Rich Mullins Quotes

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.

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.

It always cracks me up when people try to impress God, because people don't have to impress God. He's already knocked out by you.

Look at us all
we are all of us lost and in all of our different ways of pretending, we all fool ourselves into the very same hell.
Look at the cross
we are all of us loved and one God meets us all at the point of our common need and brings to all of us
all who will let Him
salvation.

I am a Christian because I have seen the love of God lived out in the lives of people who know Him. The Word has become flesh and I have encountered God in the people who have manifested (in many "unreasonable" ways) His Presence; a Presence that is more than convincing - it is a Presence that is compelling. I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity to me, but because there were people who were willing to be nuts and bolts, who through their explanation of it, held it together so that I could experience it and be compelled by it to obey.

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?'

If you want a religion that makes sense, then I suggest something other than Christianity. But if you want a religion that makes life, then, I think this is the one.

The biggest problem with life is that it's just daily.

I think that of all the diseases in the world, the disease that all humankind suffers from, the disease that is most devastating to us is not AIDS, it's not gluttony, it's not cancer, it's not any of those things. It is the disease that comes about because we live in ignorance of the wealth of love that God has for us.

We are not as strong as we think we are

I would like to encourage you to stop thinking of what you're doing as ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it all messed up or not; whether you flush your own toilet or not. Your ministry is the way that you love people. And you love people when you write something that is encouraging to them, something challenging. You love people when you call your wife and say, 'I'm going to be late for dinner,' instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife sometime, because you know she's really tired. Loving people - being respectful toward them - is much more important than writing or doing music.

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!

The longer I live, the more I have the feeling like God looks down, like when you've just bitten into a vanilla ice cream cone, you just get the feeling God's going, 'Yes! He enjoys it, and I made his taste buds and I made vanilla and he's putting it together and he's experiencing what I created him to experience.

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.

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.

Theres a wideness in Gods mercy
I cannot find in my own
And He keeps His fire burning
To melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God

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.

We all want to go there something awful, but to stand there takes some grace.

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.

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 benefits 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.

I would love to be a Franciscan brother. I'm just not sure I have the courage to do it.

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.

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'.

It's not the job of government to help the poor. The church is the mechanism that God put on earth to help the poor.

There's a difference, you know, between faith and playing make-believe. One will make you grow. The other one will make you sleep.

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.

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.

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.

We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.

Prayer is a grace through which we pour ourselves out before God and through which He calls us into His presence.

I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ's birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It's nice to find theological justification for your quirks.

You will never understand what you're doin'. But God does.

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.

If your life is motivated by your ambition to leave a legacy, what you'll probably leave as a legacy is ambition.

It never fails. God will put people in your path that irritate you, especially if you're prone to be irritated.

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.

And step by step You'll lead me / And I will follow You all of my days.

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.

I hope I would leave a legacy of joy -a legacy of real compassion,

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.

Wealth can't be defined in terms of what we have, but only in terms of how free we are to give and take".

Well, I wrote that song for the village, but I wrote this one for the sky.

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.

Usually when we do something to corrupt our lives, it's usually something to fulfill an ache that we have ...

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.

If you're really looking for answers, look past me. But if you're interested in how I got to where I am, I will be as honest as possible.

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.

If you can't be good, be loud.

And while reason may be found within His love, no reason would be able to contain his love. […] It is possible that the evidence of His divinity lies in that love – that in light of love, miracles seem sort of unremarkable. If God can love me, the rest will follow.

In the end, it's not gonna matter if you have a few scars, but it will matter if you didn't live.

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.

The only man I envy is the man who has not yet been to Africa- for he has so much to look forward to.

I think there's only one [thing] that anybody teaches, and this is character. And I think that whether you are teaching history, math, or biology, or music, what you are really doing is, you are helping to shape the character of that person who is your student ... Music is such a wonderful teaching tool, because while you are developing musical skills, that student can learn a lot about discipline [and] cooperation.

I am thinking now of old Moses sitting on a mountain - sitting with God - looking across the Jordan into the Promised Land. I am thinking of the lump in his throat, that weary ache in his heart, that nearly bitter longing sweetened by the company of God...

And then God - the great eternal God - takes Moses' thin-worn, thread-bare little body into His hands - hands into whose hollows you could pour the oceans of the world, hands whose breadth marked off the heavens - and with these enormous and enormously gentle hands, God folds Moses' pale lifeless arms across his chest for burial.

I don't know if God wept at Moses' funeral. I don't know if He cried when He killed the first of His creatures to take its skins to clothe this man's earliest ancestors. I don't know who will bury me -

...Of God, on whose breast old Moses lays his head like John the Beloved would lay his on the Christ's. And God sits there quietly with Moses - for Moses - and lets His little man cry out his last moments of life.

But I look back over the events of my life and see the hands that carried Moses to his grave lifting me out of mine. In remembering I go back to these places where God met me and I meet Him again and I lay my head on His breast, and He shows me the land beyond the Jordan and I suck into my lungs the fragrance of His breath, the power of His presence.

There is the music that we make, and the music that makes us.

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.

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.

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.

Deliver us from evil - from moral duplicity and weakness, from laziness and spiritual complacency, from those lies we tell ourselves from our fear of facing the truth.

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.

Bear in mind, children, that they listen to you because you are kids - not because you are right. That's how our Father listens to us.

I did not read the Bible today. I am not very good at being religious and don't really feel too bad about not being too good. I do wish that I loved God and His creatures more ...

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.

When I die, they're going to have to bury me because if they don't, I'll stink up the place.

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.

If you live real good, I can guarantee you are gonna get beat up real bad!