I’m not sure how I first heard about Bob Goff. Perhaps someone I follow on Twitter had posted one of his quotes, or a friend told me about one of his books that they had read, or perhaps I just saw his books on the best sellers list. Something prompted me to pick up his second book Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult. I read it in just a few days, really enjoyed it, and as soon as I finished it, I immediately downloaded his first book Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World. If you enjoy audiobooks, you might like to listen to those books, which are read well by Bob. Later, I read the children’s book he wrote with his daughter, Love Does for Kids, and I have also had the opportunity to hear Bob speak.

Bob’s books are outside of the genre that I normally read, but I really appreciate him and his message. He is very quotable, so I wanted to take this opportunity to share my favorite quotes from his three books. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

• God’s love for us doesn’t change on our worst days. Come to think of it, we can’t earn more of God’s love on our best days. We are simply loved by God, no matter what, and because of Jesus, God doesn’t define us by our mistakes.
• I think He knew that the more we stand in awe of Him, the less we’ll stand in judgement of each other.
• I don’t think Bible verses were meant to be thrown like grenades at each other. They were meant for us to use to point each other toward love and grace and invite us into something much bigger.
• Thinking about work as a day job has made a big difference in the way I approach what I do. It’s also helped me not to confuse who I am with what I do.
• I’ve realized that I used to be afraid of failing at the things that really mattered to me, but now I’m more afraid of succeeding at things that don’t matter.
• Loving people means caring without an agenda. As soon as we have an agenda, it’s not love anymore.
• I’ve found one of the best filters you can use to trust someone is when there’s nothing for them to gain from their advice.
• When Jesus invites us on an adventure, He shapes who we become with what happens along the way.
• Pick something you aren’t just able to do; instead, pick something you feel like you were made to do and then do lots of that.
• It’s given me a lot of comfort knowing we’re all rough drafts of the people we’re still becoming.
• There’s a difference between good judgment and living in judgment. The trick is to use lots of the first and to go a little lighter on the second.
• We make loving people a lot more complicated than Jesus did.
• Find someone you think is wrong, someone you disagree with, someone who isn’t like you at all, and decide to love that person the way you want Jesus to love you.
• He won’t love us more or less based on how we act, and He’s more interested in our hearts than all the things we do.
• Loving people the way Jesus did is always great theology.
• What I’ve come to learn so far about my faith is Jesus never asked anyone to play it safe. We were born to be brave. There’s a difference between playing it safe and being safe.
• Loving people we don’t understand or agree with is just the kind of beautiful, counterintuitive, risky stuff people who are becoming love do.
• God doesn’t like us more when we succeed or less when we fail. He delights in our attempts.
• People will figure out what we really believe by seeing what we actually do.
• Everybody has a plan, but God is looking for people who know their purpose.
• We all encounter difficulties. It’s what we do next that defines us.
• Don’t just love the people who are easy to love; go love the difficult ones. If you do this, Jesus said you’d move forward on your journey toward being more like Him.