Rich Mullins Quotes

“Christianity doesn't answer all my questions or make me comfortable and happy. What it does do is give me a context for living.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“It seems that I always am and always have been an outsider. I've never really fit in. I was always too religious for my rowdy friends—they thought I was unbelievably hung up—and too rowdy for my religious friends—they were always praying for me.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“God loves us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“The disciples finally begin to get a grasp that maybe God can become flesh and dwell among us, maybe God can be a man, and then they come back and not only is God a man, but He's acting like an idiot! He's hanging out with a bunch of kids. He's blessing them, you know. And you think, How do you bless children? Well, the best way I know is that you pick them up and you just throw them as high as you can, and you catch them right before they splatter. You get down on all fours and you run around the room and you let them ride you and you buck them off. … You put your mouth against their bellies and you make funny noises. Here's Jesus probably doing all this business. His disciples were humiliated! And they said, “You should not be making such a fool of Yourself!” And Jesus says, “Here, look, look, fellas. I'll call the shots here. I may be dumb, but I am God. And I'll tell you what else, if you wanna come into My kingdom, you'll come in like one of these or you won't come in at all.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. — C. S. Lewis”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“Earth's crammed with heaven; And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. — Elizabeth Baccett Browning”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“he had let go of the need to earn God's love,”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“That is why one of Rich's most powerful songs, and one he enjoyed singing in concert more than any other, is “Greed.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“I think that part of being human is being alone. And being lonely. I think one of the stresses on a lot of our friendships is that we require the people we love to take away that loneliness. And they really can't. And so, when we still feel lonely, even in the company of people we love, we become angry with them because they don't do what we think they're supposed to. Which is really something that they can't do for us.5”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite. . .because nobody goes to church because they're perfect. If you've got it all together, you don't need to go. You can go jogging with all the other perfect people on Sunday morning. Every time you go to church, you're confessing again to yourself, to your family, to the people you pass on the way there, to the people who will greet you that you don't have it all together. And that you need their support. You need their direction. You need some accountability; you need some help.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: A Devotional Biography: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“You should not let a single person in the world, whatever sin that person may have committed, come before your eyes and depart without having found mercy with you. And should that person not ask for mercy from you, then you must ask it of him. And were that person to come to you a thousand times, continue to love them so as to lead them back to the right path. Always have compassion, for all of us have sinned. —Saint Francis of Assisi”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“The line in this song that slayed me the first time I heard it, and slays me every time I hear it, is ‘I cannot explain the way that You came to love me, except to say that nothing is beyond You.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“I've failed many times to avoid those kinds of temptations. But that's not what the devil was really interested in. What he was trying to do is make me feel apart from God. Now I know that what Satan would like most to take from us is our true knowledge of who we are—which is children of God.5”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God. — Frederick Buechner”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“one hidden act of kindness is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of Christians so preoccupied with cultivating their prayer lives that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the barrio.”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“What would it be like to be Christ? I mean, did He ever play ball? Did He ever knock a window out of somebody's house and did He ever have to explain to His dad that He had to borrow twelve dollars?”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. — Mark Twain”
― James Bryan Smith, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven