Jeff VanVonderen > Quotes

“the message of spiritual abuse is always the same: "God won't love you, unless ..." or "God will only love you if ...”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Soul Repair: Rebuilding Your Spiritual Life

“God simply revealed the self-centered core that began to motivate each of them: The woman would continue to try to draw life and nurturing from a man who was not capable of filling these deep needs—never was and never will be. And the man would be forever trying to rule over the woman, either aggressively or passively trying to keep her quiet about his inadequacy to fill her needs.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace Is in Place

“The wife's list, no matter how long or short, communicates to the husband, "I don't like you. I don't accept you. But if you perform the way I think you should, then I will like and accept you." And no matter how long the husband's list may be, it says in like manner to his wife, "I don't like you either. But if you stop caring about things so much, if you stop feeling the way you feel and noticing the things you notice, then I will accept and like you.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace Is in Place

“Sign of an abusive system: getting angry at other's real needs.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, The

“Parents know all about the verses related to how children should behave but not so much about those that remind them about how they should behave.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace Is in Place

“In other words, children's choices are their responsibility, and result from how they decide to meet their own needs. Once you understand this, you can learn to stop interpreting their choices as statements about you. When your kids act weird in front of the in-laws, it is about their choices, not about your value as a person. Grace-full in-laws will already know that. You need to know that too. Otherwise, you will parent to fix your kids, so that when they are fixed, you are fixed. You will parent to control, not to serve. How things look and what people think will become more important than what is real.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace Is in Place

“I cannot make my kids obey. But I can control my responses to their disobedience—that is, I can respect their choices and provide wise consequences for their actions, so they can learn just as much about wisdom from disobeying as from obeying. And I can respond in ways that create an environment in which their poor choices are their problem.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace Is in Place

“Your children should not have to act appropriately so that you can feel like a valuable person. It is not their job to validate you or erase past relationship indictments against you with their performance. In a healthy Christian family children are not there for the adults, adults are there to be resources for their children.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace Is in Place

“The only correct motive for living by God's standards is because you love Jesus and want to obey him. In fact, obedience is the natural result of dependence upon God.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Tired of Trying to Measure Up

“[I]f you are still striving to feel that you are good enough, you are either in a blind bondage to the world's or religion's idols, not realizing that you can be free, or you are afraid to put your full trust in Christ - afraid to believe he came to make you acceptable to God, afraid to believe that he has.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Tired of Trying to Measure Up

“The Christian life is not an exercise in positive self-effort stemming from a negative self-conception (in the name of God). It's learning to live by faith in a way that is consistent with who we already are and what we already have because of the performance of a God who is faithful.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Tired of Trying to Measure Up

“For it is God's grace, not our striving, that makes us accepted and acceptable. It is his performance in Christ, not our trying hard to perform, that eradicates our shame.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Tired of Trying to Measure Up

“Trying hard is not the solution. When someone becomes a Christian, he has a brand new identity as a child of God because of the cross of Christ. But the truth is, people are affirmed in our society, in families and even in our churches for what they do, not for who they are. When a person comes into a relationship with Christ, most of the teaching he receives is about how Christians are supposed to act, not who a Christian is as a new creation in Christ.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Tired of Trying to Measure Up

“When we learn to be consistent with who we are and with what is true about us because of Jesus, bearing fruit no longer means producing. It means being capable of holding the weight of the fruit he produces.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Tired of Trying to Measure Up