Top 100 Eugene Peterson Quotes
#1. Eugene Peterson once wrote that before we can love our enemies, we have to pray our hatred. In these psalms - which are more frequent than the psalms of orientation - Israel vented and boiled over at God, apparently believing he was secure enough to be able to take it.
John Ortberg
#2. Eugene Peterson's language makes the Bible exciting and strong, sweet, sharp, persuasive, painful, personal, contemporary, kind, and dramatic - and available to every reader of this age.
Walter Wangerin
#3. We believe that this human life is a great gift, that every part of it is designed by God and therefore means something, that every part of it is blessed by God and therefore to be enjoyed, that every part is accompanied by God and therefore workable.
Eugene H. Peterson
#4. We learn the language of prayer by immersing ourselves in the language that God uses to reveal Himself to us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I am interested in cultivating the fundamentally holy nature of all language, including most definitely the casual, spontaneous , unselfconscious conversational language.
Eugene H. Peterson
#10. Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another equally pleasurable and holy.
Eugene H. Peterson
#11. 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
#12. As long as matters are really hopeful," wrote Chesterton, "hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.
Eugene H. Peterson
#13. Summing up: Be agreeable, be sympathetic, be loving, be compassionate, be humble. That goes for all of you, no exceptions. No retaliation. No sharp-tongued sarcasm. Instead, bless - that's your job, to bless.
Eugene H. Peterson
#14. Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.
Eugene H. Peterson
#15. People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.
Eugene H. Peterson
#16. 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
#17. Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions, and gifts, our human needs and eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for.
Eugene H. Peterson
#18. 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
#19. The bawling of babies, always in a way
Inappropriate - why should the love and innocent
Greet existence with wails? - is proof that not all
Is well. Dreams and deliveries never quite mesh.
Eugene H. Peterson
#20. When you grab all you can get, that's what happens: the more you get, the less you are.
Eugene H. Peterson
#21. When we read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music, than we can possibly absorb the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday's newspaper.'12
Eugene H. Peterson
#22. I don't find pastors and professors, for the most part, very interested in matters of formation in holiness. They have higher profile things to tend to.
Eugene H. Peterson
#23. The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless.
Eugene H. Peterson
#24. 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.
Eugene H. Peterson
#25. We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#26. The Bible is not a textbook. Nor is it a manual to be studied, mastered, and mechanically applied. Instead, I believe we should listen to the Word of God and reflect upon it like poetry till it infiltrates the soul.
Eugene H. Peterson
#27. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself.
Eugene H. Peterson
#28. 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
#29. The Holy Spirit's instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Eugene H. Peterson
#30. I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You'll never - I promise - regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our Father lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we're at our worst. Our Father is kind; you be kind.
Eugene H. Peterson
#31. Be agreeable, be sympathetic, be loving, be compassionate, be humble. That goes for all of you, no exceptions. No retaliation. No sharp-tongued sarcasm. Instead, bless - that's your job, to bless. You'll be a blessing and also get a blessing.
Eugene H. Peterson
#32. The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account.
Eugene H. Peterson
#33. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
Eugene H. Peterson
#34. It pays to take life seriously; things work out when you trust in GOD.
Eugene H. Peterson
#35. 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
#36. The chosen ones of God were those who let God pursue his interest in them, and as a result received his stamp of legitimacy.
Eugene H. Peterson
#37. The unholy alliance of religion and politics collaborated in finding Jesus guilty.
Eugene H. Peterson
#38. But you never got hungry for me. You continued to ignore me." GOD'S Decree. 7-8
Eugene H. Peterson
#39. Intentions must mature into commitments if we are to become persons with definition, with character, with substance.
Eugene H. Peterson
#40. Mercy to the needy is a loan to Got), and Got) pays back those loans in full.
Eugene H. Peterson
#41. They'll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They'll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean.
Eugene H. Peterson
#42. Every time you criticize someone, you condemn yourself. It takes one to know one. Judgmental criticism of others is a well-known way of escaping detection in your own crimes and misdemeanors.
Eugene H. Peterson
#43. Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All "word of God" vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.
Eugene H. Peterson
#44. Better to meet a grizzly robbed of her cubs than a fool hellbent on folly.
Eugene H. Peterson
#45. 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
#46. And so we gain hope - not from the darkness of our suffering, not from pat answers in books, but from the God who sees our suffering and shares our pain.
Eugene H. Peterson
#47. No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.
Eugene H. Peterson
#48. I keep praying that this faith we hold in common keeps showing up in the good things we do, and that people recognize Christ in all of it.
Eugene H. Peterson
#49. Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.
Eugene H. Peterson
#51. 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
#52. My uncle Ernie didn't believe in God.
At least that's what he said. But he always
Went to church on Christmas. Which I thought
Seriously compromised his atheism.
Eugene H. Peterson
#53. 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
#54. Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith.
Eugene H. Peterson
#55. But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight.
Eugene H. Peterson
#56. One of the reasons that Christians read Scripture repeatedly and carefully is to find out just how God works in Jesus Christ so that we can work in the name of Jesus Christ.
Eugene H. Peterson
#57. Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. - 2 Corinthians 4:16
Eugene H. Peterson
#58. One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.
Eugene H. Peterson
#59. For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren't smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it?
Eugene H. Peterson
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Words kill, words give life; they're either poison or fruit-you choose.
Eugene H. Peterson
#63. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.
Eugene H. Peterson
#64. 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
#65. The guards stood shoulder to shoulder: six Levites per day on the east, four per day on the north and on the south, and two at a time at the storehouse. At the
Eugene H. Peterson
#66. There must be Someone in heaven who knows the truth about me, in highest heaven, some Attorney who can clear my name - My Champion, my Friend, while I'm weeping my eyes out before God. I appeal to the One who represents mortals before God as a neighbor stands up for a neighbor.
Eugene H. Peterson
#67. It's your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.
Eugene H. Peterson
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. this book, giving voice to what is so basic among men and women throughout history, I have translated it "the Quester."]
Eugene H. Peterson
#72. Because a loveless world," said Jesus, "is a sightless world. If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him - we'll move right into the neighborhood! Not loving me means not keeping my words. The message you are hearing isn't mine. It's the
Eugene H. Peterson
#73. As silver in a crucible and gold in a pan, so our lives are assayed by GOD.
Eugene H. Peterson
#74. To live only for some future goals is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have the sides. It's the top that defines the sides.8
Eugene H. Peterson
#75. If you don't take a Sabbath, something is wrong. You're doing too much, you're being too much in charge. You've got to quit, one day a week, and just watch what God is doing when you're not doing anything.
Eugene H. Peterson
#76. I do not have more information after reading a poem; I have more experience.
Eugene H. Peterson
#77. Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with a swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God.
Eugene H. Peterson
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.
When
Eugene H. Peterson
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. For sound advice is a beacon, good teaching is a light, moral discipline is a life path.
Eugene H. Peterson
#85. What do you think God meant when he said, "Remove your sandals from your feet. You're standing on holy ground"?
Eugene H. Peterson
#86. 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
#87. Self-justification is a verbal defense for restoring the appearance of righteousness without doing anything about the substance.
Eugene H. Peterson
#88. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, imagination is indispensable.
Eugene H. Peterson
#90. The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.
Eugene H. Peterson
#91. Youth may be admired for vigor, but gray hair gives prestige to old age.
Eugene H. Peterson
#92. That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.
Eugene H. Peterson
#93. The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation.
Eugene H. Peterson
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#98. 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
#99. Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.
Eugene H. Peterson
#100. Just as water mirrors your face, so your face mirrors your heart.
Eugene H. Peterson
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