Quotes from John Ortberg Jr.

The issue when it comes to meditation is what, not if. The mind observes the impulse to meditate the way the body observes the law of gravity. Scripture has a lot to say about meditating wisely. The psalmist talks about the fruitful person as one whose "delight is in the law of the

People are God's preferred messengers, God's Plan A, because they alone carry his image.

Not knowing doesn't mean you're condemned to anxiety; rather, not knowing calls for trust, and trust is crucial to good performance. Uncertainty is essential to the game.

The first stage of forgiveness is the decision not to try to inflict a reciprocal amount of pain on everyone who has caused hurt. When I forgive you, I give up the right to hurt you back.

Gratitude is not something we give to God because he wants to make sure we know how much trouble he went to over us. Gratitude is the gift God gives us that enables us to be blessed by all his other gifts, the way our taste buds enable us to enjoy the gift of food. Without gratitude, our lives degenerate into envy, dissatisfaction, and complaints, taking what we have for granted and always wanting more.

Welcome to the human race. It is somehow essential to human life as God has ordained it that we can know the final score of yesterday but not tomorrow. It doesn't mean we're condemned to anxiety. It does mean this: If you're looking for certainty, you've chosen the wrong species. You can walk by faith, but not by sight; not down here.

God wants to be known, but not in a way that overwhelms us, that takes away the possibility of love freely chosen. "God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away," said Meister Eckhart.

In the whole divine journey, no one else can walk your pathway. In the whole cosmic choir, no one else can sing your song.

Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we're not, or pretending to be what we're not, and accepting our "appropriate smallness.

The entire sum of Creation, each private and individual act of nature, is God waving hello.

Then MacDonald writes this insightful line: "that the same God who is in us, . . . also is all about us—inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us.

God's purpose in guidance is not to get us to perform the right actions. His purpose is to help us become the right kind of people.

Superstition seeks to use the supernatural for my purposes; faith seeks to surrender to God's purposes. Faith teaches us that there is a Person behind the universe, and that Person responds to communication just as all persons do. Prayer is the primary way we communicate with God, and that's why prayer is so closely associated with seeking and discerning open doors.

God's great, holy joke about the messiah complex is this: Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from it—except one. And he was the Messiah.

Jesus has made God's presence scandalously available to anyone who wants it.

C. S. Lewis was getting at this idea when he wrote, If your thoughts and passions were directly present to me, like my own, without any mark of externality or otherness, how should I distinguish them from mine?…You may reply, as a Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in fact, affect my consciousness in this direct way without signs of "externality." Yes: and the result is that most people remain ignorant of the existence of both.

God is determined that you should be in every respect his friend, his companion, his dwelling place.

God is not interested in your "spiritual life." God is just interested in your life.

The question is, can a human being hold on to God in the face of suffering? After all, suffering is the test of love.

It only makes sense to ask God for guidance in the context of a life committed to "seeking first the kingdom.

The anonymous1 author wrote, "Wherefore play the game of life warily, for your opponent is full of subtlety, and take abundant thought over your moves, for the stake is your soul.

The problem with people, according to Jesus, is not that we are too happy for God's taste, but that we are not happy enough.

And it struck me, in that year, how deeply both faith and doubt are part of my life. We often think of them as opposites. Many books argue for one or the other. But while in some respects they are enemies, in other ways they are surprisingly alike: both are concerned with ultimate issues; both pop up unasked for at unexpected moments; both are necessary. I

No one can see God's face" (see Exodus 33:20). What do they mean when they say that no one can see God's face? They mean that we cannot see God as he is. We are not capable of this. We inevitably project our own fallenness onto God.