Quotes from Eugene H. Peterson

Abruptly Jesus broke into prayer: "Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. You've concealed your ways from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out clearly to ordinary people. Yes, Father, that's the way you like to work.

Why? Because the Master won't ever walk out and fail to return. If he works severely, he also works tenderly. His stockpiles of loyal love are immense. He takes no pleasure in making life hard, in throwing roadblocks in the way: 34-36 Stomping down hard on luckless prisoners, Refusing justice to victims in the court of High God, Tampering with evidence— the Master does not approve of such things.

A place of worship is a place for listening—listening to God speak. But it is also a place for answering, responding to what is spoken. God's words initiate a conversation. We come together as a congregation in worship to speak "through prayer and praise" with the God who speaks with us.

The message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, and the life changes what we presently are. He is not a means by which we solve problems. He is not a means to avoid problems. He creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.

Churches are not franchises to be reproduced as exactly as possible wherever and whenever—in Rome and Moscow and London and Baltimore—the only thing changed being the translation of the menu.

what seems more important are the private independent acts that become more necessary every day:

Everyone wants to be happy, to be blessed. Too many people are willfully refusing to pay attention to the One who wills our happiness and ignorantly supposing that the Christian way is a harder way to get what they want than doing it on their own. They are wrong. God's ways and God's presence are where we experience the happiness that lasts.

The Bible isn't interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him: Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will we always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle? But then

I enter a room now not wondering what I am going to do or say, but what the risen Christ has already done, already said. I come in on a story that is in progress, something that is resurrection, already going on. Sometimes I can clarify a word, sharpen a feeling, help recover an essential piece of memory, but always dealing with what the risen Christ has already set in motion, already brought into being.

religion to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; a religion made of moments of craziness but that is remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and the routines of every day.

Ziklag: for me this became the premier biblical site for realizing that when we get serious about the Christian life, we eventually end up in a place and among people decidedly uncongenial to what we expected. At least uncongenial to what I expected. That place and people is often called a church. It is hard to get over the disappointment that God, having made an exception in my case, didn't seem to call nice, accomplished, courteous, alert people to worship.

It was included in the Songs of Ascents to develop just those aspects of life under God and in Christ which my sometime friend Kelly lacked and which we all need.

And my work is not to fix people. It is to lead people in the worship of God and to lead them in living a holy

Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit.

Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

Psalm 132 cultivates a hope that gives wings to obedience, a hope that is consistent with the reality of what God has done in the past but is not

Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim.

I don't want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of creation right now, any time now. Pay attention.

What we require is obedience—the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when an accurate memory of God's ways is combined with a lively hope in his promises.

Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church

the fact that we are a family of faith does not mean we are one big happy family. The people we encounter as brothers and sisters in faith are not always nice people. They do not stop being sinners the moment they begin believing in Christ.

Evil is always temporary. "The worst does not last."2 Nothing counter to God's justice has any eternity to it.

Under the image of the Trinity we discover that we do not know God by defining him but by being loved by him and loving in return.

When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is turn it into an instrument for controlling others, either putting or keeping them "in their place." The history of such religious manipulation and coercion is long and tedious. It is little wonder that people who have only known religion on such terms experience release or escape from it as freedom. The problem is that the freedom turns out to be short-lived.