John Ortberg Quotes - Page 3

There is a world of difference between being friendly to someone because they're useful to you and being someone's friend.

It may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me, but it is a wonderful thing that God thinks I am worth dying for.

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

For many 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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness. This is most visible in extraordinary lives, in saints and martyrs. But it is no less true for ordinary people like us.

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.

Habits eat good intentions for breakfast.

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

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

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.

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

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

The goal is not for us to get through the Scriptures. The goal is to get the Scriptures through us.

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.

We must learn to cast off our anxieties because we have so many of them. The world destroys spiritual life by generating constant anxiety. Jesus said that the life of the gospel is choked out by the cares of this world. We know this to be true yet we are more chained and tethered to the world than ever before in the human race.

Never worry alone. When anxiety grabs my mind, it is self-perpetuating. Worrisome thoughts reproduce faster than rabbits, so one of the most powerful ways to stop the spiral of worry is simply to disclose my worry to a friend... The simple act of reassurance from another human being [becomes] a tool of the Spirit to cast out fear -- because peace and fear are both contagious.

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.

Scratch the surface of any cynic, and you will find a wounded idealist underneath. Because of previous pain or disappointment, cynics make their conclusions about life before the questions have even been asked. This means that beyond just seeing what is wrong with the world, cynics lack the courage to do something about it. The dynamic beneath cynicism is a fear of accepting responsibility.

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