The Road We Must Travel Quotes

“Sabbath keeping is the primary discipline that helps us live within the limits of our humanity and to honor God as our Creator. It is the key to a life lived in sync with the rhythms that God himself built into our world.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“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.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Here's the core problem we have with the Sermon on the Mount: it isn't that Jesus' teachings are absurd; it's that we don't see the world that Jesus sees. We see a world of injustice and anger and hatred and violence--a world where everything good is in short supply and life itself is fragile. But Jesus saw a world in which his father was in control, in which justice was guaranteed, in which goodness was breaking forth, and in which life itself is without end. And if you see that world through the lens of the gospel, then what Jesus tells us to do and how he informs us to live makes perfect sense.”
― Skye Jethani, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Through the years I came to realize that some of the most important insights I gained about myself came not from my friends but from my critics who, while playing rough, nevertheless alerted me to blind spots and inadequacies no one else had the courage to tell me about.”
― Gordon MacDonald, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“In silence our speech patterns are refined because silence fosters a self-awareness that enables us to choose more truly the words that we say.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Most of us spend more time with advertisements than with Scripture.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“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, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Laws may be good, laws may be just. Laws may give us a sense of what's right and wrong, a sense of morality. Laws can put barriers, hedges, gates around how far evil is allowed to go. But what law cannot do is truly rehabilitate us. It cannot restore to us the dignity that God wants us to have as the creatures made in his image. What law cannot do is truly take the evil, the anger, the hatred out of our hearts.”
― Skye Jethani, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Jesus is not laying out another law for us to obey. He's illustrating for us what a truly rehabilitated heart looks like.”
― Skye Jethani, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“The reason why we look so crazy as Christians is because we see a world that the rest don't see. We see a God-bathed world in which we are perfectly safe. So safe, so set free from fear that we can even love our enemies without thought of the consequences.”
― Skye Jethani, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“...repentance is, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of that deeper pool of evil that lies resident in every one of us and which is ready to explode at any moment. (...) A deeper repentance means that I must examine my heart for such potential waywardness and renounce the tendency to compare myself with others, to explain away my failures, and to whine if someone isn't merciful to me.”
― Gordon MacDonald, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Sabbath keeping is a way of ordering one's whole life to honor the rhythm of things--work and rest, fruitfulness and dormancy, giving and receiving, being and doing, activism and surrender. The day itself is set apart, devoted completely to rest, worship, and delighting in God and his good gifts. And the rest of the week must be lived in such a way a way as to make Sabbath possible.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Practicing rhythms of silence and words, stillness and action, helps us learn to wait on God--which doesn't come easily for those of us accustomed to busily trying to make things happen.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“When we suffer, God empowers us to face the worst and become our best.”
― Mark Buchanan, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“But the truth is, we are broken people living in a fallen world with other broken people. You and I, whether Christian or not, have never known a day in which suffering is altogether absent. Because of sin, every day you live, from the day you were born till the day you die, is not what it ought to be.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“I've got to quit trying to play the Holy Spirit's role by forcing, manipulating, talking, and programming people into the change I want to see. Instead I've got to spend more time praying that the Holy Spirit would come into their lives and regenerate them.”
― Francis Chan, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“This is a broken world. It's messed up, and you're messed up. Everybody around you is messed up. You need help--otherworldly help. In the person of Jesus Christ, God has provided that help. The death of Christ gives life to sinners like you and me. Do you know Him?”
― Tullian Tchividjian, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“It is vitally important for us to realize that suffering itself does not rob you of joy; idolatry does. If you're angry, bitter, and joyless in the midst of your suffering, it means you've idolized whatever you've lost. Joylessness and bitterness in the crucible of suffering happens when we lose something we've held onto more tightly than God.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“When Jesus, our King, comes back, He will put this broken world back together again. You don't need to be ashamed of your grief, because your grief is a cry for that day--the day when we will enjoy sinless hearts and minds with disease-free bodies. Everything that causes pain and discomfort will be forever put away.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“We all have an ideal of how things should be, and that ideal comes from God, because you were made in His image. Whether you have a relationship with Jesus or not, there's still something inside of you that recognizes suffering is unnatural.

So Christian grief is an act of worship because it is a statement of faith that one day things won't be this way.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“Grief is an emotional acknowledgement that the way God originally intended things to be has been vandalized. Grief involves a distant memory of what the world was like prior to the disobedience of Adam and Eve--a world full of justice, grace, and mercy. Grief also involves a cry for what will one day be a universal reality: a world without pain, disease, or conflict.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“We've been taught a watered-down version of following Jesus for so long that people think it's Christianity, but it's not biblical.”
― Francis Chan, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“As a culture, we're so worried about what's going to happen to us thirty years from now that we are not taking care of our brothers and sisters who need help today. Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow, let alone thirty years down the line.”
― Francis Chan, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“For the sake of the Kingdom, we are invited, like the disciples, to tell the story of our ignorance, stubbornness, and failings--but we can also tell the story of how God's grace triumphs over our sin.”
― Nathan Conrad, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey