Quotes by John Ortberg

If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.

When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.

Every day you and I walk through Gods 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.

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.

So it goes for those of us who live in a cul-de-sac, where babies are brought home from the hospital and watched over, where hearts stop and feet slip, where we wonder if there is a hidden road that leads somewhere.We believe and we doubt. Believing and doubting share the same inevitability, but they are not equal. They cannot lay the same claim on our allegiance. They do not share the same power.If there are places beyond the cul-de-sac, doubt cannot take us there.

David is called a man after Gods heart. This can be a little confusing when you get into his story, because hes guilty of adultery and murder and cover-up. Hes a train wreck as a husband, and hes worse as a dad. But his heart belongs to God. His whole life is immersed in the presence and story of God. What lights him up is to serve God and love God, and when he mess up—and he does—he repents and wants to get right with God again.

Even you can’t tell yourself how to change, because you didn’t create you. 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. He has no other agenda. He has no unmet needs he is hoping you can help him with. And he knows what the best version of you looks like. He delighted in the idea of it, and he is already working on it. The apostle Paul said, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” Which means God is at work every moment to help you become his best version of you.

The ministry of bearing with one another is more than simply tolerating difficult people. It is also learning to hear God speak through them.

God says, I will measure my people by the one standard that counts. It’s very simple. Are people hungry? Feed them. Are people sick? Help them. Are people oppressed? Stick up for them. Are the widows lonely? Visit them. Are there uneducated children? Teach them. Are people rejected because of the color of their skin? Befriend them.The widow of Zarephath fed Elijah even though she had but a handful of flour and a little oil in a jug. (1 Kings 17:7–24) In this story she is recklessly generous. She gives the last of what she has to Elijah.We should all pause occasionally to ask if we are living with that kind of generous spirit. Maybe we have an abundance of oil and flour in our jars. Maybe we only have a little. Maybe we have a huge flour jar, or perhaps a very small one. No matter what we have, we can still learn to live with a generous spirit.

We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.

True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness.

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.

Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.

If I think God’s aim is to produce rule-followers, spiritual growth will always be an obligation rather than a desire of my heart.

We complicate our faith and lives in many ways, but at the core, our purpose is simple: We are called to love.

Christianity is like a nail, he (Yemelian Yaroslavsky). The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.

The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.

...sin is often the attempt to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way.

...all of us are somewhere on a journey to God, and the gap between least and most advanced is infinitely smaller than the gap between the most advanced and God himself.

Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what were not, or pretending to be what were not, and accepting our appropriate smallness.