John Ortberg Quotes

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In the context of worship, amusement is a waste of time and a waste of life, and therefore a form of sin.

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

Evil exists. Evil is real. One of the hallmarks of evil is that it seeks to convince its victims that it exists 'out there.'

I'm not sure ministry can ever have the urgency it requires if it is not aware of evil, both externally and internally.

There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God's counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator.

Preaching a series allows you to go into greater depth in the text, and spending several weeks on one theme allows the teaching to be absorbed more thoroughly.

When people feel they're getting to speak into what's being preached, there is high built-in motivation to participate.

There are usually multiple messages that could be preached from the same text.

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.

People with the strongest and healthiest sense of calling are not obsessed with their calling. They are preoccupied with the Caller.

To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.

I need an inspiration that is grounded in reality while thoroughly transcendent.

The only true and lasting inspiration for life is genuine love for God, and submitted gratitude that I get to be a part of the redemptive quest.

Tithing is considerably less popular than words like generosity or sharing.

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 have always heard that you need to give yourself a long time to unplug when you do a sabbatical. I unplugged so fast I was a little concerned that I was losing brain capacity.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.

A bad sermon is like a car wreck - everyone slows down to see what happened.

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

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.

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.

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.

Over time, grit is what separates fruitful lives from aimlessness.

I don't have a problem with delegation. I love to delegate. I am either lazy enough, or busy enough, or trusting enough, or congenial enough, that the notion leaving tasks in someone else's lap doesn't just sound wise to me, it sounds attractive.

The church is in the hope business.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

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

The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing - but it's now also our deepest fear.

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

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.

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.

A healthy soul is whole and integrated. It is connected to God. A person with a healthy soul is at peace with God, with himself, and with other people.

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

'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.

There are no clear boundary lines between what is physiological, what is psychological, and what is spiritual. Those are language domains that make sense and have integrity but overlap significantly.

What influences our behavior, and what our level of responsibility is, are very complex issues. And anytime we try to make this simplistic, we don't serve people well.

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

I am struck by how quickly I am prone to judgmentalism.

Actually, my character needs to be questioned. On a regular basis. By people who know and love me.

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

I wrote 'Soul Keeping' because we are taught more about how to care for our cars than how to steward our souls. But you cannot have an impactful life with an impoverished soul.

When the soul is understood and attended to, we can be liberated from hurry, preoccupation, unsatisfied desires, and chronic discontent.

Gratitude is what we radiate when we experience grace, and the soul was made to run on grace the way a 747 runs on rocket fuel.

The soul is both the most fragile and most resilient thing about you; a healthy soul is what holds you together when your world falls apart. Since you will carry your soul into eternity, it's worth checking up on it at least as often as your teeth.

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.

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

I am a political junkie. During a presidential campaign, I will often buy a couple of newspapers a day just to keep up.

It strikes me that presidential campaigns can often bring out the worst as well as the best in us.

Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'

We all want to feel spiritually vigorous, and we hurt when we don't. This pain is intensified for people who lead church ministries.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin.

The irony is that 'looking down on everybody else' is a violation of the law of love, which, according to Jesus, is the absolute essence of righteousness.

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.

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

'Amusement' is appealing because we don't have to think; it spares us the fear and anxiety that might otherwise prey on our thoughts.

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