Top 260 Quotes & Sayings by John Ortberg - Page 2

My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously.

Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.

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

Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.

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.

In community, we discover who we really are and how much transformation we still require. This is why I am irrevocably committed to small groups. Through them, we can accomplish our God-entrusted work to transform human beings.

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.

I hate how spiritual formation gets positioned as an optional pursuit for a small special interest group within the church.

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.

Better to be a loving person without knowing how you got there, than an expert no one can stand to be around.

I have given up the idea that there is an opposition-free church out there. But I have gained something else - an appreciation for the gift of opposition. When it comes, I learn something about my motives. When it comes, I get to test my courage.

The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.

I know that those of us who go into church work are to regard ourselves as servants, are to offer our lives as a gift.

Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.

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

Tithing is a bad ceiling but an excellent floor.

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

No one wants pain. Not even long-time, mature Christians who want to grow. We will always find ways to avoid pain. Pain itself is a bad thing.

Some leaders are not intimidated by opposition; they actually thrive on it. It wakes them up. It energizes them. It calls them to battle. It causes them to mobilize their thoughts and energy.

Far more books get written about how to get more people in your church than how to get the people already in your church to have more humility and sincere love.

As a preacher who is fully human, and clearly not divine, I can't speak as Jesus did. But I do seek to speak truth that carries weight and authority. All of us who preach the gospel aspire to speak under the authority of Jesus.

We do not need answers or formulas to minister in crisis.

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

My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two.

Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.

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

Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.

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

Authentic spiritual authority is what puts you in touch with reality.

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

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

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.

When someone is in crisis, don't start by teaching, leveraging, or explaining. Just be with.

Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.

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.

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

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

Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

Skill at helping people grow spiritually, like skill at playing chess, depends on understanding and valuing differences.

Jesus viewed his own destiny - to be glorified in and through death - as an expression of a kind of cosmic principle: the pathway to life runs through death.

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

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

This much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important in the spiritual formation of human beings.

The hurried can become unhurried. But it will not happen by trying alone, nor will it happen instantly. You will have to enter a life of training.

Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams.

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.

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.

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.

As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this.

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 cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible - they just don't actually read the Bible.

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

God has decided, for his own good reasons, that people are not transformed outside of community.

We call an obsession with having someone's approval 'co-dependency;' the Bible's word for it is idolatry. A country can be an idol. A family can be an idol.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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