Garden City Quotes

“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.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“It’s not failure if you fail at doing something you’re not supposed to do. It’s success. Because with each success, and with each so-called failure, you’re getting a clearer sense of your calling.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“I love Tim Keller’s definition of work. He puts it this way: work is “rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“That’s why Sabbath is an expression of faith. Faith that there is a Creator and he’s good. We are his creation. This is his world. We live under his roof, drink his water, eat his food, breathe his oxygen. So on the Sabbath, we don’t just take a day off from work; we take a day off from toil. We give him all our fear and anxiety and stress and worry. We let go. We stop ruling and subduing, and we just be. We “remember” our place in the universe. So that we never forget . . . There is a God, and I’m not him.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“Sometimes a calling is staring us in the face, we just need to make eye contact.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“All too often there is a massive disconnect between “spiritual life” and life.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“Everything matters to God. The way of Jesus should permeate and influence and shape every facet of your life.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“What we do flows from who we are. Both matter.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“We need to relearn how to power down, unplug, disconnect, take a break, and be in one place at one time. We forget that we’re not a machine. We can’t work 24/7.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“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, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“You were made to do good— to mirror and mimic what God is like to the world. To stand at the interface between the Creator and his creation, implementing God’s creative, generous blessing over all the earth and giving voice to the creation’s worship.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“Jesus is calling us out. He’s saying that greatness is when we love and serve others.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“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, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“The more like Jesus we are, and the more like the image of God we are, the more people see of God’s glory.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“Do you see your work as an essential part of your discipleship to Jesus and as the primary way that you join him in his work of renewal? If not, you should.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“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, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“We’re called to a very specific kind of work. To make a Garden-like world where image bearers can flourish and thrive, where people can experience and enjoy God’s generous love. A kingdom where God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven,” where the glass wall between earth and heaven is so thin and clear and translucent that you don’t even remember it’s there. That’s the kind of world we’re called to make. After all, we’re just supposed to continue what God started in the beginning.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“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, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“The cultural milieu we live in is one of celebrityism. The temptation, when you get really good at something, is to do it to serve and love yourself, not the world, and to do it for your own glory, not God’s. It’s so easy for gifted people to fall into pride, hubris, shameless self-promoting, and self-aggrandizement. It’s lame.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“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, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“To borrow from the language of Jesus, you gotta figure what the “work the Father gave you to do” is. And then you need to learn the art of saying no. To good things. A smart man once said, “Good is the enemy of best.”17”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“Yes, Jesus was the template for what Godness looks like. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus of Nazareth. But the mystery of the incarnation is that he was also the template for what real, true humanness looks like. He’s the Son of God and he’s the “son of Adam.” If you want to know what a human being, fully awake and alive, ruling over the world as a conduit for the Creator God’s love looks like in flesh and blood — then look at Jesus.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“For starters it means that your work is a core part of your humanness. You are made in the image of a working God. God is king over the world, and you’re a king, a queen — royalty — ruling on his behalf. Gathering up the creation’s praise and somehow pushing it back to God himself.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“Human beings are responsible for art, science, medicine, education, the Sistine Chapel, Handel’s Messiah, New York City, space travel, the novel, photography, and Mexican food — I mean, who doesn’t love Mexican food? But we’re also responsible for a world with 27 million slaves, blatant racism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the genocide in Rwanda, ISIS, the financial meltdown of 2008, pornography, global warming, the endangered-species list, and don’t even get me started on pop music. So we humans are a mixed bag. We have a great capacity — more than we know — to rule in a way that is life-giving for the people around us and the place we call home, or to rule in such a way that we exploit the earth itself and rob people of an environment where they can thrive. This was God’s risk. His venture. His experiment.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“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, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“I would argue the desire to be great was put there by the Creator himself. After all, we’re made in his image.

The problem is this desire, which in its embryonic, innocent state is so, so right, is quickly warped and soiled and bent out of shape by the ego.

We devolve from a desire to be great to a desire to be thought of as great.

From a desire to serve the weak to a desire to be served by the weak.

From a desire to save the world to a desire to have it.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“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, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“you would think that if Jesus’ agenda is to fix the world gone awry, then the story would end up back where it all started — in Eden, with everybody naked and unashamed. But instead, it’s a little different. Actually, it’s a lot different. It’s a Garden-like city called New Jerusalem with walls and gates and streets and dwellings and art and architecture and food and drink and music and culture. Why is that? Because the Garden was never supposed to stay a garden; it was always supposed to become a garden city.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“love Tim Keller’s definition of work. He puts it this way: work is “rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

“Parker Palmer, in his masterpiece of a book on vocation, writes this: “The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”
― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.