#john mark comer

To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace.

“Let God love us into people of love.”

...there are two versions of tolerance. Classic tolerance is the idea that we can agree to disagree rather than kill each other or go to war over some petty thing. This was a revolutionary leap forward in social evolution. I’m all for it. But modern tolerance is the much newer idea that right and wrong are elastic. In this view, the call out somebody’s action as sin is to “judge” them. To disagree with somebody is to hate them. So, for example, if you disagree about sexuality, no matter how gracious and kind and intelligent you are, you immediately earn the label “bigot.” But we all know that’s ludicrous. To disagree with somebody is just to disagree.

We've seen the death of the Sabbath in American life. Until the 1960s, blue laws forced business to close on the Sabbath, a government-mandated speed limit on the pace of American life. [...] In one generation, Sunday evolved from a day of rest and worship to a day to buy more crap we don't need, run errands, eat out, or just get a jump-start on our work for the week ahead. Our culture never even slowed down long enough to ask, What will this new pace of life do to our souls?

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.

To set an entire day aside to stop working, consuming, buying, selling, I'm not going to do injustice to this day, I'm not going to take from the earth this day other than gently eat its plants and enjoy its bounty, that has a profound effect on the global economy, a profound effect on the environment and therefore a profound effect on the poor. One of the best things we can do to help the poor who often never get a Sabbath (Sabbath is a byproduct of wealth and privilege and of employment), is we can leverage our wealth and privilege. One of the ways to do it is by giving, but another one of the ways is just by not consuming for a day a week.

The church is a hospital—a place where sick, broken, wounded, flawed people are made new by Jesus.

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.