Quotes from John Ortberg Jr.

Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

To accept people is to be for them. It is to recognize that it is a very good thing that these people are alive, and to long for the best for them. It does not, of course, mean to approve of everything they do. It means to continue to want what is best for their souls no matter what they do.

In some ways, "waiting on the Lord" is the hardest part of trusting. It is not the same as "waiting around." It is putting yourself with utter vulnerability in his hands.

Joy is God's basic character. Joy is his eternal destiny. God is the happiest being in the universe.

Prayer, perhaps more than any other activity, is the concrete expression of the fact that we are invited into a relationship with God.

When you're in your twenties, someone once wrote, you live to please other people. When you're in your thirties, you get tired of trying to please others, so you get miffed with them for making you worry about it. When you're in your forties, you realize nobody was thinking about you anyway.

When God calls people to do something, their initial response is almost always fear. If there is a challenge in front of you, a course of action that could cause you to grow and that would be helpful to people around you, but you find yourself scared about it, there's a real good chance that God is in that challenge.

Somebody once said that the biggest difference between you and God is that God doesn't think he's you. In pain, we get very clear about not being God.

There is a very important theological distinction between being a prophet and being a jerk. What burns deeply in the heart of a true prophet is not just anger but love.

I can buy baseball cards to view an entire career on the back of a little square of cardboard. But nobody sells major league father cards with key statistics on the back ("Had a great season in 2005: set career highs in unforced expressions of affection and averaged 87 minutes of quality time per day.")

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible.

eschatological thinking.

Author Evelyn Waugh was a Catholic who fell pretty woefully short of his faith's standards. Somebody asked Waugh one time, "How can you call yourself a Catholic and be so badly behaved, so mean, such a jerk, so spiteful?" Waugh responded, "Just imagine me if I were not a Catholic." And

You want to see how devoted we are to comfort? Walk into the average American home and hide the remote control, and watch what happens. Life without the remote control is an unbearable burden for the average American family. Then someone invented a TV with a beeper so that when you clap your hands, the remote control will beep until you find it.

The one thing needed is the decision to live so continually in Jesus' presence as to be always covered with the dust of the rabbi. Martha got

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least. DOROTHY DAY You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. ANNE LAMOTT

People nowadays take time far more seriously than eternity. – Thomas Kelly

Researchers have found there is simply no correlation between hurry or Type-A behavior and productivity.

Whatever repeatedly enters the mind occupies the mind, eventually shapes the mind, and will ultimately express itself in what you do and who you become.

It is not bad to pray in a time of crisis. One of God's most amazing attributes is that he is humble enough to accept people when they turn to him in sheer desperation, even when they have been ignoring him for years.

I did, however, remember a line from a book by Dallas Willard that I had read just recently: "At the beginning of each morning I commit my day to the Lord's care. . . . I have already placed God in charge. I no longer have to manage the weather, airplanes, and other people.

Winston Churchill lived into his nineties and said the only exercise he ever got was serving as a pallbearer for his friends who died while they were exercising.

The Bible's teaching on prayer leads overwhelmingly to one conclusion: Prayer changes things.

Not knowing doesn't mandate anxiety; rather, it instills confidence, and confidence is crucial to good performance.