John Ortberg > Quotes

“If you can't do great things, Mother Teresa used to say, do little things with great love. If you can't do them with great love, do them with a little love. If you can't do them with a little love, do them anyway.
Love grows when people serve.”
― John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God's Best Version of You

“Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.”
― John Ortberg, When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box

“God is never a God of discouragement. When you have a discouraging spirit or train of thought in your mind, you can be sure it is not from God. He sometimes brings pain to his children-conviction over sin, or repentance over fallenness, or challenges that scare us, or visions of his holiness that overwhelm us. But God never brings discouragement.”
― John Ortberg

“If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.”
― John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason

“Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand.”
― John Ortberg, Who Is This Man?: The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus

“Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.”
― John Ortberg

“Many Christians expend so much energy and worry trying not to sin. The goal is not to try to sin less. In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him. To be with him. “Abide in me.” Just relax and learn to enjoy his presence. Every day is a collection of moments, 86,400 seconds in a day. How many of them can you live with God? Start where you are and grow from there. God wants to be with you every moment.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“I need to worship because without it I can forget that I have a Big God beside me and live in fear. I need to worship because without it I can forget his calling and begin to live in a spirit of self-preoccupation. I need to worship because without it I lose a sense of wonder and gratitude and plod through life with blinders on. I need worship because my natural tendency is toward self-reliance and stubborn independence.”
― John Ortberg

“For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.”
― John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason

“The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.”
― John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason

“A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That’s why the psalmist says to God, “Because your love is better than life . . . my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.” Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible — the soul craves because it is meant for God. “My soul, find rest in God.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.”
― John Ortberg, The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People

“Scratch the surface of any cynic, and you will find a wounded idealist underneath. Because of previous pain or disappointment, cynics make their conclusions about life before the questions have even been asked. This means that beyond just seeing what is wrong with the world, cynics lack the courage to do something about it. The dynamic beneath cynicism is a fear of accepting responsibility.”
― John Ortberg, Faith and Doubt

“There is something you can't fix, can't heal, or can't escape, and all you can do it trust God. Finding ultimate refuge in God means you become so immersed in his presence, so convinced of his goodness, so devoted to his lordship that you find even the cave is a perfectly safe place to be because he is there with you.”
― John Ortberg

“The test of love is that it gives even when there is no expectation of a return.”
― John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason

“The soul was not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle: • Things seem to bother you more than they should. Your spouse’s gum-chewing suddenly reveals to you a massive character flaw. • It’s hard to make up your mind about even a simple decision. • Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave are harder to resist than they otherwise would be. • You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that leave you with high long-term costs. Israel ended up worshiping a golden calf simply because they grew tired of having to wait on Moses and God. • Your judgment is suffering. • You have less courage. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” is a quote so ubiquitious that it has been attributed to General Patton and Vince Lombardi and Shakespeare. The same disciples who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“The best place to start doing life with God is in small moments.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“Every day you and I walk through God's shop. Every day we brush up against objects of incalculable worth to Him. People. Every one of them carries a price tag, if only we could see it.”
― John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason

“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.”
― John Ortberg

“You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“If we are serious about loving God, we must begin with people, all people. And especially we must learn to love those that the world generally discards.”
― John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason

“I was operating on the unspoken assumption that my inner world would be filled with life, peace, and joy once my external world was perfect.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy — well-ordered — when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“The Bible does not say you are God’s appliance; it says you are his masterpiece. Appliances get mass-produced.”
― John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God's Best Version of You