Quotes from Eugene Peterson

Jesus] said "Follow me" and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn't after the best but the worst.

Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.

American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.

Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions, and gifts, our human needs and eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for.

The pastoral vocation in America is embarrassingly banal. It is banal because it is pursued under the canons of job efficiency and career management. It is banal because it is reduced to the dimensions of a job description. It is banal because it is an idol – a call from God exchanged for an offer by the devil for work that can be measured and manipulated at the convenience of the worker. Holiness is not banal. Holiness is blazing…

Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own. Romans 4:3

It is the very nature of language to form rather than inform. When language is personal, which it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative - we don't know more, we become more. Our best users of language, poets and lovers and children and saints, use words to make - make intimacies, make character, make beauty, make goodness, make truth.

Não nos é apenas dito que Jesus é o Filho de Deus; não apenas nos tornamos beneficiários da sua redenção; somos convidados a morrer a sua morte e a viver a Sua Vida com a liberdade e a dignidade de participantes. E aqui está o aspecto mais maravilhoso: nós entramos na história sem nos tornarmos o centro da história.

The Bible is not a textbook. Nor is it a manual to be studied, mastered, and mechanically applied. Instead, I believe we should listen to the Word of God and reflect upon it like poetry till it infiltrates the soul.

In Revelation 10, John] eats the book—not just reads it—he got it into his nerve endings, his reflexes, his imagination. The book he ate was the Holy Scripture. Assimilated into his worship and prayer, his imagining and writing, the book he ate was metabolized into the book he wrote.

When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.

All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.

When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not 'How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?' but 'How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?

The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment.

The Latin words humus , soil/earth, and homo , human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.

It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.

Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.