John Ortberg

“Your Mission starts where you are,Not where you think you should be.Sometimes we're tempted to think that our current position/job/situation is a barrier to our mission, but, in fact, it is where it starts.”

“True repentance never leads to despair. Its leads home. It leads to grace.”

“Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.”

“We must learn to cast off our anxieties because we have so many of them. The world destroys spiritual life by generating constant anxiety. Jesus said that the life of the gospel is choked out by the cares of this world. We know this to be true yet we are more chained and tethered to the world than ever before in the human race.”

“Even in the world today, it is often at the point where we are frustrated by the gap between fallen reality and our sense of God’s desires that we are moved to action in a cause greater than ourselves.”

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

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

“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.”

“sometimes we do not realize how much we have to be grateful for until it is threatened.”

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

“Being rich towards God means ...growing a soul that is increasingly healthy and good. ... loving and enjoying the people around you. ...learning about your gifts and passion and doing good work to improve the world. ...becoming generous with your stuff. ...making that which is temporary become the servant of that which is eternal. ...savoring every roll of the dice and every trip around the board.”

“Every day you and I walk through God's 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.”

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

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

“The test of love is that it gives even when there is no expectation of a return.”

“God sees with utter clarity who we are. He is undeceived as to our warts and wickedness. But when God looks at us that is not all He sees. He also sees who we are intended to be, who we will one day become.”

“It may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me, but it is a wonderful thing that God thinks I am worth dying for.”

“True love is willing to warn, reprove, confront or admonish when necessary.”

“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.”

“Love me, love my rag dolls," God says. It's a package deal.”

“There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.”

“We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.”

“I need to worship because without it I can forget that I have a Big God beside me and live in fear. I need to worship because without it I can forget his calling and begin to live in a spirit of self-preoccupation. I need to worship because without it I lose a sense of wonder and gratitude and plod through life with blinders on. I need worship because my natural tendency is toward self-reliance and stubborn independence.”

“There is something you can't fix, can't heal, or can't escape, and all you can do it trust God. Finding ultimate refuge in God means you become so immersed in his presence, so convinced of his goodness, so devoted to his lordship that you find even the cave is a perfectly safe place to be because he is there with you.”

“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.”

“If I have the courage to acknowledge my limits and embrace them, I can experience enormous freedom. If I lack this courage, I will be imprisoned by them.”

“Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.”

“If you can't do great things, Mother Teresa used to say, do little things with great love. If you can't do them with great love, do them with a little love. If you can't do them with a little love, do them anyway.Love grows when people serve.”

“Low self-esteem causes me to believe that I have so little worth that my response does not matter. With repentance, however, I understand that being worth so much to God is why my response is so important. Repentance is remedial work to mend our minds and hearts, which get bent by sin.”

“We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.”

“The goal of prayer is to live all of my life and speak all of my words in the joyful awareness of the presence of God.Prayer becomes real when we grasp the reality and goodness of God's constant presence with 'the real me.' Jesus lived his everyday life in conscious awareness of his Father.”

“God is so immense that if he were 'too visible,' people would give forced compliance without expressing their heart. So God made it possible, in enormous love, for us to live as if he were not there.”

“Never worry alone. When anxiety grabs my mind, it is self-perpetuating. Worrisome thoughts reproduce faster than rabbits, so one of the most powerful ways to stop the spiral of worry is simply to disclose my worry to a friend... The simple act of reassurance from another human being [becomes] a tool of the Spirit to cast out fear -- because peace and fear are both contagious.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.”