Quotes by John Mark Comer
John Mark Comer (b. 1980) — Pastor und Bestsellerautor · Evangelikal / Freikirchlich · USA
John Mark Comer (* 1980) ist ein US-amerikanischer freikirchlicher Pastor und Autor, der die Bridgetown Church in Portland mitgründete und die Initiative „Practicing the Way“ leitet. Bekannt wurde er durch Bücher wie „Das Ende der Rastlosigkeit“, in denen er Nachfolge als praktische Einübung geistlicher Disziplinen wie Sabbatruhe, Stille und Entschleunigung beschreibt. Für heutige Bibelleser macht er klassische Formen christlicher Spiritualität alltagsnah zugänglich, stößt jedoch in konservativ-evangelikalen Kreisen wegen seiner Nähe zu kontemplativen Traditionen und der Schwerpunktsetzung auf Praktiken statt Dogmatik auch auf Kritik.
Era: Today
Recurring topics: Peace & Rest, Discipleship, God, Jesus & the Holy Spirit, Meaning & Identity, Growth & Character, Prayer & Silence, Faith & Trust, Love
Quotes by John Mark Comer
There is a God, and I'm not him.
John Mark Comer
It's a day when I don't accomplish anything, and I don't feel guilty.
John Mark Comer
Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.
John Mark Comer
For Jesus, salvation is less about getting you into heaven and more about getting heaven into you.
John Mark Comer
The end isn’t silence and solitude; it’s to come back to God and our true selves. It isn’t Sabbath; it’s a restful, grateful life of ease, appreciation, wonder, and worship. It isn’t simplicity: it’s freedom and focus on what matters most. It isn’t even slowing; it’s to be present, to God, to people, to the moment.
John Mark Comer
If this isn’t your experience of prayer—if for you prayer is closer to boredom, distraction, and scary emotions coming to the surface of your heart—please don’t shame yourself or self-flagellate; that won’t help. Just keep praying.
John Mark Comer
What’s hard isn’t following Jesus. What’s hard is following myself, doing my life my way; therein lies the path to exhaustion. With Jesus there’s still a yoke, a weight to life, but it’s an easy yoke, and we never carry it alone.
John Mark Comer
True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
John Mark Comer
Jesus’s invitation is to take up his yoke—to travel through life at his side, learning from him how to shoulder the weight of life with ease. To step out of the burnout society to a life of soul rest.
John Mark Comer
To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.
John Mark Comer
That said, no family of origin is healthy enough to transform us into the kind of love we see in Jesus, and no family is dysfunctional enough to keep us from becoming people of love in Jesus.
John Mark Comer
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 is not shocked by your emotions. No matter how messed up your soul may be, God is right there with you, listening.
John Mark Comer
Listen, I have good news for you. Great news, in fact. You. Can’t. Do. It. All. And neither can I.
John Mark Comer
I'm not a machine. I can't work seven days a week. I'm a human.
John Mark Comer
Here's how you know if you've created God in your own image: he agrees with you on everything.
John Mark Comer
The Sabbath is a day with no to-do list.
John Mark Comer
We take a day off, and the world gets along just fine without us.
John Mark Comer
The Sabbath isn't a day to buy or sell — to get more. It's a day to enjoy what I already have.
John Mark Comer
It turns out that God is better than any of us could imagine.
John Mark Comer
Even if all we see is a glimpse and all we hear is an echo, it's more than worth the trek.
John Mark Comer
Our job is to make the invisible God visible — to mirror and mimic what he is like to the world. We can glorify God by doing our work in such a way that we make the invisible God visible by what we do and how we do it.
John Mark Comer
To restate: love, joy, and peace are at the heart of all Jesus is trying to grow in the soil of your life. And all three are incompatible with hurry.
John Mark Comer
The single most important question is, Are we becoming more loving? Not, Are we becoming more biblically educated? Or practicing more spiritual disciplines? Or more involved in church? Those are all good things, but not the most important thing.
John Mark Comer
For those of us who desire to follow Jesus, here is the reality we must turn and face: If we’re not being intentionally formed by Jesus himself, then it’s highly likely we are being unintentionally formed by someone or something else.
