Sheila Gregoire's Reviews > Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“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

“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

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

“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, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“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

“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, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“We honestly think that we ourselves and those around us should be proficient with spiritual power, moving and acting with agility and endurance, wisdom and purity, able to conquer long-established habits of sloth and rebelliousness, simply on the basis of our desire and effort and sincerity...We have to train for the spiritual life.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“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

“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

“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

“That’s why we need to practice the presence of God: Not just to acknowledge in some philosophical way that God is present, but to rehearse, to repeat, to work and rework our knowledge that even though we don’t see Him and sometimes don’t feel Him, He is there. He is here. When we practice the presence of God, we train ourselves to desire His presence—to resist our temptation to flee Him. We also train ourselves to experience His presence—to resist our temptation to think that He flees us. In other words, the practice of the presence of God helps us to live between the temptations of Jonah bound for Tarshish and John bound in prison. Jonah is the prophet who wants to abandon God. John is the prophet who feels abandoned by God.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“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, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“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

“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

“Prayer makes no sense apart from waiting.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“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