Top 100 John Mark Comer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We sin because we believe a lie about what will make us happy.”

— John Mark Comer

52. “People all over the world – outside the church and in – are looking for an escape, a way out from under the crushing weight to life this side of Eden. But there is no escaping it. The best the world can offer is a temporary distraction to delay the inevitable or deny the inescapable. That’s why Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape.”

— John Mark Comer

53. “Don’t get married because you think he or she is “the one.” Trust me, they’re not. There’s no such thing! But do get married when you see who God is making somebody to be, and it lights you up.”

— John Mark Comer

54. “The reconciliation of God’s mercy and justice in the death of Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s character.”

— John Mark Comer

55. “Most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide.14.”

— John Mark Comer

56. “It’s two broken people coming together to follow God’s calling on their lives.”

— John Mark Comer

57. “All too often our hurry is a sign of something else. Something deeper. Usually that we’re running away from something – father wounds, childhood trauma, last names, deep insecurity or deficits of self-worth, fear of failure, pathological inability to accept the limitations of our humanity, or simply boredom with the mundanity of middle life.”

— John Mark Comer

58. “Because to Jesus, love is serving. It’s cleaning garbage off his feet. It’s wiping grime from between her toes. It’s choosing – choosing of your own free will – to play the role of the servant, the least important person in the room.”

— John Mark Comer

59. “Aim at an easy life and your actual life will be marked by a gnawing angst and frustration; aim at an easy yoke and, as John Ortberg once said, “Your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow.”

— John Mark Comer

60. “To the Scripture writers, hope is the absolute expectation of coming good based on the character of God.”

— John Mark Comer

61. “Here’s how you know if you’ve created God in your own image: he agrees with you on everything.”

— John Mark Comer

62. “Anxiety is temporary atheism.”

— John Mark Comer

63. “The poet Mary Oliver once said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

— John Mark Comer

64. “All too often there is a massive disconnect between “spiritual life” and life.”

— John Mark Comer

65. “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

66. “What we do flows from who we are. Both matter.”

— John Mark Comer

67. “In the beginning we have a choice, but eventually, we have a character.”

— John Mark Comer

68. “We prefer to think of ourselves as rational individualists rather than the emotional, relational, and easily manipulated social creatures we actually are.”

— John Mark Comer

69. “The trick is to learn how to wait well.”

— John Mark Comer

70. “Yahweh is forgiving, but sin is not.”

— John Mark Comer

71. “We hear the refrain “I’m great, just busy” so often we assume pathological busyness is okay. After all, everybody else is busy too. But what if busyness isn’t healthy? What if it’s an airborne contagion, wreaking havoc on our collective soul?”

— John Mark Comer

72. “We were put on earth – because the entire cosmos is this God’s temple – to make visible the invisible God. To show the world what God is like. We are the Creator’s representatives to his creation.”

— John Mark Comer

73. “Hurry is violence on the soul.”

— John Mark Comer

74. “To follow Jesus, especially in the Western world, is to live in that same tension between grateful, happy enjoyment of nice, beautiful things, and simplicity. And when in doubt, to err on the side of generous, simple living.”

— John Mark Comer

75. “In the cruciform kingdom, only the bad things die: image and status and bragging rights, all vanity.”

— John Mark Comer

76. “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

77. “We need to learn to embrace our potential and our limitations. Because both of them are signposts, pointing us forward into God’s calling on our life.”

— John Mark Comer

78. “Most of us have more than enough time to work with, even in busy seasons of life. We just have to reallocate our time to “seek first the kingdom of God,”7 not the kingdom of entertainment.”

— John Mark Comer

79. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

— John Mark Comer

80. “Calling isn’t something you choose, like who you marry or what house you buy or what car you buy; it’s something you unearth. You excavate. You dig out. And you discover.”

— John Mark Comer

81. “With every decision we make to complain, criticize, play the victim, focus on the negative, and so on, we become more and more the kind of person who is by nature negative, grouchy, unhappy, and unpleasant to be around, until eventually we lose the very capacity to live happily, gratefully, and full of wonder at our lives in God’s good world.”

— John Mark Comer

82. “In the following story, Eve is tempted by the serpent. She’s called to rule over the creation, but instead she’s ruled by the creation. It’s a sad turn of events – an upending of the created order.”

— John Mark Comer

83. “Sometimes a calling is staring us in the face, we just need to make eye contact.”

— John Mark Comer

84. “God’s view of the family, however, is over-the-top. To him, it’s the first thing on human’s job description.”

— John Mark Comer

85. “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

86. “Do you ever catch yourself with the sneaking suspicion that you’ll wake up on your deathbed with this nagging sense that somehow, in all the hurry and busyness and frenetic activity, you missed the most important things?”

— John Mark Comer

87. “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

88. “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

89. “Many have noted that the modern world is a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.”

— John Mark Comer

90. “One of the key tasks of our apprenticeship to Jesus is living into both our potential and our limitations.”

— John Mark Comer

91. “The gospel gives us the freedom to fail. Because we are loved. No matter what happens.”

— John Mark Comer

92. “It’s about giving up control, and trusting God.”

— John Mark Comer

93. “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”13.”

— John Mark Comer

94. “If he isn’t doing anything with his life that matters for God’s kingdom, how will you partner with him?”

— John Mark Comer

95. “If we fight the image of God in us – even if we succeed in the short run – it will come back to eat us alive.”

— John Mark Comer

96. “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

97. “The phrase a personal relationship with Jesus is nowhere in the Bible. I’m not saying we don’t have one, but people take that idea way too far. You are not saved into a vacuum. You are saved into a community of called-out ones. Jesus saved us to reconcile us to God and to people.”

— John Mark Comer

98. “We’re image bearers, created to rule, to partner with God in pushing and pulling the creation project forward, to work it, to draw out the earth’s potential and unleash it for human flourishing – to cooperate with God in building a civilization where his people can thrive in his presence. And in this cosmic agenda, each of us has a vocation, a calling from God, a way that God wired us, somebody to be and something to do – because the two merge in perfect symmetry.”

— John Mark Comer

99. “Human beings simply can’t live without loving relationships and meaning to both our suffering and our existence as a whole. Jesus comes to offer both.”

— John Mark Comer

100. “Because where you put your resources is where you put your heart. It’s the steering wheel to your engine of desire.”

— John Mark Comer