Quotes from John Ortberg

Acceptance is an act of the heart. To accept someone is to affirm to them that you think it's a very good thing they are alive.

Habits eat good intentions for breakfast.

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.

True repentance never leads to despair. Its leads home. It leads to grace.

The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.

The church is in the hope business.

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

We'd like to be humble...but what if no one notices?

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

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.

Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'

Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.

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.

Prayer allows us to wait without worry.

Authority can be faked. That's why impersonating a police officer is a crime. Sometimes the outward appearances of authority can be deceiving.

A simple way to address hidden curriculum issues is to spend time talking with staff and key leaders about their spiritual lives.

I'm more concerned about who you're becoming than what you're doing.

The ministry of bearing with one another is learning to hear God speak through difficult people.

The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.

Preaching a series allows you to go into greater depth in the text, and spending several weeks on one theme allows the teaching to be absorbed more thoroughly.

The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing - but it's now also our deepest fear.

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.

When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.