Quotes from Mark Batterson

In working through nonreligious language to explain that journey, the idea of place became very important. Jesus says, "Here's the deal! I'll leave My place. I'll come to your place. I'll take your place. And then we'll go to My place." This simplicity captured me. Everyone understands places. We all have them. It's where we live our lives day to day. Then Jesus walks into our place and redirects us.

Most of us overestimate what we can accomplish in two years, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years.

If you don't have a personal definition of success, chances are you will succeed at the wrong thing. You'll get to the end of your life and realize that you spelled success wrong. And if you spell it wrong, you'll get it wrong.

According to the law of requisite variety, the survival of any system depends on its capacity to cultivate variety in its internal structures. Disequilibrium is life ... When I'm in a spiritual slump, nine times out of ten, something sacred has become routine ... one of the ways I snap out of a spiritual slump is by disturbing by routine and experimenting with spiritual disciplines.

Who you become is determined by how you pray.

When we go adventuring with Jesus, He takes us places we never dreamed we could go, gives us ideas we never thought we could have, and gives us friends that last forever.

When you look back on your life, the greatest moments will be the moments when you went all in.

The greatest moments in life are the miraculous moments when human impotence and divine omnipotence intersect — and they intersect when we draw a circle around the impossible situations in our lives and invite God to intervene.

Instead of exclusively focusing on what's wrong and trying to fix it, you identify what's right and try to replicate it. Appreciative inquiry is playing to people's strengths. It's catching people doing things right. It's celebrating what you want to see more of. And it's bragging about people behind their backs.

We fixate on sins of commission: Don't do this, don't do that—and you're OK. But that is holiness by subtraction. And it's more hypocrisy than holiness! It's the sins of omission—what you would have, could have, and should have done — that break the heart of your heavenly Father.

Pain can be a professor theology. Pain can be a marriage counselor. Pain can be a life coach. Nothing gets our full attention like pain. It breaks down false idols and purifies false motives. It reveals where we need to heal, where we need to grow. It refocuses priorities like nothing else. And pain ins part and parcel of God's sanctification process in our lives.

if God doesn't answer the way you want, you still need to praise through. That is when it's most difficult to praise God, but that is also when our praise is most pure and most pleasing to God.