The Pursuing God Quotes

“The question we’re faced with before the risen Christ is not whether we’ve done a good enough job going out to find God. The question is whether we’re willing to stop running and be found.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“The Ten Commandments are not “how to get God to like you”; they’re “how to live together because God likes you.” The Creator wants to undo what was done at Eden, to restore a people into union with him, who will turn around and offer that restoration to the world.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“sin attacks and degrades our humanity. It makes us less human, not more.2 By not sinning, Jesus is more human than we are. He’s less like an athlete using steroids, and more like an athlete who never ate Twinkies. Less like an adult competing against kindergartners, and more like an adult who actually trained because she enjoys the sport—while we sat around all year, watching TV, eating potato chips, and didn’t even bother to show up to the race. Jesus doesn’t use a superhuman advantage to win; he refuses the inhumanity we all participate in.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Jesus comes looking not for our trophies, but our scars.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Our problem is not that we’re reaching out for God and he’s refusing to be found. It’s the opposite: God’s reaching out for us, and we’re scattering in other directions. God loves us, but we love darkness. God moves toward us. But sin can’t stand the presence of God.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“So today when we receive Christ’s body and blood, we are to be formed as an embodied signpost of God’s coming kingdom, in the midst of our modern empires that want to rule the earth without God. We eagerly anticipate God’s coming salvation, to judge the hostile powers that stand opposed to his kingdom and establish the reign of Jesus fully in their place. The Eucharist, with all its Passover imagery, is a public proclamation that our Father is coming to reign through Jesus on earth as in heaven, and his kingdom shall be without end. The Spirit and the bride look up over the walls of Babylon and cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus, come.” We long for our coming deliverance: out of our empires, into his kingdom. And that day is coming.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Like Israel in the wilderness, the church is in an in-between time: having left her allegiance to the Egypt-like empires behind her, yet still awaiting the full coming of the kingdom she travels toward. In the meantime, Jesus’ presence travels with us through the Eucharist, the bread that sustains us in the wilderness of the world like manna from heaven. The church finds herself as a kingdom in the wilderness, on her way to the promised land.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“we want to encounter God through the “skylight,” opening our own personal window to the heavens above to have a direct one-on-one encounter with God. But God prefers instead to come through the “front door,” encountering us through the neighbor who comes bearing the message and presence of Jesus.6 Why? What reason could God possibly have? It is because, Newbigin reflects, God is not as interested in millions of scattered, one-on-one relationships with isolated individuals as he is in building a body, forming a community, gathering a people to himself and through himself to one another. “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.”7 God enters through our front door so that we can only receive him by receiving the presence of our neighbor. We enter his body by receiving his body.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Our Bibles read less as, Hey Johnny, be good, and much more as, Hey y’all, be good to one another and watch how y’all are living as God’s people together. Jesus indwells us as his body. Discipleship is something that happens through his communion with us, as his Spirit forms us together as his bride.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Jesus gives us his body as gift. Yet usually we receive gifts as passive recipients, then take them away on our own. We unwrap that Christmas present, then head to our room to play with those Legos or that new remote control car by ourselves. But when we receive Jesus’ body as gift, we are brought into the gift: we become part of the body of Christ we receive. Indeed, union with Jesus is wrapped up in the very nature of the gift itself.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“As Jesus binds us into union with himself, we are brought into the body of Christ. Communion is not just an act between me and Jesus, but a participation in the people of God. As Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann observes, the original meaning of the word liturgy was “an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals.”4 Jesus gathers us together and forms us as his people. The Eucharist is the body that makes us a body.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“God doesn’t create us because he needs us; he creates us because he wants us. The Father, Son, and Spirit already have perfect relationship from eternity. They share affection, intimacy, and joy. They not only experience life, light, and love; they are life, light, and love. God is not just a being; God is Being, the ground of our existence. The Trinity creates the world in divine freedom, not to fill a need within but from an overflow of their divine love. We are each made as creatures to lavish their affection upon. They are not trying to get something from us; they are giving themselves to us.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“I’m not taking Communion to show Jesus I’ll be faithful to him; I’m celebrating the fact that Jesus is faithful to me.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Some of us need space to stop striving, put down our Christian activities, and rest in the generosity of God for a while. But when we do, in time you can’t help but let it grow through you. That’s the nature of God’s love.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“We’re invited not to set out and find God, but to stop running and be found.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“But God beckons from our brokenness, breaks in through the back door, invites us to encounter him in our insecurities, sits in our suffering, waiting for us to join him there. And when his grace rather than our glory becomes the starting point, there’s freedom to enter the world as it is, to not ignore or sugarcoat the pain but to call it what it is and graciously give our lives away for his glory there, as signposts of the upside-down, resurrecting kingdom.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Jesus calls us to the way of the cross. The cross is not a way we break out of the world to get up to Jesus, but a way Jesus breaks into the world through us as his people.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Jesus is like a host who invites us to sit down at his table, share a meal together, and get to know him deeply. He is more than a heroic example of a better way to live; he is the presence of life breaking into our darkness and death. He does not give us a map to go out and find the Creator; he is the presence of the Creator come to us.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“The cross is not a mechanism we use to get to God, but the way God has come to find and raise us.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“This is our salvation: to be indwelt by God within us (the Spirit), united to God before us (the Son), and embraced within the life of God surrounding us (the Father).”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Creation is a temple; humanity its priests.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“God has an interesting way of showing his anger; he gives us what we want.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Sacrifice is not something we use to clean ourselves up so God can stand to be with us again. On the contrary, sacrifice is something God uses to cleanse us, so that we can stand to be in his presence again.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“One wonders whether the loss of such ceremony has contributed to the Western world’s exaltation of the autonomous individual over the world—no longer seeing ourselves within the Creator’s interdependent web of creation, leaving us freer to exploit and consume regardless of ecological consequence.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“No matter how horrendous our actions become, we cannot act upon God so as to change the integrity of his character.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“If God’s love is not the primary thing we see displayed at the cross, like fireworks exploding in the sky, then we’re not looking through the same lens that Jesus does.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“God hates sin. He hates it not because it gets him dirty, but because it alienates us from him and tears apart his creation.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“Now, the Law is good, and God gives it to his people, but God’s primary purpose in bringing Israel to the mountain is not to give her the Law; it’s to give her himself. We tend to think of the Ten Commandments as legalistic rules and regulations to keep a distant, uptight God happy. But Israel understood them as wedding vows, commitments of fidelity and devotion, aimed at the flourishing of their life together.”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home

“A moralist looks at Jesus in the desert and immediately jumps to, We need to pony up, try harder, and be faithful under temptation! A worshipper observes the wilderness around her and responds more simply: We need Jesus!”
― Joshua Ryan Butler, The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home