Mark Buchanan > Quotes

“Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God

“Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe

“Unless and until we rest in God, we will never risk for God.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God

“J. R. R. Tolkien gives one of the most entrancing descriptions of the true nature of Sabbath. In book 1 of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he describes a time of rest and healing in the house of Elrond in Rivendell. The hobbits, along with Strider, their guide, have made a dangerous, almost fatal journey to this place. They will soon have to make an even more dangerous, almost certainly fatal journey away from this place. But in the meantime, this: For awhile the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.2 The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have power over the present. That’s Sabbath.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is laziness, rest is sloth. But without rest, we miss the rest of God: the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Some knowing is never pursued, only received. And for that, you need to be still. Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It is both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart. It is a day we enter, but just as much a way we see. Sabbath imparts the rest of God—actual physical, mental, spiritual rest, but also the rest of God— the things of God’s nature and presence we miss in our busyness.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“One of the most convicting things I have recently come to realize about Jesus is that He was never, not once, in a hurry.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy BEING God to become LIKE God.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God

“That's how I read the Bible. There are more than sixty references in Scripture to celebration and all but one or two of them are positive. Most of them are divine commands to go and party. Exodus and Deuteronomy and Numbers read like a string of invitations to a nonstop whirlwind of festival: "Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread...Celebrate the Feast of Harvest...Celebrate the Feast of Weeks...Celebrate the Passover...Celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles...Celebrate." These were not quiet, sedate, well-mannered little tea parties. They were raucous, shout-at-the-top-of-your-lungs and dance-in-the-streets, weeklong shindigs. The heart of the prodigal home, shouting to His servants, "Bring the fatted calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate!" That's our God. You read this stuff enough, you start to get the sense that God is looking for just about any excuse to fire up the barbecue and invite the neighborhood over.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“Physical sickness we usually defy. Soul sickness we often resign ourselves to.”
― Mark Buchanan

“Ironic that those most holy are least likely to see themselves that way.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God

“Spiritual discipline: any activity I do by direct effort that will help me do what I cannot now do by direct effort.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“The examen is a form of personal inventory. At day’s end, spend time in prayerful reflection on your day: your comings and goings, routines and disruptions, work and play, discoveries and disappointments. Think about who you met, or missed. Think about your moments of aloneness. In all, ask two questions: when was I most alive, most present, most filled and fulfilled today? And when was I most taxed, stressed, distracted, depleted today? A simpler, and more spiritually focused, version of those questions: when did I feel closest to God, and when farthest?”
― Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“One measure for whether or not you’re rested enough—besides falling asleep in board meetings—is to ask yourself this: How much do I care about the things I care about? When we lose concern for people, both the lost and the found, for the bride of Christ, for friendship, for truth and beauty and goodness; when we cease to laugh when our children laugh (and instead yell at them to quiet down) or weep when our spouses weep (and instead wish they didn’t get so emotional); when we hear news of trouble among our neighbors and our first thought is that we hope it isn’t going to involve us—when we stop caring about the things we care about—that’s a signal we’re too busy. We have let ourselves be consumed by the things that feed the ego but starve the soul. Busyness kills the heart.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“Because we are what we love, our identity and our dignity depend on what we love and the depth and passion with which we love.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Four Best Places to Live: Discovering Worship, Prayer, Expectancy and Love

“And then God gave me insight: this was winter. It would end, in time, but not by my own doing. My responsibility was simply to know the season, and match my actions and inactions to it. It was to learn the slow hard discipline of waiting. It was my season to believe in spite of—to believe in the absence of evidence or emotion, when there’s nothing, no bud, no color, no light, no birdsong, to validate belief. It was my time to walk without sight.”
― Mark Buchanan, Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul

“The Pharisees had an ethic of avoidance, and Jesus had an ethic of involvement.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“There is too wide a gap, for most of us, between what we say and what we mean. Between our words and our thoughts. The first thing the Prophet Isaiah said when he saw the living and exalted God was, “Woe is me, I am ruined. For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah was one of the most godly men who ever walked the earth. But seeing God, he sees also, abrupt and stark and grief-making, his own duplicity. Then God does what only God can do: he sears his lips clean (Isaiah 6:6-7). And herein lies our hope: truly seeing God, we truly see ourselves, in all our woe-begotten duplicity; but crying out to God, we are truly and greatly helped.”
― Mark Buchanan

“The trees frothed with leaf and blossom. The ground softened to mud, then thickened with an embroidery of flowers. Birds whirled and swooped and sang, and colts and calves tottered or gamboled in farmyards. The back of winter finally broke, and warmth and color came rushing in.

And hope. Always, hope.”
― Mark Buchanan, Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul

“Laughter—just good bone-shaking, belly-jiggling, light-in-the-head laughter, is a sure sign of health. The only one who hates it is Satan and all his wannabes.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God

“This is a bitter irony. That a faith based on staggering mysteries –the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Cross and Resurrection, the imparting of the Spirit — should have become shorn of mystery, so plodding and prosaic, so mundane and managerial is a bitter irony.

It’s an irony that Jesus’ famous statement to Nicodemus, you must be born again, has in our hands been turned into a slogan and a formula.

Out of Jesus’ mouth, in Nicodemus’ ear, that statement proclaimed a staggering mystery.

It was the ultimate antiformula.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“The opposite of a slave is not a free man. It’s a worshiper. The one who is most free is the one who turns the work of his hands into sacrament, into offering. All he makes and all he does are gifts from God, through God, and to God.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“Forgiven people "prove" they're forgiven by walking in newness of life. They walk in the light, walk by faith, walk by the Spirit. Forgiveness sets us in motion. It acts upon us to make us act. It gets us up and gets us going. It does not indulge one more minute of lying around waiting for things to happen, waiting for others to do something, blaming others for the way I am. "Get up, take your mat, and go home." This getting up, taking our mat - once the symbol of our inability to move at all - and going home in full view of everyone is what every forgiven man and woman is supposed to do every day. When we're new creations, we act like it.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your Church Is Too Safe: Why Following Christ Turns the World Upside-Down

“Silence is the room we create for the searching of God, where we hear His voice and follow.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“To worship is to ascribe to God things that are true about him until we actually believe that truth and live according to it.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Four Best Places to Live: Discovering Worship, Prayer, Expectancy and Love

“Simplicity is something more, something other than just doing without or doing it yourself. Its essence is neither forsaking nor striving. Its essence, rather, is listening: What has God put in your heart? Simplicity is, once having discerned that, being content with it. Simplifying it further: simplicity is being content with God.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Holy habits are that: the disciplines, the routines by which we stay alive and focused on Him. At first we choose them and carry them out; after a while they are part of who we are. And they carry us.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“without rest, we miss the rest of God: the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Some knowing is never pursued, only received. And for that, you need to be still.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“Sabbath-keeping requires two orientations. One is Godward. The other is timeward. To keep Sabbath well—as both a day and an attitude—we have to think clearly about God and freshly about time. We likely, at some level, need to change our minds about both. Unless we trust God’s sovereignty, we won’t dare risk Sabbath. And unless we receive time as abundance and gift, not as ration and burden, we’ll never develop a capacity to savor Sabbath.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“But grace and effort are not opposites. Grace and earning are opposites.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control