Top 100 Eugene H. Peterson Quotes
#1. Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.
Eugene H. Peterson
#2. The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings.
Eugene H. Peterson
#3. I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits.
The
Eugene H. Peterson
#4. God's great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be.
Eugene H. Peterson
#5. I am interested in cultivating the fundamentally holy nature of all language, including most definitely the casual, spontaneous , unselfconscious conversational language.
Eugene H. Peterson
#6. Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another equally pleasurable and holy.
Eugene H. Peterson
#7. There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
Eugene H. Peterson
#8. Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.
Eugene H. Peterson
#9. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?
Eugene H. Peterson
#10. O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.
Eugene H. Peterson
#11. The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ... moment.
Eugene H. Peterson
#12. The birth of Jesus is a birth with a message. It takes the entire Bible to bring the complete message, but this birth is the core of it: In Jesus, God is here to give us life, real life.
Eugene H. Peterson
#13. Intentions must mature into commitments if we are to become persons with definition, with character, with substance.
Eugene H. Peterson
#14. Better to meet a grizzly robbed of her cubs than a fool hellbent on folly.
Eugene H. Peterson
#15. The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#16. We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don't see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone.
Eugene H. Peterson
#17. I get asked, 'What do you miss most about being a pastor?' I think it's the intimacy, the incredible gift of intimacy. You go through death with somebody, with their families, and there's an intimacy that comes through that that is just incomparable.
Eugene H. Peterson
#18. But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight.
Eugene H. Peterson
#19. Drugged their despair with Thunderbird and buried their dead visions and dreams in the alley behind the Pastime, ignorant of the God at work beneath their emptiness.
Eugene H. Peterson
#20. Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God's conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn't get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests.
Eugene H. Peterson
#21. The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.
Eugene H. Peterson
#22. I think pastors are the worst listeners. We're so used to speaking, teaching, giving answers. We must learn to be quiet, quit being so verbal, learn to pay attention to what's going on, and listen.
Eugene H. Peterson
#23. Talking to God, I felt, is always better than talking about God; those pious conversations - there's always a touch of self-approval about them. THERESE OF LISIEUX[1] I
Eugene H. Peterson
#24. There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.
Eugene H. Peterson
#25. Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.
Eugene H. Peterson
#26. Priest and wise man and prophet alike felt that their professional well-being was threatened by Jeremiah's singularity. Panicked, they plotted his disgrace. Their "law" and "counsel" and "words" were in danger of being exposed as pious frauds by Jeremiah's honest and passionate life.
Eugene H. Peterson
#27. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
Eugene H. Peterson
#28. What do you think God meant when he said, "Remove your sandals from your feet. You're standing on holy ground"?
Eugene H. Peterson
#29. Listen carefully to what I am saying - and be wary of the shrewd advice that tells you how to get ahead in the world on your own. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity. Stinginess impoverishes. NEVER WITHOUT A STORY
Eugene H. Peterson
#31. The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation.
Eugene H. Peterson
#32. I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books (on church life) that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.
Eugene H. Peterson
#33. Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.
Eugene H. Peterson
#34. All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#35. The Spirit works through community. Somebody will have a stupid, screwy idea. That's okay. The point of having creeds and confessions and traditions is to keep us in touch with the obvious errors.
Eugene H. Peterson
#37. 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.
Eugene H. Peterson
#38. I cannot fail to call the congregation to worship God, to listen to his Word, to offer themselves to God.
Eugene H. Peterson
#39. Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.
Eugene H. Peterson
#42. Thomas Merton wrote, "it is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not 'what he ought to be.' If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we will do away with him altogether."50
Eugene H. Peterson
#43. Go figure out what this Scripture means: 'I'm after mercy, not religion.' I'm here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.
Eugene H. Peterson
#44. It's essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory. Art is the primary way in which this happens. It's the primary way in which we become what we see or hear.
Eugene H. Peterson
#45. But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.
Eugene H. Peterson
#46. I'll call nobodies and make them somebodies; I'll call the unloved and make them beloved. In the place where they yelled out, 'You're nobody!' they're calling you 'God's living children.
Eugene H. Peterson
#47. Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not 'How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?' but 'How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?
Eugene H. Peterson
#48. The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection.
Eugene H. Peterson
#49. I had escaped the snare of certitude that I welcomed so avidly at first and entered, via the name of Jesus, the wide and comprehensive company of Jesus.
Eugene H. Peterson
#51. Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.
Eugene H. Peterson
#52. Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples - when they see the love you have for each other.
