Quotes from Mark Buchanan

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.

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.