John Mark Comer
It’s not failure if you fail at doing something you’re not supposed to do. It’s success. Because with each success, and with each so-called failure, you’re getting a clearer sense of your calling.
John Mark Comer
We need to relearn how to power down, unplug, disconnect, take a break, and be in one place at one time. We forget that we’re not a machine. We can’t work 24/7.
John Mark Comer
To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.
John Mark Comer
We were set up to love. To absorb the love of God into our bloodstream and then to share it with another human being.
John Mark Comer
But for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.
John Mark Comer
An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.
John Mark Comer
Here’s to tomorrow morning, six o’clock. Coffee. The chair by the window, the window by the tree. Time to breathe. A psalm and story from the Gospels. Hearing the Father’s voice. Pouring out my own. Or just sitting, resting. Maybe I’ll hear a word from God that will alter my destiny; maybe I’ll just process my anger over something that’s bothering me. Maybe I’ll feel my mind settle like untouched water; maybe my mind will ricochet from thought to thought, and never come to rest. If so, that’s fine. I’ll be back, same time tomorrow. Starting my day in the quiet place. You?
John Mark Comer
Sometimes he would go away overnight or even for a few weeks at a time just to get away from the crowds and gather himself to God. More than once we read stories about Jesus sleeping in and the disciples having to wake him up. I like this Jesus and want to follow him. Every chance he got, he would enjoy a nice long meal with friends over a bottle of wine, creating space for in-depth conversations about the highs and lows of life. He would practice Sabbath on a weekly basis—an entire day set aside for nothing but rest and worship, every single week.
John Mark Comer
It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.
John Mark Comer
When you think of Eden, don’t think of a public park with a lawn, a play set, and a flowerbed or two, where God hands Adam a lawnmower and says, Keep it tidy, will ya? Think of a violent, untamed wilderness teeming with beauty, but no infrastructure, no roads, no bridges, no cities, no civilization, and God says, Go make a world. Adam wasn’t a landscape-maintenance employee. He was an explorer, a cartographer, a gardener, a designer, an architect, a builder, an urban planner, a city-maker.
John Mark Comer
Self is the new god, the new spiritual authority, the new morality. But this puts a crushing weight on the self—one it was never designed to bear. It must discover itself. Become itself. Stay true to itself. Justify itself. Make itself happy. Perform and defend its fragile identity. As my Peloton instructor would say, “Validate your greatness.” But what about the many days when we’re not all that great? The pressure is exhausting. Cue the stats on burnout, anxiety, and mental health.
John Mark Comer
Meditating on God’s love has done more to increase my love than decades of effort to try to be more loving. Allowing myself to deeply experience his love—taking time to soak in it and allow it to infuse me—has begun to effect changes that I had given up hope of ever experiencing. Coming back to God in my failures at love, throwing myself into his arms and asking him to remind me of how much he loves me as I am—here I begin to experience new levels of love to give to others.
John Mark Comer
Some of us end up doing a lot of good things, but we never get around to doing the best thing. Because when you get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent (what a great phrase, by the way), you put off what’s really important. When you say yes to everything, you say yes to nothing. The work the Father gave you to do gets put on the back burner, at the bottom of the to-do pile. This is a tragedy because you’re robbing the world of your much-needed contribution.
John Mark Comer
What a trellis is to a vine, a rule of life is to abiding. It’s a structure—in this case a schedule and a set of practices—to set up abiding as the central pursuit of your life. It’s a way to organize all of your life around the practice of the presence of God, to work and rest and play and eat and drink and hang out with your friends and run errands and catch up on the news, all out of a place of deep, loving enjoyment of the Father’s company.
John Mark Comer
He believes that you can live under the loving gaze of the Father; you can also become the kind of person who is like the Father—loving and joyful and full of peace, patience, and kindness. You can grow into a person of happiness, even in times of great suffering. The kind of person who is not afraid of suffering or even of death, who is free of the emotional need for things to go your own way.
John Mark Comer
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