Quotes from John Ortberg

Skill at helping people grow spiritually, like skill at playing chess, depends on understanding and valuing differences.

Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.

Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin.

'Who Is This Man?' is about the impact of Jesus on human history. Most people - including most Christians - simply have no idea of the extent to which we live in a Jesus-impacted world.

Jesus had a universal concern for those who suffered that transcended the rules of the ancient world.

Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.

My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two.

We call an obsession with having someone's approval 'co-dependency;' the Bible's word for it is idolatry. A country can be an idol. A family can be an idol.

I have always heard that you need to give yourself a long time to unplug when you do a sabbatical. I unplugged so fast I was a little concerned that I was losing brain capacity.

When the soul is understood and attended to, we can be liberated from hurry, preoccupation, unsatisfied desires, and chronic discontent.

Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.

Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

Prudence is not the same thing as caution. Caution is a helpful strategy when you're crossing a minefield; it's a disaster when you're in a gold rush.

It strikes me that presidential campaigns can often bring out the worst as well as the best in us.

People with the strongest and healthiest sense of calling are not obsessed with their calling. They are preoccupied with the Caller.

I am struck by how quickly I am prone to judgmentalism.

Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.

Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit.

Sometimes in churches somebody will discover a particular vein of spirituality and seek to recruit others into it, or assume a superior position because they have found certain techniques - but no one actually wants to become like them.

For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

Passion for our work is not usually a subterranean volcano waiting to erupt...It is a muscle that gets strengthened a little each day as we show up - as we do what is expected of us, and then some.

The only true and lasting inspiration for life is genuine love for God, and submitted gratitude that I get to be a part of the redemptive quest.

A bad sermon is like a car wreck - everyone slows down to see what happened.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.