Quotes from the Biography of Rich Mullins"Rich Mullins, His Life and Legacy... An Arrow Pointing to Heaven." " 'Christianity is about a daily walk with this person, Jesus. The heart of Christian faith is a radical and reasonable trust and focus on Jesus, but for many of us our focus has shifted very subtly from love for Jesus and faithfulness to Him and obedience to Him to a set of doctrines. Life and living come from God - it comes from Jesus - not from doctrine or good morals. You can be an utterly moral person and not be alive. Jesus came that we might have life, not good morals. It's not that I'm opposed to good morals at all; it's just that sometimes I think we put the cart before the horse.' " He (Rich Mullins) expressed that love in a number of concrete ways to a variety of people because he believed that love is real only when it is given freely and without expectation of return. He said, '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." "Quite often we extend love toward people because we want to change them. Rich believed that we ought to love without any requirements." "I remember one time Beaker and I were hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and he met some friends of his, so I walked into town. It was about a five-mile walk from the campsite down the trail..., down into town. And when I got there I went into a restaurant and I was having a steak, and this guy started talking to me and we had this great conversation. We were having a good time, and he said, "Hey look, it's dark and it's five miles up the road to your campground. Why don't I drive you up there?" "It was also while on the Unguarded tour that Rich learned just how fickle applause is. Kathy Sprinkle attended one of the concerts on that tour and remembers how once Rich learned a powerful lesson about success: "That night he had a particularly good concert and was feeling very good about himself and how great it felt to hear all those kids screaming for him. We went for a walk near the end of Amy's set and returned through the parking lot as some of the teens from the concert were coming out. He accidentally bumped into a group of the. He had changed his clothes after his set, and he had on a ragged T-shirt and old jeans. As these kids walked by some of them laughed at him, and one said, 'Creepy old bum!' " That experience taught him a great lesson: the crowd can be cheering one minute and jeering the next." "What is it that God desires most from us? Many might answer, "He wants us to be holy. He wants us to sin less." Rich would disagree. He would say, 'He wants us to be His.' His trademark autograph was "Be God's"; not "Be good," but "Be God's." Being good in and of itself was not the main issue, though it was certainly a by-product of being in a close relationship with God. The main issue is surrendering our lives to God." "Because of his awareness of his own sinfulness, Rich was not prone to judge others. He was indeed aware that he was not a man "without sin"; therefore, he had no stones to throw. But his understanding of love was deeper than merely not throwing stones. For Rich, it also meant learning to accept people as they are, to embrace them even with their flaws, to love them without trying to fix them. He wrote: "In 1989 Rich worked with a youth pastor named David Busby, who said, 'There is nothing you can do to make God love you more, and nothing you can do to make God love you less.' Even though Rich had heard about God's love before, something in this bold statement hit him afresh. Suddenly he understood for the first time that God's love is not based on what we do or don't do. The love God has for each of us springs from His nature because God is love. It is not based on our performance, on our failures, on our sins or on our successes. God's love is a reality. God loves us. Constantly. " Rich said: " We practice silence [when we're driving] in the truck a lot of times so we hardly ever have a tape or anything like that. But we don't have any rules - you can do what you want. But Beaker put in a Brennan Manning tape and I really didn't want to hear it because I didn't know who Brennan was and I don't ordinarily like preaching. I went "Argh, great." Well, I think about five minutes into it I had to pull off the road because I was just bawling my eyes out. I though, I have gone to church ever since I was ... wee little, probably from when I was a week old, and this is the first sermon in my memory that is the preaching of the good news of the gospel of Christ. He's not preaching about an issue, He's not preaching about a theological position, He's not preaching about anything except the good news. And I though, Wow, this is what I am hungry to hear. This is what I am dying to hear." "Brennan [Manning], like Dave Busby, also had a saying that had an impact on Rich. 'God loves us as we are, not as we should be, for we will never be as we should be.' Those two statements about God's love... dramatically altered the way Rich thought about God." "Rich needed to hear this truth spoken again and again because it takes time for a new belief to replace an old one. The messages he heard growing up were different from what Brennan was preaching. Rich heard sermons of condemnation and guilt producing homilies, and he had believed them. They had planted themselves somewhere in his soul and formed the way he thought about God and himself - that God was an angry judge and he was noting but a sinner destined for hell. "The love of God is not only something we need, Rich realized, it is the reason we were made. God loved us into existence. god saw us before we were born and out of His love declared that we ought to be. Everything that exists came into being by the love of God. We were made to be loved." "It is said that children with rickets, 'scratch lime from the walls.' So, too, when we do not feel loved we 'scratch acceptance from the walls.' We will do anything to get it: climb the ladder to success, try to be funny, acquire possessions alter our bodies, etc. If we are religious, this will often translate into becoming scrupulous. We will try to be perfect or saintly in order to find acceptance from God. Every attempt to find this acceptance in anything but God will eventually fail, and we will either have to deny the pain and try to ignore it or medicate it with a drink or a pill. but we must have it. The human soul cannot endure to be unloved." "I will be my brother's keeper "God loves us not because we are lovable, but because He is love. - C. S. Lewis" "Our courteous Lord does not want His servants to despair because they fall often and grievously; for our falling does not hinder Him in loving us. - Lady Julian of Norwich " "Not only is this divine love not an emotion: it is also not something we can merit. Our world functions on a system of rewards and punishments. If we do well, we are rewarded and we feel loved. If we fail, we are punished and we feel unloved. But the love of God is not something that is contingent on what we do. It is constant. Unfortunately, many Christians are desperately trying to earn a love they already possess and are fearful of forfeiting a love they can never lose. This whole system has to be unlearned." Rich says, "Anytime that we focus on our performance, that in itself cuts us off from God - not successfully - because God's grace is greater than even our darkest sin. This is not about your righteousness. Your righteousness is all in Jesus. So don't get hung up about how important you are in the Kingdom of God or how important you are to the growth of the church. It seems that God is always saying, 'I'm not worries so much about how you're doing as much as I'm glad about who you are.' The scripture also says don't get too hung up in your failures, your weakness, or your addictions - it doesn't make you separate from God because he still loves you." "The love of God is not only comforting but also painful in that it requires that we die to our need to feel worthy, which is in direct contrast to the spirit of the age, which tell us that we must feel good about ourselves in order to find peace. Rich often said that this is a losing effort, for whatever we think might make us feel good about ourselves (good looks, talent, wealth, intelligence) was always subject to change and could be taken from us in an instant." "Could it be that God 'feels'? Could God be capable of passion? Could God be excited or must He be austere? Are we comfortable with the image of God as Father and nervous about God as lover (some of us even prefer God as Parent - less a personality, more an ideal). Are we happy to have God be the Creator, but scared to think of Him as being Creative? Do we like God being an engineer, but balk at His being an artist? Does His being a logician comfort us, but His being a poet threaten us? Do we enjoy the glow of God's light but shade ourselves from the heat of His flames? Does the idea that Jesus tolerated the sinful woman's anointing of His feet and John resting his head on Jesus' breast make us squirm, so the thought that Jesus enjoyed this makes us sick? How is it that we can accept that Moses saw a bush that burned and was not consumed, yet we doubt that God can love in a rage and never cool?" "The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus inside a woman's body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab. - C. S. Lewis" "The Jesus of The Jesus Record is one who comes as a might deliverer of the poor and the oppressed, a disturber of the peace, a strong lover who cuts through our pain and darkness, a homeless man who walked on water and calmed the sea, a miracle man with holes in His hands, a man who played with children and baffled the scholars, a God-man who now lives in radiance but once was let down by His friends, and finally a man who now rules and reigns in the heavens, where He has gone to prepare a place for us." "More than dying for us, Jesus also give His life for us - a complete human life. In order to do that, He had to become one of us, like us in every way. God could have become a tough, stoic, unfeeling kind of man, like our Hollywood idols. Instead, He became a man who wept, a man who felt everything we could ever