God Has a Name Quotes

“Often what we believe about God says more about us than it does about God. Our theology is like a mirror to the soul. It shows us what’s deep inside.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“Maybe the truth is that we want a God who is controllable because we want to be God. We want to be the authority on who God is or isn’t and what’s right or wrong, but we want the mask of religion or spirituality to cover up the I-wanna-be-God reality.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“If your heart is stubborn, cold, or in open rebellion against Yahweh, then the worst thing God can do is give you what you want and let all your desires come true.21”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“But the Bible claims something radically out of step with its time. It claims there is one true Creator God who made everything. And the world was born, not out of conflict or war or jealous infighting, but out of the overflow of his creativity and love.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“Here’s how you know if you’ve created God in your own image: he agrees with you on everything.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“In his commencement address at Kenyon College, the novelist and social critic David Foster Wallace eloquently said, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”59”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“It’s not so much that “Jesus is the only way to God.” I mean, he is, but a better way to say it is: Jesus is God come to us.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“Scripture is first and foremost a story. And it’s a story about God. We want to make it a story about us—about how to get ahead in life or have great sex or up our portfolio or just be happy. And there are all sorts of “success principles” in the Bible, but honestly, that’s just not what the story is about. If you strip the Bible down to the core, it’s a story about God, and about how we as people relate to God.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“In the modern world, we start with the assumption that we know what God is like, and then we judge every religion or church or sermon or book based on our view of God.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“In fact, God seems to love that kind of raw, uncut prayer, skirting the line between blasphemy and desperate faith. He’s not nearly as scared of honesty as we are.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“The reconciliation of God’s mercy and justice in the death of Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s character.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“Yahweh is forgiving, but sin is not.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“To the Scripture writers, hope is the absolute expectation of coming good based on the character of God.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“when God describes himself, he doesn’t start with how powerful he is or how he knows everything there is to know or how he’s been around since before time and space and there’s no one else like him in the universe. That’s all true, but apparently, to God, it’s not the most important thing. When God describes himself, he starts with his name. Then he talks about what we call character. He’s compassionate and gracious; he’s slow to anger; he’s abounding in love and faithfulness, and on down the list.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“I cringe when I hear people abuse the Bible to bolster a twisted version of the American Dream.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“When we say that God is faithful, we don’t mean you’ll never experience suffering. A lot of people—in particular, Americans—misinterpret God’s faithfulness to mean some kind of promise to give us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So when tragedy strikes or the economy goes south or the child tests positive or we don’t find a spouse by thirty, we think God is unfaithful.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“To clarify, it’s not that God’s will is weak—on an even playing field with all the other wills. As if we, God, and Satan are all equal players in a game for the world. It’s that in the universe God has chosen to actualize, love is the highest value, and love demands a choice, and a choice demands freedom. So God has chosen to limit his overwhelming capacity to override any “will” stacked against him, in order to create space for real, genuine freedom for his creatures, human and nonhuman. And evil is the by-product of that freedom that God built into the fabric of the universe. Put simply, God is incredibly good, but the world is a terrifyingly free, dangerous, beautiful place to call home.50”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“That’s what Yahweh is after: a people who are “godly,” who are like the God they worship. A people who are compassionate . . . A people who are gracious . . . A people who are slow to anger . . . A people who are abounding in love and faithfulness . . . And a people who live in the tension of mercy and justice.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

“The only thing that can effectively keep you from God’s mercy is thinking you deserve it. This is one of the many reasons that religious people are often the farthest from God.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

“Here it is: we don’t get to pick and choose with the Scriptures. As followers of Jesus”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

“Prayer is what Moses did with God in the tent. What Jesus did with the Father in Gethsemane. It’s brutally honest, naked, and vulnerable. It’s when your deepest desires and fears and hopes and dreams leak out of your mouth with no inhibition. It’s when you talk to God with the edit button in the off position and you feel safe and heard and loved. It’s the kind of relational exchange you can’t get enough of.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

“Here’s a truth that cuts across the whole of the universe: we become like what we worship.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

“The cross is an expression of Yahweh’s mercy—it’s his way of “forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” But it’s also an expression of God’s justice—“he does not leave the guilty unpunished.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

“There are upward of twenty-eight million slaves in the world today. More than ever before. For a tiny fraction of the world to live in Western-style luxury, it takes hundreds of millions of people living under economic oppression, if not full-on slavery. Sure, your new shoes are great and only cost you fifty bucks. But they were made by a dirt-poor woman in Vietnam working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, just to survive.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

“God seems to love that kind of raw, uncut prayer, skirting the line between blasphemy and desperate faith. He’s not nearly as scared of honesty as we are.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“There are prayers in the Scriptures—in the books Moses wrote and especially in Psalms—where I cringe, half expecting lightning to strike the person dead. But it doesn’t. In fact, God seems to love that kind of raw, uncut prayer, skirting the line between blasphemy and desperate faith. He’s not nearly as scared of honesty as we are.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“Our hope isn’t that nothing bad will ever happen to us. Or that everything that does happen to us is “the will of God.” Our hope is that no matter what happens to us, Jesus is back from the dead, and anything is possible.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“If your heart is stubborn, cold, or in open rebellion against Yahweh, then the worst thing God can do is give you what you want and let all your desires come true.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“If you treat God like a formula, you’ll just end up mad and confused.”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name

“(Some of you are thinking, I never want to read ancient Hebrew. Fair point.)”
― John Mark Comer, God Has a Name