At the end of 2022, it was clear to me that my theme word for 2023 needed to be “behold.” My soul needs to just back up and gaze on Jesus. Marinate in his presence.

And then this brand new book came out this spring: Beholding: Deepening our Experience in God by Strahan Coleman.

Oh goodness…my heart needed this book, so I want to share 21 of my favorite quotes. Please add this book to your summer reading!

1. Beholding is a life founded on the truth that no other offer on earth or in heaven is greater than that of simply staring into the eternal eyes of God, then seeing our world through them. It places a great value on God Himself; it makes Him that worth our time (16).
2. The invitation here is to simple friendship. It is to prayer as a satisfying and abiding pleasure. It’s to the remapping of our expectations about where our strength comes from, a call to exhale into the unburdening God and to inhale His beauty and life (20).
3. A strange thing happens when we decentralize asking in our prayer life. What do we do? How do we commune with God without agenda or necessity? I wonder if the answer is partly why so many of us pray like crazy in suffering, then forget about God in healing, because we don’t know what to do when the basis of our relationship is no longer desperate acceptance, healing, longing, or need (28).
4. I realised I’d been praying in reverse my whole life, looking for a working relationship when God longed for a friend (32).
5. For so many of us, the harsh reality is that it’s not so much God we want as the security, emotional experiences, sense-making, or community He gives us. This shows up in our prayers as the product over the Producer. Consumeristic prayer is transactional only. It’s about give and take: worship for blessings, or repentance for shame-lifting. The result is a view of prayer that is primarily centred on getting things done or getting what we want with tangible outcomes or personal gain, rather than sitting with and admiring God. It limits our relationship with the God of beauty to a working relationship (38).
6. If we can’t learn to love God more than His gifts, and if we can’t accept that we’re loved by God as His own child rather than as His worker, then what hope do we have of really loving anyone else that way? (42)
7. Well before you or I even wake in the morning, God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are conversing. They have been since well before the creation of the world and will continue well beyond its renewal. Prayer doesn’t start when we sit down to close our eyes or when we think about it; it never ends, and so it makes perfect sense to me that we should come to God first of all as a listener-receiver: as a beholder (48).
8. The fruit of love is a far more precious resource than the giftedness of man (58).
9. I’ve come to see that kindness is a miracle, self-control a shocking characteristic, gentleness and humility rare commodities, and Christian unity almost worthy of greater awe than dead-raising (58).
10. Often, study is easier than prayer. The fight for justice is easier than self-reflection and repentance (61).
11. Being right does not equal being righteous. We need Christ for that, and He’s a person long before He is an ideology or a movement (61).
12. All intercession and petition and no beholding and abiding makes only half a relationship with God, and as far as our friendship goes, not the most important half (63).
13. Forgiveness wasn’t Christ’s ultimate goal on the cross. Reconciliation was. And there’s an important difference. Reconciliation literally means the restoration of friendship. This is profound, and it changes everything about the way we pray (65).
14. Sometimes I wonder if this is all the world has seen or learned from us over the years: a transactional spirituality more obsessed with the evil in the world and our personal sin than with the wonder of divine friendship that God’s love came to give us (67).
15. The question isn’t “Does God love us?” but whether we’ll allow the fact that He always does to become an experienced reality in our daily lives (74).
16. If our gospel is sin obsessed, it reduces our story with God to that of forgiveness only, and we’re likely to take that sin-central view of life to those around us. Sin will be the first thing we see, and when we’re confronted with people who touch the nerve of our particular sin horror, we will struggle to see their image. We’ll only see their brokenness as the main event of their existence (100).
17. This is staggering to me because whilst we often spend so much of our lives seeking the spiritually extraordinary, God came to us embodied in our mundane ordinary and said, “Look! This is what divine life looks like! To live fully alive, in obedience to, and in pleasure with Me is to be more human, not less!” (124)
18. To look at the world is to see Christ hidden amidst it, and though it may not always feel ecstatic or outer body, it’s as valid as sharing a meal with Jesus in Cana, where before He transferred water into wine, He was just another ordinary guest. The Eucharist demands that we see the world enchanted (126).
19. A profound unity that’s hard to explain gathers in a room when people are silent together in God. It runs deep (168).
20. There are many seasons in our walking in the way of Jesus when our bodies’ trauma, illness, or aches carry the potential to hinder our communion with God. It’s during these times that our physical acts of prostration, kneeling, and sitting before God in silence can really carry us. Especially when we bring our heart to it. Body prayer is an invitation to an embodied communion through any and all seasons we face (210).
21. Jesus didn’t come to save and reconcile minds; He came to save and reconcile people (214).

And here is bonus song: Behold Him.