feel: loneliness, betrayal, and fear. Again, sometimes we are reluctant to think of Jesus as lonely. But, as my colleague, Chris Kettler notes, "Because Christ became lonely, where we become lonely we are no longer lonely alone." Jesus faced all that the weakest of us faces, and because of that, we have a God who understand all that we experience. We need not only the victory won in the death of Christ; we also need the completion and wholeness found in the life of Christ." "Jesus does not require that we become holy and perfect before we come to him. He demands that we know that we are sick and in need of a physician. When we reach out to Jesus - who has already reached out to us - we become whole and beautiful. And so does the world around us." "Rich saw Jesus as the conduit of the life and power of God. Being attached to Jesus, or to used John's word, 'abiding' in Jesus (John 15:4), connects us to this life. Adherence to a doctrine or a moral principle cannot give us life. The shift away from a daily walk with Jesus to a set of beliefs about Jesus is a common problem in the church, Rich believed." "One of his closest friends, Kathy Sprinkle, said of Rich, 'Almost all of his pain revolved around his immense loneliness and his need to feel loved. As much as we loved him, we could never fill that void. I learned from him that there is within us all, if we have the guts to admit it, a terrible void created by our loneliness for God that can never be fully satisfied in this life." " 'Tonight, not only do I find this world frightening - I am frightened of myself. I am frightened of the evil that I am capable of. I am frightened of that which You (I believe) would deliver me from, and yet I will wont let go. Help me to let go, Lord. "Deliver us from evil...." You taught us to pray. Maybe this fear is part of the lesson. 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. I thin, Lord, that we're all afraid of werewolves - not afraid of being destroyed by one - afraid of being one.' " " 'The hardest thing 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 her to accomplish.' " "In his youth Rich had a deep hunger for God and a strong desire to imitate Jesus. In the Gospels he saw Jesus denounce the pursuit of wealth, saying, 'Woe to them that are rich.' He told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, saying that the rich has as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel has of going through the eye of a needle. And Jesus called money a rival god, saying that people could not be faithful to God and money at the same time. "What Rich wanted more than anything was to b be faithful to Jesus, and for him, that meant caring for the poor. He said, 'If I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way 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." "The things of this world are not ours to keep. We are merely stewards of them while we are here. Our pride sometimes leads us to say "mine" and "ours," when in reality everything is God's." "Rich's eternal perspective also gave him a different view of his vocation. He found working in the contemporary Christian music industry a difficult experience. Because it is a business as well as a ministry, it is concerned with making money. Because it is concerned with making money, it is always in a precarious position of compromise. The great danger in the Christian music industry is using people's need to hear the gospel and be inspired in order to make money. Rich wanted his own motivation to be pure." "He didn't have any material gain that he was after; therefore he had nothing to risk and was able to speak honestly and clearly what he heard from God." "We begin to see the wisdom of God, who gave us commandments not as a way of punishing us, or even testing us, but for our own good. God gives us His commandments because he wants to save us from being damaged." "There is only one thing I know I am going to do in my life. I don't know if I'll be a success, a failure, married, single - but I do know that sooner or later, I'm going to die. The finality of that is kind of like God's little joke. No matter how cool you think you are, you will decompose. Most people live most of their lives ignoring death. Anything that will remind us, we remove from sight. This obsession with immortality is a bizarre thing. What that tells me, though, is we must be immortal." "One time he was in Florida to do a concert, and he realized that he had not showered for several days. He called some people he had met only once and asked if he could come shower at their house. They welcomed him. After he finished showering, he got dressed, walked to the front door, thanked the people, and left. They were stunned. He left without staying and visiting. He just used their shower. Sam Howard says of the incident, "In his mind, there was nothing wrong with that. He needed a place to shower, and they had one. He used other people's possessions without feeling any obligation because that is how he would have treated them if they had needed to use his shower. With Rich there was no mine and yours; it was all ours. |
