Quotes from John Ortberg

To love someone is to desire and work toward their becoming the best version of themselves. The one person in all the universe who can do this perfectly for you is God.

God is so immense that if he were 'too visible,' people would give forced compliance without expressing their heart. So God made it possible, in enormous love, for us to live as if he were not there.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.

Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.

You have a "turn" every time you have an opportunity to choose. But most of us only see a tiny fraction of the choices we have.

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.

Actually, my character needs to be questioned. On a regular basis. By people who know and love me.

The most important criterion is this: hire someone whose character and humility and attitude you would like to have reproduced in your church and in yourself.

In the context of worship, amusement is a waste of time and a waste of life, and therefore a form of sin.

The soul is both the most fragile and most resilient thing about you; a healthy soul is what holds you together when your world falls apart. Since you will carry your soul into eternity, it's worth checking up on it at least as often as your teeth.

When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.

The test of love is that it gives even when there is no expectation of a return.

Grace is the offer of God's ceaseless presence and irrational love that cannot be stopped.

Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.

Never try to have more faith - just get to know God better. And because God is faithful, the better you know Him, the more you'll trust Him.

True love is willing to warn, reprove, confront or admonish when necessary.

The hurried can become unhurried. But it will not happen by trying alone, nor will it happen instantly. You will have to enter a life of training.

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.

One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.

I need an inspiration that is grounded in reality while thoroughly transcendent.

In community, we discover who we really are and how much transformation we still require. This is why I am irrevocably committed to small groups. Through them, we can accomplish our God-entrusted work to transform human beings.

God has decided, for his own good reasons, that people are not transformed outside of community.

My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously.