John Ortberg Quotes

We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.

As much as we complain about it, though, there's part of us that is drawn to a hurried life. It makes us feel important. It keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means I don't have to look too closely at my heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness.

Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.

Grace is the offer of God's ceaseless presence and irrational love that cannot be stopped.

The problem with spending your life climbing up the ladder is that you will go right past Jesus, for he's coming down.

Have you no soul?" is really another way of saying, "Is it possible that your mind with its values and conscience are not even troubled by what your will has chosen and your body carried out?

It's better to have little faith in a big God than to have big faith in a little god.

What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.

The truth is, the soul's infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of God's infinite capacity to give.

My main job is to remain connected to God. When my primary focus is being present with him, everything else has a way of falling into place.

Life goes on. The world spins out another day. The mystery of human life and hope goes on. And here and there, the luminous light that shone out from a carpenter in Nazareth glimmers and flickers in the darkness. And we hope again for what life might become. The soul waits.

One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.

One of the great misconceptions about spiritual growth that develops in a lot of churches is that information alone is adequate to produce transformed human beings. So if we want to have a church of spiritually mature people, let's just keep cramming more and more information into them ... Information alone is not adequate for the transformation of the human personality.

If you want to free your soul, you acknowledge that there is a spiritual order that God has designed for you. You are not the center of the universe. You are not the master of your fate. You are not the captain of your ship. There is a God, and you aren't him. True freedom comes when you embrace God's overall design for the world and your place in it. This is why in the Bible you see this strong connection between God's law and soul-freedom.

In my love-challenged condition, seeing a difficulty for someone else can leave me feeling a little more smug or superior-by-comparison.

A soul centered in God always knows it has a heavenly Father who will hold its pain, its fear, its anxiety.

God sees with utter clarity who we are. He is undeceived as to our warts and wickedness. But when God looks at us that is not all He sees. He also sees who we are intended to be, who we will one day become.

Sometimes, an inability to believe in Satan reflects a larger inability to believe in a spiritual plane at all.

If you ask people who don't believe in God why they don't, the number one reason will be suffering. If you ask people who believe in God when they grew most spiritually, the number one answer will be suffering.

One of the most painful aspects of suffering is the loneliness of it. Others may offer support or empathy, but no one can walk the road to Moriah in our place.

Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy - well-ordered - when there is harmony between these three entities and God's intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.

gratification of mind and body will actually dismantle your soul.

The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can't admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul.

The Ten Commandments were never designed to be a stand-alone list of rules. They come within a relational context. They describe what living up to a certain value and a certain identity and a certain destiny looks like. In fact, in Judaism, they are not called the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew term is aseret hadevarim, which literally means "ten utterances" or "ten statements" because they were rooted in things that are meant to be in God's kingdom. They flow out of how we were designed, who we were meant to be. We read them as "this is what you have to do," but God was saying, "this is who you are." That's why we don't so much break the Ten Commandments as we break ourselves when we violate them.

God designed us so that our choices, our thoughts and desires, and our behavior would be in perfect harmony with each other and would be powered by an unbroken connection with God, in perfect harmony with him and with all of his creation. That is a well-ordered soul.

Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

When you give your soul rest, you open it to the peace Jesus intends for you.

We live on the planet of lost souls. That is the human problem. It is not some superficial thing that only relates to getting the right afterlife if you affirm the right doctrines. It has to do with the depth of the human condition, which Jesus identified as nobody else ever has.

'Who Is This Man?' is about the impact of Jesus on human history. Most people - including most Christians - simply have no idea of the extent to which we live in a Jesus-impacted world.

True repentance never leads to despair. Its leads home. It leads to grace.

Feeling ready" is highly overrated.

Sin is protean. It is a cancer that keeps mutating, and just when you think you have killed off one form, it turns out a deadlier strain yet is threatening your heart.

One of the most impressive aspects of Jesus is how he was impressed by unimpressive people.

The single dynamic that helps people be most aware of God and most experiencing the fruit of the Spirit is gratitude.

If I have the courage to acknowledge my limits and embrace them, I can experience enormous freedom. If I lack this courage, I will be imprisoned by them.

Sin is very important to the soul because sin is what disintegrates the soul; it's what attacks the soul. Sin kind of is to the soul what cancer is to the body.

All of our language reflects this. If you're empty, you need to fulfill yourself. If you're stressed, learn how to take care of yourself. If you're on a job interview, you have to believe in yourself. If you're at the tattoo parlor, you must learn to express yourself. If someone dares to criticize you, you have to love yourself. If you're not getting your own way, you have to stand up for yourself. What should you do on a date? You ought to be yourself. What if your self is a train wreck? What do you do then?

Ask God to make your work go well today.

Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.

If you can't do great things, Mother Teresa used to say, do little things with great love. If you can't do them with great love, do them with a little love. If you can't do them with a little love, do them anyway.
Love grows when people serve.

God is not interested in our spiritual life. He's interested in our life.

Thank God that we are called to seek his face and not his Facebook.

One reason why we fail to hear God speak is that we are not attentive. We suffer from what might be called 'spiritual mindlessness.'

Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.

The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.

Prayer, meditation, and confession actually have the power to rewire the brain in a way that can make us less self-referential and more aware of how God sees us. But these impediments to sin may not come easily.

May your expectations all be frustrated, May all of your plans be thwarted, May all of your desires be withered into nothingness, That you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and can sing and dance in the love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

We are tempted to live under the illusion that somewhere out there are people who are normal.

