Top 55 John Ortberg Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The question isn’t if someone will sign up for spiritual formation; it’s just who and what our spirits will be formed by.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

God has entrusted us with his most precious treasure – people. He asks us to shepherd and mold them into strong disciples, with brave faith and good character.

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.

Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church.

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.

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

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

The most important criterion is this: hire someone whose character and humility and attitude you would like to have reproduced in your church and in yourself.

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.

A simple way to address hidden curriculum issues is to spend time talking with staff and key leaders about their spiritual lives.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Tithing is a bad ceiling but an excellent floor.

‘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.

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

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.

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.

For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It’s the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.

Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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