John Ortberg Quotations | Page 2

The day people around me stop questioning my character is the day my character begins to grow vulnerable.

Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.

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

Habits eat good intentions for breakfast.

If we do not become changed from the inside-out - if we don't morph - we will be tempted to find external methods to satisfy our need to feel that we're different from those outside the faith. If we cannot be transformed, we will settle for being informed or conformed.

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

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

You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.

God is never a God of discouragement. When you have a discouraging spirit or train of thought in your mind, you can be sure it is not from God. He sometimes brings pain to his children-conviction over sin, or repentance over fallenness, or challenges that scare us, or visions of his holiness that overwhelm us. But God never brings discouragement.

Jesus is mysterious not just because of what we don't know about him, but because of what we do know about him.

There is a immense difference between training to do something and trying to do something....Sp iritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.... Following Jesus simply means learning from him how to arrange my life around activities that enable me to live in the fruit of the Spirit

Failure does not shape you; the way you respond to failure shapes you.

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.

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.

When I repent, here is where it starts. I try to name my sin as honestly and as specifically as possible. Here is what repenting is not. It is not excusing my sin, minimizing my sin, it's not rationalizing my sin ... Repentance is getting painfully honest with God.

There is something you can't fix, can't heal, or can't escape, and all you can do it trust God. Finding ultimate refuge in God means you become so immersed in his presence, so convinced of his goodness, so devoted to his lordship that you find even the cave is a perfectly safe place to be because he is there with you.

Joylessness may be the sin most readily tolerated by the church.

Make your life about something bigger than your life.

Genuine brokenness pleases God more than pretend spirituality.

I need to learn. Joy is at the heart of God's plan for human beings. The reason for this is worth pondering awhile: Joy is at the heart of God himself. We will never understand the significance of joy in human life until we understand its importance to God. I suspect that most of us seriously underestimate God's capacity for joy.

The main measure of your devotion to God is not your devotional life. It is simply your life.

Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand.

Ironically, often the thing that keeps me from experiencing joy is my preoccupation with self. The very selfishness that keeps me from pouring myself out for the joy of others also keeps me from noticing and delighting in the myriad small gifts God offers each day. This is why Walker Percy describes boredom as "the self stuffed with the self."

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

Solitude is the one place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise relentlessly mold us. Solitude requires relentless perseverance.

For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God.

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

We must assess our thoughts and beliefs and reckon whether they are moving us closer to conformity to Christ or farther away from it.

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.

God wishes to be seen, wishes to be sought, wishes to be expected, and wishes to be trusted.

Every day you and I walk through God's shop. Every day we brush up against objects of incalculable worth to Him. People. Every one of them carries a price tag, if only we could see it.

We'd like to be humble...but what if no one notices?

Prayer allows us to wait without worry.

We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.

I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.

Your Mission starts where you are,Not where you think you should be.Sometimes we're tempted to think that our current position/job/situation is a barrier to our mission, but, in fact, it is where it starts.

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

How hard is it for God to get your attention? Do you regularly practice turning aside in your day? That is, taking a moment to listen to God- because God, through the Holy Spirit, really is speaking, because we know, every place is filled with the presence of God. There is not an inch of space, not a moment of time, that God does not inhabit.

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

Jesus ... associated with the outcasts; he spoke with them, touched them, ate with them, loved them.

Will you keep going when you don't know why? When you can't get any answers that would make the pain go away, will you still say, 'My Lord,' even though his ways are not clear to you? Will you keep going-with all the grace and grit and faith you can muster-and live in hope that one day God will set everything right. Will you trust that God is good? ... Ultimately, the choice everyone faces is the choice between hope and despair. Jesus says, 'Choose hope.'

If ever there were a true "just as I am" church, if ever there were a community where everybody could bring all their baggage and brokenness with them without neat and tidy happy endings quite yet, if ever there was a group where everyone was loved and no one pretended - we could not make enough room inside the building.

Having faith does not mean never having doubts or questions. It does mean remaining obedient.

The most frequent promise in the Bible is ‘I will be with you.’

Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.

Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.

The goal of prayer is to live all of my life and speak all of my words in the joyful awareness of the presence of God. Prayer becomes real when we grasp the reality and goodness of God's constant presence with 'the real me.' Jesus lived his everyday life in conscious awareness of his Father.

Who you become while you're waiting is as important as what you're waiting for.

Imagine watching all that God might have done with your life if you had let him.

When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.

The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. This means that to be a follower of Jesus, you must renounce comfort as the ultimate value of your life.

Peace doesn't come from finding a lake with no storms. It comes from having Jesus in the boat.

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

Sheldon Vanauken wrote that the strongest argument for Christianity is Christians, when they are drawing life from God. The strongest argument against Christianity? Also Christians, when they become exclusive, self-righteous, and complacent.

The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.

What repeatedly enters your mind and occupies your mind, eventually shapes your mind, and will ultimately express itself in what you do and who you become.

If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.

Wise people build their lives around what is eternal and squeeze in what is temporary. Not the other way around.

There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.

Never try to have more faith - just get to know God better. And because God is faithful, the better you know Him, the more you'll trust Him.

In a contagious world,we learn to keep our distance. If we get too close to those who are suffering, we might get infected by their pain. It may not be convenient or comfortable. But only when you get close enough to catch their hurt will they be close enough to catch your love.

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

You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.

The miracle of Sunday is that a dead man lives. The miracle of Saturday is that the eternal Son of God lies dead.

The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.

A boss who interrupts an employee a lot is called an extrovert, whereas an employee who interrupts a boss too often is called an ex-employee.

In the beginning, we're told, was the word. Every once in a while someone shows up on the planet who is word-obsessed and word-gifted; and the light and darkness get named again. In our day, that someone is Buechner.

The only cure from sin is by maintaining a vision of God.

I'm more concerned about who you're becoming than what you're doing.

Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.

Passion for our work is not usually a subterranean volcano waiting to erupt...It is a muscle that gets strengthened a little each day as we show up - as we do what is expected of us, and then some.

In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.

Your world could grow infinitely bigger if you were only willing to become...appropri ately small.

One of the great illusions of our time is that hurrying will buy us more time.

Spiritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.

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.

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

True love is willing to warn, reprove, confront or admonish when necessary.

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

As long as we have unsolved problems, unfulfilled desires, and a mustard seed of faith, we have all we need for a vibrant prayer life.

God is so immense that if he were 'too visible,' people would give forced compliance without expressing their heart. So God made it possible, in enormous love, for us to live as if he were not there.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.

Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit. And it's constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience.

Ever console or scold people hurt in human relationships that satisfaction comes from God alone? Stop. Adam's fellowship with God was perfect, and God Himself declared Adam needed other humans.

We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.

You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

We are too often double espresso followers of a decaf Sovereign.

Greatness is never achieved through indecision.

Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much.

"Sometimes in churches somebody will discover a particular vein of spirituality and seek to recruit others into it, or assume a superior position because they have found certain techniques - but no one actually wants to become like them."

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.

Jesus gave the world its most influential movement.

The reason our souls hunger so is that the life we could be living so far exceeds our strangest dreams.

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

Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.

Jesus changed how the world thinks about science, medicine, human rights, education & more.

The entire life of Jesus isn't the story of somebody climbing up a ladder; it's a picture of someone coming down-a series of demotions. The problem with spending our lives climbing up the ladder is that we will go right past Jesus, for He's coming down.

You have a "turn" every time you have an opportunity to choose. But most of us only see a tiny fraction of the choices we have.

The Holy Spirit will lead you to be with people as Jesus would be with them if He were in your place.

If we are serious about loving God, we must begin with people, all people. And especially we must learn to love those that the world generally discards.