The will is very good at making simple and large commitments like getting married, or deciding to move someplace," Dallas explained. "But it is very bad at trying to override habits and patterns and attitudes that are deeply rooted in us. If you try to improve your soul by willpower, you will exhaust yourself and everyone around you.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

We complicate our faith and lives in many ways, but at the core, our purpose is simple: We are called to love.

Calvin said that the only haven of safety is "to have no other will, no other wisdom, than to follow the Lord wherever He leads. Let this, then, be the first step, to abandon ourselves, and devote the whole energy of our minds to the service of God." To do this, we will have to face our greatest fear.

When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.

deliberately look for God in the ordinary moments of everyday life.

God wanted Abram to be his friend, and friends trust each other, and you can't learn to trust someone without a little risk and uncertainty and vulnerability.

It's better to have the faith to embrace reality with all its pain than to cling to the false comfort of a painless fantasy.

The Bible does not say you are God's appliance; it says you are his masterpiece. Appliances get mass-produced.

The primary goal of spiritual life is human transformation.

all of us lost souls allow ourselves to live in worry and anger and self-importance and pettiness when life with God is all around us:

We are not the passive victim of others' opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.

At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection.

The ministry of bearing with one another is learning to hear God speak through difficult people.

Your eternal destiny is not cosmic retirement; it is to be part of a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever-increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment - that is the prophetic vision which 'eye has not seen and ear has not heard.'

From ancient times, the core idea of the soul is the soul is the capacity to integrate different functions into a single being or into a single person. The soul is what holds us all together: what connects our will and our minds and our bodies and connects us to God.

Our only hope is not for more willpower; it is for a new set of habits.

Training is essential for almost any significant endeavor in life - running a marathon, becoming a surgeon, learning how to play the piano.

A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.

Greatness of soul is available to people who do not have the luxury of being ecstatic about the condition and appearance of their bodies.

Wolterstorff gives an amazing answer: the teaching of the Scriptures, clarified and made available to all the world through Jesus, that every human being is made in the image of God, and loved by God. There

Authority can be faked. That's why impersonating a police officer is a crime. Sometimes the outward appearances of authority can be deceiving.

When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.

If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat.

Prudence is not hesitation, procrastination, or moderation. It is not driving in the middle of the road. It is not the way of ambivalence, indecision, or safety.

Tithing is like training wheels when it comes to giving. It's intended to help you get started, but not recommended for the Tour de France.

Tithing is a bad ceiling but an excellent floor.

I want to love my wife, care for my kids, and give life to my friends. I want to do the work God made me to do. I want to love God and the world he made. I want to do my part to help it flourish, for my spiritual maturity is not measured by following rules. "The me God made me to be" is measured by my capacity to love. When we live in love, we flourish. That is the dance.

Self-improveme nt is no more God's plan than self-salvation.

The child in Bethlehem would grow up to be a friend of sinners, not a friend of Rome. He would spend his life with the ordinary and the unimpressive. He would pay deep attention to lepers and cripples, to the blind and the beggar, to prostitutes and fishermen, to women and children. He would announce the availability of a kingdom different from Herod's, a kingdom where blessing - of full value and worth with God - was now conferred on the poor in spirit and the meek and the persecuted.

We are the ones who get bored because our capacity to focus our attention, to delight our minds in sustained thought, has been weakened by our dependence on external stimuli.

David is called a man after God's heart. This can be a little confusing when you get into his story, because he's guilty of adultery and murder and cover-up. He's a train wreck as a husband, and he's worse as a dad. But his heart belongs to God. His whole life is immersed in the presence and story of God. What lights him up is to serve God and love God, and when he mess up - and he does - he repents and wants to get right with God again.

Jesus gave the world its most influential movement.

Greatness is never achieved through indecision.

God's primary will for your life is not the achievements you accrue; it's the person you become.

Many Christians expend so much energy and worry trying not to sin. The goal is not to try to sin less. In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him. To be with him. "Abide in me." Just relax and learn to enjoy his presence. Every day is a collection of moments, 86,400 seconds in a day. How many of them can you live with God? Start where you are and grow from there. God wants to be with you every moment.

Grace always and only consists of what will help someone come home to the Father.

The church is in the hope business. We, of all people, ought to be known most for our hope because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking.

The character of the faith that allows us to be transformed by suffering and darkness is not doubt-free certainty; rather, it is tenacious obedience.

Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.

Sometimes we do not realize how much we have to be grateful for until it is threatened.

Our soul begins to grow in God when we acknowledge our basic neediness.

Jesus would make available to the world the great teaching of Israel: ethical monotheism. There is one God, and he is the source and judge of all that is good. This

Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it's because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That's the self. We're all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves.

To become grateful, I must learn that I can handle disappointment and delayed gratification with grace and perseverance. This is why practices such as fasting and simplicity are such powerful tools for transformation. The experience of frustration and disappointment is irreplaceable in the development of a grateful heart.

Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.

...all of us are somewhere on a journey to God, and the gap between least and most advanced is infinitely smaller than the gap between the most advanced and God himself.

Jesus was often busy, but never hurried.

If we want to follow someone, we can't go faster than the one who is leading.

Real question is not who was this man (Jesus), but who is this man?

Jesus had a universal concern for those who suffered that transcended the rules of the ancient world.