Quotes from Mark Buchanan

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prayer makes no sense apart from waiting.

These are all problems in non-equilibrium physics, the physics of complex systems, or, to coin a new term historical physics. If the laws of physics are ultimately simple, why is the world so complex? Why don't eco-systems and economies reveal the same simplicity as Newton's laws? The answer, in a word, is history.

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

The root idea of Sabbath is simple as rain falling, basic as breathing. It's that all living things—and many nonliving things too— thrive only by an ample measure of stillness.

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.

In some ways, the whole point of the Exodus was Sabbath. Let my people go, became God's rallying cry, that they might worship me. At the heart of liberty—of being let go—is worship. But at the heart of worship is rest—a stopping from all work, all worry, all scheming, all fleeing—to stand amazed and thankful before God and his work. There can be no real worship without true rest.

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

Springtime brings the consolation of hope. It gives the assurance that death has lost its sting. There is beauty in this hope and this assurance. There is beauty in the woman whose chemo-induced baldness, unswaddled, shines like a pearl, in the man whose palsy makes him shimmy like a Spanish dancer. There is beauty in their defiance and their acceptance. There is beauty in their standing in the hope that death can't steal or destroy.

But what we find is that flight becomes captivity: once we begin to flee the things that threaten and burden us, there is no end to fleeing.

In boardrooms and bedchambers, in lecture halls and marketplaces, God is hardly seen as a player let alone the author, the one who holds in His hand each king's heart and directs it like a watercourse (Proverbs

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

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.

The span between life as we intend it and life as we receive it is vast. Our true purpose is worked out in that gap. It is fashioned in the crucible of interruptions.

I don't have any more wisdom in our courage for this journey than you do. Maybe less. But if you could use a traveling companion, I would come along. I would be only like one of those two men on the road to Emmaus, mostly confused myself, with a slow heart that burned within. Maybe together we would be able to discern Christ on the road beside us.

The enemy casts a shadow, big and dark and menacing. But there's no substance behind it. It has a stinger, but it's lost its venom. It has a bark, but no bite. We'll all suffer death in the lowercase. But by Christ's good graces, no one need suffer death in the uppercase. Death at that scale has been undone. Death still has battalions on the ground, pitching battle, making havoc, quibbling and collaborating among themselves. But the empire backing them has collapsed.

For the place God calls us into isn't doubt free—how can any place where we walk by faith and not by sight be that? No, the holy wild is where we have driving and haunting doubts, God-hungry doubts that pull us to our knees, force us to the Word, make us wrestle all night and not let go until He blesses us. The holy wild throngs with true skeptics.

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.

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.