John Ortberg Quotes

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John Ortberg

Profession : Clergyman

Birth : May 5, 1957

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

John Ortberg

Tithing is considerably less popular than words like generosity or sharing.

John Ortberg

I don't have a problem with delegation. I love to delegate. I am either lazy enough, or busy enough, or trusting enough, or congenial enough, that the notion leaving tasks in someone else's lap doesn't just sound wise to me, it sounds attractive.

John Ortberg

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

John Ortberg

Jesus viewed his own destiny - to be glorified in and through death - as an expression of a kind of cosmic principle: the pathway to life runs through death.

John Ortberg

Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.

John Ortberg

Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.

John Ortberg

A bad sermon is like a car wreck - everyone slows down to see what happened.

John Ortberg

Sometimes in churches somebody will discover a particular vein of spirituality and seek to recruit others into it, or assume a superior position because they have found certain techniques - but no one actually wants to become like them.

John Ortberg

I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.

John Ortberg

The church is in the hope business.

John Ortberg

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

John Ortberg

From ancient times, the core idea of the soul is the soul is the capacity to integrate different functions into a single being or into a single person. The soul is what holds us all together: what connects our will and our minds and our bodies and connects us to God.

John Ortberg

Sin is very important to the soul because sin is what disintegrates the soul; it's what attacks the soul. Sin kind of is to the soul what cancer is to the body.

John Ortberg

There are no clear boundary lines between what is physiological, what is psychological, and what is spiritual. Those are language domains that make sense and have integrity but overlap significantly.

John Ortberg

What influences our behavior, and what our level of responsibility is, are very complex issues. And anytime we try to make this simplistic, we don't serve people well.

John Ortberg

In my love-challenged condition, seeing a difficulty for someone else can leave me feeling a little more smug or superior-by-comparison.

John Ortberg

Actually, my character needs to be questioned. On a regular basis. By people who know and love me.

John Ortberg

The day people around me stop questioning my character is the day my character begins to grow vulnerable.

John Ortberg

Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.

John Ortberg