite the risk and uncertainty and the inevitability of suffering—one of the few things we can know for certain in this life.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“If everyone in America suddenly acknowledged that they are not their own but belong to God, we would still be left with systems, institutions, practices, and tools that are designed for the sovereign self, and it wouldn’t take long before we found ourselves right back where we started. We cannot evangelize our way out of this problem. We cannot volunteer our way out. We need a miracle. Our desire for a program of self-improvement, a personal method of accepting that you are not your own, is itself a symptom of the problem. We believe we can use technique to solve the problems of a society governed by technique—but as we’ve discovered, that does not work.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Each morning you must choose to get out of bed or not. All the medication and cognitive therapy and latest research and self-care in the world can’t replace your choice. This decision can be aided by these resources but never replaced by them. Which means that you have to have an answer to a fundamental question: Why get out of bed? Or, more bluntly, why live?”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“When other forms of law oppress us, we quite naturally retreat into autonomy, or self-law.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“We almost never take the witness of our actions seriously enough. I suspect that’s because if we did, it would frighten us. It’s scary to realize that my every decision communicates to people around me something about the nature of God, the goodness of His creation and laws.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“These verses have sometimes been twisted to claim that all anxiety is merely a failure to trust God. And while sometimes that is why we are anxious, it is not the only reason. What Paul offers is not an alternative to therapy and medication nor a simple fix to the agony that often abides. Instead, he offers us a peace that can enable us to carry on. What gets me every time is that the peace of God goes beyond “all understanding.” I don’t know how I would handle life if this weren’t true.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Everyone is on their own private journey of self-discovery and self-expression, so that at times, modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are—which is a fairly accurate description of social media.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The gospel is not a preference. It’s not another piece of flair we add to our vest. It’s something far more beautiful and disturbing. The gospel is the power to raise the dead, to proclaim the greatness of God in a fallen and confused world.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“Belonging to God sets limits on our lives. Sometimes they are hard limits to bear. It is not easy to stand before God, even with grace. Moment by moment we must set aside our sinful desires, even the ones closest to our heart, to live sacrificially. I do not want to lie to you. This is a difficult life.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The challenge facing us today is not so much the temptation to be relevant to the point that we lose the gospel, but the tendency to unknowingly accept a secular understanding of our faith while believing that we are boldly declaring the gospel.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“So, remember this: tremendous suffering is the normal experience of being in this world. Beauty and love and joy are normal, too, but so is suffering. Second, there are rarely clear answers to depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“No matter how much we consciously affirm that our existence is already justified through God, virtually every other voice we interact with will tell us, “No. Keep striving. You haven’t done enough. If you quit now, your life will be a waste. Do something else to make it worthwhile.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Moments create momentum.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Like the rest of western society, the church in the West tends to be good at helping people cope with modern life, but not at undoing the disorder of modern life.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“In other words, being raised from childhood into belief in Christ is suspicious, somehow less genuine, and certainly more susceptible to a falling away because the alternatives have not been considered. Rather than seeing faithfulness from birth to death as a blessing from God (which is certainly the model of the Old Testament), we harbor doubts about such believers’ sincerity.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“While belonging to the church, you will be hurt. You will have to learn to love people who look different from you, who have different interests, passions, and languages. You’ll have to give sacrificially to support people who in a strict meritocracy don’t “deserve” your compassion or aid. You’ll have to submit to the right leadership of elders. You’ll have to get over yourself and get out of your head. Maybe hardest of all, you’ll have to do all this while rejecting the lie that it is your love and service that makes you righteous or important or justified. You are righteous because Christ is righteous. You love and serve because He loved and served you.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Christ truly knows us and His acceptance unites us to Him, sanctifying us by teaching us moment by moment to love what is true and good and beautiful—to love His will.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The best example of this is Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which famously begins: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”17 One reason these lines have resonated with readers for centuries is that the poet is describing a common human experience: waking up halfway into life only to discover you are lost. Perhaps you wake up one morning questioning whether your life is worth living.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Her pure excitement overwhelms my wife and me—we can’t help but cheer her on, even though her jumping is, technically speaking, pretty sad. In these moments the praise we give is not feigned praise for her jumping; we praise her for taking delight in the goodness of being.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“Our egotistical temptation is to think that what matters in life is what is big and visible and political. So we make grand plans and join national movements in hopes that we can make a “real” difference. And no doubt, some political movements can make a real difference. But for the most part the answer to the city is found in millions of tiny decisions to live faithfully even while living in the city.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World