Astonished: Recapturing the Wonder, Awe, and Mystery of Life with God

Top Highlights

“The opposite of faith (trusting in what you can’t see) is sight (trusting in what you can see). The impulse to domesticate God comes from our discomfort at not being able to see, understand, or perceive God. So we seek to make Him ‘see-able’—understandable, controllable, predictable.” (source)

“The point is that God frustrated the woman in exactly the places he designed the woman to find fulfillment.” (source)

“And the key point, the even more surprising point, is that He did this as an act of mercy in order to drive us back to Him. His judgments were calculated to ensure our continued frailty and dependence so that His now-fallen and rebellious creation would be driven back to reliance upon Him. By introducing difficulty into human life, God heightened humanity’s sense of vulnerability while at the same time introduced a hunger and thirst for significance and meaning that only He could supply.” (source)

“The promise of the Scriptures isn’t that God will erase the difficulty and fallenness of human life; rather, it is that He’ll use it to draw us to Him over and over and over again. It is a mistake to market God as the answer to our insatiable desires when He was the one who made certain our desires were insatiable in the first place. God is relentless in His pursuit of humanity; He’ll use anything and everything to bring us to the place where we’ll acknowledge our need for Him.” (source)

“The problem is that God rarely cooperates with our sales guarantees. There is no place in Scripture where God promises to meet our needs, fill the hole in our hearts, or make our life easier. In fact, God usually does just the opposite. That is one reason why so many are disappointed in God. We’ve made promises for Him that He doesn’t make for Himself. Using the language of free-market consumerism to bring people to Christ actually hurts them in the long run for the simple reason that Jesus often introduces difficulty, tension, and uncertainty into our lives. If we’ve promised people that Jesus will remove the bumps and bruises of life, then they’ll be unpleasantly surprised to find He’ll frequently introduce bumps and bruises as part of the journey of faith.” (source)