John Ortberg Quotes

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John Ortberg

Profession : Clergyman

Birth : May 5, 1957

My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two.

John Ortberg

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.

John Ortberg

As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this.

John Ortberg

People cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible - they just don't actually read the Bible.

John Ortberg

Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.

John Ortberg

Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

John Ortberg

Far more books get written about how to get more people in your church than how to get the people already in your church to have more humility and sincere love.

John Ortberg

God has decided, for his own good reasons, that people are not transformed outside of community.

John Ortberg

The hurried can become unhurried. But it will not happen by trying alone, nor will it happen instantly. You will have to enter a life of training.

John Ortberg

My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously.

John Ortberg

One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.

John Ortberg

This much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important in the spiritual formation of human beings.

John Ortberg

Skill at helping people grow spiritually, like skill at playing chess, depends on understanding and valuing differences.

John Ortberg

Authority can be faked. That's why impersonating a police officer is a crime. Sometimes the outward appearances of authority can be deceiving.

John Ortberg

Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.

John Ortberg

Authentic spiritual authority is what puts you in touch with reality.

John Ortberg

As a preacher who is fully human, and clearly not divine, I can't speak as Jesus did. But I do seek to speak truth that carries weight and authority. All of us who preach the gospel aspire to speak under the authority of Jesus.

John Ortberg

I know that those of us who go into church work are to regard ourselves as servants, are to offer our lives as a gift.

John Ortberg

The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.

John Ortberg

Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.

John Ortberg