Rich Mullins
I would love to be a Franciscan brother. I'm just not sure I have the courage to do it.Collection: Courage
Having grown up Protestant, I was unfamiliar with St. Francis. Then I watched the movie 'Brother Sun, Sister Moon'... I just became fascinated with the character of St. Francis. What I saw in that movie was a man who had fallen in love with God, someone for whom God was everything.
I don't know that the United States is 'God's Country,' but the church has been so strong here, and because of its influence, we hold life to be sacred and we believe that individuals have dignity. This is part of our legacy.
I think a lot of parents hand people over a blueprint and say, 'This is how you're supposed to do it.' And my parents, I think, kind of drew a picture and said, 'Here's the good stuff in life. How do you get there?'
The difference between me and most Protestants is most Protestants have no problem at all saying 'The Lord told me this' or 'The Lord told me that,' but they won't believe that the Lord speaks through the pope. You know, at least this guy has some credentials.
I think I would like to be a monk. I really considered Catholicism a few years ago, but there were some things that I just couldn't reconcile.
I think my parents were really smart parents. I think they were, actually, pretty progressive for the time. The one thing that they really wanted me to know is what makes me tick, what I am about, how I approach life. And I think what my parents really wanted for me was for me to be who I am.
I have no physical genius about me. I can't dribble a ball and run at the same time, I can't do lay-ups - I'm not an athlete. But my experience as a kid was, I was made fun of so much that what I did then, is, I wouldn't participate. And I think I cheated myself out of a lot of fun.
I think I would rather live on the verge of falling and let my security be in the all-sufficiency of the grace of God than to live in some pietistic illusion of moral excellence. Not that I don't want to be morally excellent but my faith isn't in the idea that I'm more moral than anybody else. My faith is in the idea that God and His love are greater than whatever sins any of us commit.Collection: Fall
Never forget what Jesus did for you. Never take lightly what it cost Him. And never assume that if it cost Him His very life, that it won't also cost you yours.Collection: Jesus
God spoke to Balaam through his ass. I believe God still speaks through asses today. So if God should choose to speak through you, you needn't think too highly of yourself.Collection: Believe
God notices you. The fact is he can't take his eyes off of you. However badly you think of yourself, God is crazy about you. God is in love with you. Some of us even fear that someday we'll do something so bad that he won't notice us anymore. Well, let me tell you, God loves you completely. And he knew us at our worst before he ever began to love us at all. And in the love of God there are no degrees, there is only love.Collection: Crazy
Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.Collection: Beautiful
The hardest part of being a Christian is surrendering and that is where the real struggle happens. Once we have overcome our own desire to be elevated, our own desire to be recognized, our own desire to be independent and all those things that we value very much because we are Americans and we are part of this American culture. Once we have overcome that struggle then God can use us as a part of His body to accomplish what the body of Christ was left here to accomplish.Collection: Christian
I grew up hearing everyone tell me 'God loves you'. I would say big deal, God loves everybody. That don't make me special! That just proves that God ain't got no taste. And, I don't think He does. Thank God! Because He takes the junk of our lives and makes the most beautiful art.Collection: Beautiful
The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart -- it is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that befits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice -- it does not so much nibble at our shoe leather as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from the bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our small-minded questions, but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask.Collection: Sex
I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity, but because there were people willing to be nuts and bolts.Collection: Christian
When you stop being so afraid of failing you become much more free to succeedCollection: Succeed
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.Collection: Lonely
Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you've done it to me. And this is what I've come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they're just wrong. They're not bad, they're just wrong. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken-hearted.Collection: Jesus
I had a professor one time... He said, 'Class, you will forget almost everything I will teach you in here, so please remember this: that God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and He has been speaking through asses ever since. So, if God should choose to speak through you, you need not think too highly of yourself. And, if on meeting someone, right away you recognize what they are, listen to them anyway'.Collection: Thinking
So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live.Collection: Real
Save me from trendy religion that makes cheap clichés out of timeless truths.Collection: Timeless
It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church... you should read the Scriptures.Collection: Christian
We never understand what we're praying, and God, in His mercy, does not answer our prayers according to our understanding, but according to His wisdom.Collection: Prayer
It's all that pretending to be perfect that breeds inauthenticity in the church.Collection: Perfect
Let people see your struggles and don't ever fake it.Collection: Struggle
Love is found in the things we've given up, more than in the things that we have kept.Collection: Love Is
We do not find happiness by being assertive. We don't find happiness by running over people because we see what we want and they are in the way of that happiness so we either abandon them or we smash them. The Scriptures don't teach us to be assertive. The Scriptures teach us — and this is remarkable — the Scriptures teach us to be submissive. This is not a popular idea.Collection: Running
And I really suspect that of all the things we think we want to know, the only thing we really want to know is that we are loved. And if Jesus means anything, he means that you are loved. I hope you know that. And I hope you stop worrying about all the stuff you don't know, because I don't think it amounts to a hill of beans.Collection: Jesus
Love is a virtue and not a feeling. It is fed and fired by God- not by the favorable response of the beloved. Even when it doesn't seem to make a dime's worth of difference to the ones on whom it is lavished, it is still the most prized of all virtues because it is at the heart of the very character of God.Collection: Heart
We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.Collection: Humble
So hold me Jesus, 'cause I'm shaking like a leaf. You have been King of my glory won't You be my Prince of Peace.Collection: Jesus
If you can't be good, be loud.Collection: Loud
Faith without works is like a song you can't sing. It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine.Collection: Song
God did not give Joseph any special information about how to get from being the son of a nomad in Palestine to being Pharaoh's right hand man in Egypt. What He did give Joseph were eleven jealous brothers, the attention of a very loose and vengeful woman, the ability to do the service of interpreting dreams and managing other people's affairs and the grace to do that faithfully wherever he was.Collection: Dream
If your life is motivated by your ambition to leave a legacy, what you'll probably leave as a legacy is ambition.Collection: Ambition
A faith that moves mountains is a faith that expands horizons, it does not bring us into a smaller world full of easy answers, but into a larger one where there is room for wonder.Collection: Moving
Sometimes my life just don't make sense at all. The mountains looks so big and my faith just seems so small.Collection: Mountain
Good taste has everything to do with being cultured and being refined, and if art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human.Collection: Art
You are not alone in the world. You are part of an ensemble.Collection: Ensemble
Be praised for all Your tenderness by these works of Your hands, suns that rise and rains that fall to bless and bring to life Your land. Look down upon this winter wheat and be glad that You have made blue for the sky and the color green that fills Your fields with praise.Collection: Fall
Usually when we do something to corrupt our lives, it's usually something to fulfill an ache that we have.Collection: Ache
I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is not what the theory of relativity is, but I think what we all really want to know anyways, is whether we're loved or not.Collection: Thinking
We just can't love without God. God wants for us want we want for ourselves. These basic things are not that hard to grasp. We just have to have faith, and faith is a gift. We just need to accept it.Collection: Needs
A lot of people are sitting around waiting for God to tell them what to do. I think God is saying 'Do what you want!' If he wants me to express His love, I need to find a way to do it.Collection: Thinking
Yes, it’s embarrassing to be born again, but imagine how embarrassing it must have been to be born the first time. At least this time you get to wear clothes!Collection: Clothes
I hope I would leave a legacy of joy -a legacy of real compassion.Collection: Real