Quotes by John Ortberg

Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.

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.

No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith. Elie Wiesel

Skepticism can keep us from blessing, can keep us trapped in two minds.

A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today.

Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand.

We must minister out of weakness. The reason we help others is not because we are strong and they need us; it is because if we dont help them, we will end up a hopeless relic.

The greatest moment of your life is now. Not because its pleasant or happy or easy, but because this moment is the only moment youve got. Every past moment is irretrievably gone. Its never coming back. If you live there, you lose your life. And the future is always out there somewhere. You can spend an eternity waiting for tomorrow, or worrying about tomorrow. If you live there, you likewise will lose your life. This moment is Gods irreplaceable gift to you.

We are not the passive victim of others opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.

Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how Im doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them.

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.

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When its done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.

Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.

At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus death and resurrection.

This much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important in the spiritual formation of human beings.

Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.