John Ortberg Quotes
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One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.
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God has decided, for his own good reasons, that people are not transformed outside of community.
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The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.
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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.
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Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them.
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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.
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I am a political junkie. During a presidential campaign, I will often buy a couple of newspapers a day just to keep up.
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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.
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I am struck by how quickly I am prone to judgmentalism.
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When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.
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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.
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Evil exists. Evil is real. One of the hallmarks of evil is that it seeks to convince its victims that it exists 'out there.'
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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.
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Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In my love-challenged condition, seeing a difficulty for someone else can leave me feeling a little more smug or superior-by-comparison.
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Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.
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At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection.
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To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.
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Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.
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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.