Eugene H. Peterson
#54. Any understanding of God that doesn't take into account God's silence is a half truth - in effect, a cruel distortion - and leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by leaders who are quite willing to fill in the biblical blanks with what the Holy Spirit never tells us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#55. At day's end I'm ready for sound sleep, For you, GOD, have put my life back together.
Eugene H. Peterson
#56. Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray.
Eugene H. Peterson
#57. Impersonal things that dominate our time and imagination offer extravagant promises of control and knowledge. But they also squeeze all sense of mystery and wonder and reverence out of our lives.
Eugene H. Peterson
#61. We need alert listeners to give dignity to those stretches in our lives when we are not aware of participating in anything we think might be embraced by the kingdom of God.
Eugene H. Peterson
#62. I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.
Eugene H. Peterson
#63. [Jesus] said "Follow me" and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn't after the best but the worst.
Eugene H. Peterson
#65. When besieged, I'm calm as a baby. When all hell breaks loose, I'm collected and cool.
Eugene H. Peterson
#67. Religion is a very scary thing, because a pastor is in a position of power. And if you use that power badly, you ruin people's lives, and you ruin your own life.
Eugene H. Peterson
#68. But caveat lector: we do not read the Bible in order to reduce our lives to what is convenient to us or manageable by us - we want to get in on the great invisibles of the Trinity, the soaring adorations of the angels, the quirky cragginess of the prophets, and ... Jesus.
Eugene H. Peterson
#69. Congregation is composed of people, who, upon entering a church, leave behind what people on the street name or call them.
Eugene H. Peterson
#70. Mercy, GOD, mercy!": the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ. In
Eugene H. Peterson
#71. Jesus didn't debase the holy into the secular; He infused the secular with the holy.
Eugene H. Peterson
#72. An interest in souls divorced from an interest in Scripture leaves us without a text that shapes these souls. In the same way, an interest in Scripture divorced from an interest in souls leaves us without any material for the text to work on.
Eugene H. Peterson
#73. The so-called spirituality that was handed to me by those who put me to the task of pastoral work was not adequate. I do not find the emaciated, exhausted spirituality of institutional careerism adequate. I do not find the veneered, cosmetic spirituality of personal charisma adequate.
Eugene H. Peterson
#74. Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble ... [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality ... a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.
Eugene H. Peterson
#75. The North American church at present is conspicuous for replacing the Jesus way with the American way.
Eugene H. Peterson
#76. Apart from childhood and crisis, prayers have a way of being abstracted from the homely and distinctive details that are part and parcel of our ordinary and daily life.
Eugene H. Peterson
#77. Skilled living gets its start in the Fear-of-GOD, insight into life from knowing a Holy God.
Eugene H. Peterson
#78. Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own. Romans 4:3
Eugene H. Peterson
#79. The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, 'Let us worship God.' If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor.
Eugene H. Peterson
#80. I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.
Eugene H. Peterson
#82. The Bible, all of it, is livable; it is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole.
Eugene H. Peterson
#83. Never walk away from someone who deserves help; your hand is God's hand for that person.
Eugene H. Peterson
#84. Prayer is a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul.
Eugene H. Peterson
#85. The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We're called to have people follow Jesus. We're called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.
Eugene H. Peterson
#86. We've all met a certain type of spiritual person. She's a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She's not a selfish person. But she's always at the center of everything she's doing.
Eugene H. Peterson
#87. And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily
open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.
Eugene H. Peterson
#88. I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.
Eugene H. Peterson
#89. Real life, the real world, is a vast theater of salvation, directed by our wise and totally involved God.
Eugene H. Peterson
#90. Neither explaining suffering nor offering a program for the elimination of suffering, Lamentations keeps company with the extensive biblical witness that gives dignity to suffering by insisting that God enters our suffering and is companion to our suffering.
Eugene H. Peterson
#91. The power that the world acknowledges comes out of the mouth of a gun; the power that the person of faith respects comes from the mouth of Christ.
Eugene H. Peterson
#93. There is a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed.
Eugene H. Peterson
#94. No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most "entire" context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God's revelation.
Eugene H. Peterson
#95. I want to develop discernments that say an unapologetic "no" to ways that violate the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Eugene H. Peterson
#96. Without stories we end up with stereotypes
a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR.
Eugene H. Peterson
#97. When God wanted to guarantee his promises, he gave his word, a rock-solid guarantee - God can't break his word. And because his word cannot change, the promise is likewise unchangeable.
Eugene H. Peterson
#98. It's the set of the sail, and not the gale that determines the way they go.
Eugene H. Peterson
#99. The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind. Emily Dickinson
Eugene H. Peterson
#100. Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?
Eugene H. Peterson
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