Lydia Brownback > Quotes

“The only way to joy is to interpret our circumstances by God's Word rather than to judge God by our circumstances.”
― Lydia Brownback, Joy: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“We aren't going to choose paths of wisdom if we don't trust the One who has marked out those paths for us. Fear of the Lord is trust in the Lord”
― Lydia Brownback, A Woman's Wisdom: How the Book of Proverbs Speaks to Everything

“The more we soak ourselves in God’s Word, the more we will be able to readily lay hold of the wisdom we need for particular circumstances.”
― Lydia Brownback, A Woman's Wisdom: How the Book of Proverbs Speaks to Everything

“Happiness, or contentment, comes from where we look and what we believe, not from what we have.”
― Lydia Brownback, Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“God is glorified not by calling strong women but by giving His strength to weak women.”
― Lydia Brownback, Joy: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“God doesn't want our efforts at self-improvement. He wants our trust in his kindness toward us in Christ.”
― Lydia Brownback, Trust: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“What we focus on defines us, so if our focus is inward, on ourselves, we wind up defining for ourselves whether we are righteous or guilty. When we begin and end with us—with our self— we miss the heart of the gospel and never truly find the freedom for which we ache.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“Any teaching that sets self-love as the highest good is false teaching, and we are susceptible to it because it appeals to that deep yearning for affirmation we feel at our very core. That’s why it hooks us.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“When we turn life’s little pleasures into remedies for life’s troubles, we are setting up idols in our hearts, which actually push God aside.”
― Lydia Brownback, Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“The way out of the bondage of self-improvement is to recognize that in Christ, there is none of that old self left to improve. We can simply let go of all that.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“Improving ourselves is not the sacrifice the Lord calls us to.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“God let [Jonah] go his own way, as he does with us when we insist on running our own show; but because God is merciful, he will make sure that any way we take away from him doesn’t work out so well.”
― Lydia Brownback, Trust: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“As a result, we don’t see anything wrong with aiming more at personal gratification than at God’s glory in the plans and choices we make, in some part because we believe that our earthly happiness is the primary way God’s glory is revealed.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“An obsessive preoccupation with what others will think and a paralyzing fear of failure go hand in hand, and both are symptoms of a hyper-examined life. Many living a hyper-examined life will flit and float from job to job, from friend to friend, from place to place. This may seem adventurous at first, but what’s often behind this rootlessness is a compulsive need for satisfaction in every season of life. Instead of losing themselves in the joys of the mundane, the regular, and the everyday, these wandering souls constantly search their own emotional state for happiness—not realizing that such preoccupation with self is exactly what tends to kill happiness in the first place.10”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“How can we help what we feel? We just can’t muster up joyful feelings; that’s true. But we can rejoice, which sooner or later leads to joyful feelings. Rejoicing is not a feeling. It is joy in action. It is the humble willingness to offer God praise and thanks in all things, regardless of how we feel at the moment (p. 98).”
― Lydia Brownback, Joy: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“What begins as self-care can morph into habits of laziness, where we are unwilling to exert ourselves without some pleasurable comfort as an accompaniment.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“Self-seeking breeds loneliness; self-forgetfulness breeds fullness.”
― Lydia Brownback, Finding God in My Loneliness

“Times of difficulty arise because people are lovers of themselves and lovers of money and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of good and lovers of God.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“If we center our thoughts and activities on ourselves, our world grows increasingly narrow, and over time our view of reality is warped. Without realizing it, we become the measure of all things in our own minds.”
― Lydia Brownback, Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

“Offering thanks to God, no matter what is going on in our lives, is a way of acknowledging that he knows exactly what he is doing and that we can trust him.”
― Lydia Brownback, Joy: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“If we’re frustrated when the Internet is slow or excessively irritated by the full-basketed shopper in the express lane, then it’s pretty likely that we’re going to be discouraged if our ministry efforts don’t soon bear visible fruit. We’re an instantaneous people, and we carry that expectation into every area of life. But God doesn’t work that way, as a close look at his work through redemptive history will reveal. When it comes to results, serving God faithfully means serving him blindly. We may never see the fruit of our prayers or our teaching or our writing or our godly parenting or whatever form our calling takes. If getting tangible results is our prerequisite for service, at some point we are bound to give up. We will only keep going if we do as Paul instructed: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Col. 3:23).”
― Lydia Brownback, Finding God in My Loneliness

“We don’t need ten tips to a better spiritual life. What we need is to put God out front in our thoughts, priorities, time, and activities. If we allow his Word to govern us, we will see that he delights to show us “the path of life” and the path for our life (p. 45).”
― Lydia Brownback, Joy: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“Real trust isn't believing that God will do things as we expect he should; it is, rather, believing that whatever he does is good and perfect. We will only find relief from fear if we relinquish our expectations of what we think God ought to do for us and ask him to create within our hearts a trusting expectation for what he wills to do. If”
― Lydia Brownback, Trust: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“That very thing you want God to fix may be his instrument to teach you first to depend on him rather than on yourself or on peaceful circumstances.”
― Lydia Brownback, Trust: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“We will never find contentment—freedom from that angry feeling of unfairness—by getting the things that are rightfully ours. We will find it by letting go of our entitlement to them.”
― Lydia Brownback, Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“The joy of trials is rarely found in the circumstances of our difficulties. Rather, it is found when we stop fighting against what God is doing and seek his purposes and priorities, which always without exception are designed for our welfare. Whatever the difficulty—even one brought about by our sin—we can leave the outcome in God’s hands (p. 76).”
― Lydia Brownback, Joy: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“Contentment does not lie around the next corner. It is not waiting for us on the other side of today’s difficulty, nor is it lost with yesterday. Contentment is where God is, and God is with us today.”
― Lydia Brownback, Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“I’d never put my child through what God is doing to me.” But God is a wiser parent than we could ever be. He places us in situations that provoke us, not to cause us to doubt but to strengthen us against our doubts.”
― Lydia Brownback, Trust: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“The devil is stronger and smarter than we are; so arguing with him won’t help us very much and can actually enhance our difficulty. Jesus has provided us with the way to resist…there are Scripture passages to refute every one of [the devil’s] lies. Immersing ourselves in the Bible is one of the primary ways we keep, or guard, our hearts.”
― Lydia Brownback, Trust: A Godly Woman's Adornment

“The only thing big enough to conquer this kind of fear is God, who rules every detail of every day of your life. Rest assured that nothing can touch you apart from your heavenly Father’s permission. Out of his love for you, he is well able to prevent the thing you are so afraid of, and out of that same love he might allow it. Either way, whatever happens, he only allows what is going to work for your eternal happiness and blessing and his glory.”
― Lydia Brownback, Trust: A Godly Woman's Adornment