Bethany Skogen’s Reviews > When People Are Big and God is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man > Status Update

“It means we need to love rather than that we must be filled with love (meaning, significance, and so on) due to a psychological deficit…. We bring glory to God by imitating his persistent love. We love not because people have psychological deficits but because God first loved us.” Pg. 144

“Instead of the image of God in human beings taking the form of a love cup or a hollow core of longing, the image is more accurately that of Moses as he literally reflected the glory of God, like the moon reflects the light of the sun. You are a mirror.” pg. 138

“The main reason there is an epidemic of emptiness is that we, not God, have created and multiplied our needs.” pg. 132

“This explains why Christ is sometimes not enough for us. If I stand before Him as a cup that is waiting to be filled in order to satisfy my unbounded desires, I will never feel quite full. Why? First, because my lusts, by their very nature, can’t be filled… Second, because Jesus does not intend to satisfy my selfish desires. Instead, He intends to break the cup of psychological need.” pg. 131

Tripartite view of the person — body, soul, and spirit

“Psychological needs may seem biblical because they are said to originate and reside in the soul — they have a place — but notice that the soul does not need to be positioned before God… This might not be too alarming until you discover that almost everything that seems hard and important in daily life has been attributed to needs of the soul.” p125

“It is one thing to release a person from prison, but it is something else to deluge that same person with all the riches imaginable. But that is what our God has done. We are given an inheritance, ‘the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’ (Matt. 25:34)” pg. 109

“Yet if our use of the term “needs” is ambiguous, and its range of meaning extends all the way to selfish desires, then there will be some situations in which we should say that Jesus intends not to meet our needs but to change our needs.” Pg. 73

“Those who followed Maslow tended to agree on three basic points: psychological needs exist, they are an essential part of being human, and unmet needs result in some kind of personal pathology… they are distinctly American. Need theories thrive only in contexts where the emphasis is on the individual rather than the community and where consumption is a way of life.” Pg. 71-72