Mark Buchanan Quotes

#1. Busyness makes us stop caring about the things we care about.

Mark Buchanan

#2. 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

#3. God's definition of going well is unique, distinct, almost eccentric. His definition of wellness is not about health, finances, or job security. It's not about unfailing protection from the vagaries and dangers of a broken world. It's not about life being fair. It's about acceptance.

Mark Buchanan

#4. But grace and effort are not opposites. Grace and earning are opposites.

Mark Buchanan

#5. Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy BEING God to become LIKE God.

Mark Buchanan

#6. Unless and until we rest in God, we will never risk for God.

Mark Buchanan

#7. I discovered that being thankful and experiencing the power and presence of Jesus Christ are tightly entwined. As we practice thankfulness, we experience more of God's transforming grace, God's thereness.

Mark Buchanan

#8. Here lies the basic flaw of all doubt. It can never really be satisfied. No evidence is ever fully, finally enough. Doubt wants always to consume, never to consummate. It clamors endlessly for an answer and so drowns out any answer that might be given it.

Mark Buchanan

#9. Prayer makes no sense apart from waiting.

Mark Buchanan

#10. Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.

Mark Buchanan

#11. When we suffer, God empowers us to face the worst and become our best.

Mark Buchanan

#12. The secret impetus behind legalism is its competitiveness. The point is not just to win: it's to beat everyone else.

Mark Buchanan

#13. Author wonders whether God's proclamation of His natural mastery when appearing to Job might be about restoring a sense of wonder to world-weary man as much as humbling him.

Mark Buchanan

#14. 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

#15. Holiness is not a bid to be noticed or loved or accepted by God. Holiness, rather, is acting out and acting upon the truth that God has noticed, loved and accepted us long before we did anything to warrant that.

Mark Buchanan

#16. Physical sickness we usually defy. Soul sickness we often resign ourselves to.

Mark Buchanan

#17. All the wickedness in the world begins with an act of forgetting.

Mark Buchanan

#18. Ironic that those most holy are least likely to see themselves that way.

Mark Buchanan

#19. Love can't cover over the sins we cover up ... If you want God and others to cover over your sin, stop covering it up.

Mark Buchanan

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Most of us spend more time with advertisements than with Scripture.

Mark Buchanan

#23. 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

#24. Spiritual discipline: any activity I do by direct effort that will help me do what I cannot now do by direct effort.

Mark Buchanan

#25. God gave us laughter, I think, as a balm to wash the wounds of our own blunders, as a splint to mend the bones we break in our rashness or vanity.

Mark Buchanan

#26. Silence is the room we create for the searching of God, where we hear His voice and follow.

Mark Buchanan

#27. The Pharisees had an ethic of avoidance, and Jesus had an ethic of involvement.

Mark Buchanan

#28. 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

#29. Many of us are confessional giants but ethical midgets.

Mark Buchanan

#30. Sabbath's golden rule: Cease from what is necessary. Embrace that which gives life.

Mark Buchanan

#31. This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children.

Mark Buchanan