Eugene H. Peterson
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.Collection: Funeral
When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.Collection: Plot
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.Collection: Use
Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.Collection: Faith
It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.Collection: Spiritual
Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.Collection: Prayer
The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.Collection: Religious
Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.Collection: Life Changing
Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.Collection: Mother
Love is not a word that describes my feelings; it is not a technique by which I fulfill my needs; it is not an ideal, abstract and pure, on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence with or in response to God in relation to persons.Collection: Love
Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Grace
Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what's best - As above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You're in charge!Collection: Father
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.Collection: Bible
Too much of the world's happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower his. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn't have to be that way.Collection: Luxury
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.Collection: Latin
Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.Collection: Stories
God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.Collection: Plot
Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.Collection: Adventure
If we get our information from the biblical material there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Art
The poor are not a problem to be solved but a people to join.Collection: People
Exile (being where we don't want to be with people we don't want to be with) forces a decision: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself?...'I will do my best with what is here.'Collection: Sorry
Repentance is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. Repentance is the most practical of all words and the most practical of all acts. It is a feet-on-the-ground-kind-of-word. It puts a person in touch with the reality that God creates.Collection: Jesus
If we don't understand how metaphor works we will misunderstand most of what we read in the Bible. No matter how carefully we parse our Hebrew and Greek sentences, no matter how precisely we use our dictionaries and trace our etymologies, no matter how exactly we define the words on the page, if we do not appreciate the way a metaphor works we will never comprehend the meaning of the text.Collection: Appreciate
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.Collection: Growing Up
Like a child exploring the attic of an old house on a rainy day, discovering a trunk full of treasure and then calling all his brothers and sisters to share the find, Richard J. 'Foster has 'found' the spiritual disciplines that the modern world has stored away and forgot, and has excitedly called us to celebrate them. For they are, as he shows us, the instruments of joy, the way into mature Christian spirituality and abundant life.Collection: Christian
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.Collection: Religious
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.Collection: Wine
Suffering attracts fixers the way road-kills attract vultures.Collection: Helping Others
When you are part of a megachurch you have no responsibility to anybody else.Collection: Responsibility
The task of the prophet is not to smooth things over but to make things right.Collection: Tasks
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.Collection: Spiritual
Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.Collection: Sloth
"Sabbath is not primarily about us or how it benefits us; it is about God, and how God forms us. It is not, in the first place, about what we do or don't do; it is about God - completing and resting and blessing and sanctifying. These are all things that we don't know much about......But it does mean stopping and being quiet long enough to see - open-mouthed - with wonder - resurrection wonder.....we cultivate the "fear of the Lord". Our souls are formed by what we cannot work up or take charge of. We respond and enter into what the resurrection of Jesus continues to do."Collection: Jesus
I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.Collection: Teaching
Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?Collection: Biblical
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.Collection: Religious
It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Blue
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.Collection: Kicking
Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be - you get a fresh start, your slate's wiped clean. Count yourself lucky - God holds nothing against you and you're holding nothing back from Him.Collection: Lucky
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.Collection: Attitude
The moment the organic unity of belief and behaviour is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created.Collection: Humanity
You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.Collection: Religious
There is something about Christmas that requires a rug rat. Little kids make Christmas fun. I wonder if could rent one for the holidays. When I was tiny we would by a real tree and stay up late drinking hot chocolate and finding just the right place for the special decorations.Collection: Fun
Spirituality is no different from what weve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. Its just ordinary stuff.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Firsts