As much as we complain about it, though, there's part of us that is drawn to a hurried life. It makes us feel important. It keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means I don't have to look too closely at my heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness.

John Ortberg

You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.

John Ortberg

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

For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

John Ortberg

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

John Ortberg

Prudence is not hesitation, procrastination, or moderation. It is not driving in the middle of the road. It is not the way of ambivalence, indecision, or safety.

John Ortberg

Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.

John Ortberg

Over time, grit is what separates fruitful lives from aimlessness.

John Ortberg

The soul is both the most fragile and most resilient thing about you; a healthy soul is what holds you together when your world falls apart. Since you will carry your soul into eternity, it's worth checking up on it at least as often as your teeth.

John Ortberg

Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.

John Ortberg

God has entrusted us with his most precious treasure - people. He asks us to shepherd and mold them into strong disciples, with brave faith and good character.

John Ortberg

The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing - but it's now also our deepest fear.

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

The New Testament doesn't present Jesus as a single man to cover up his humanity. It presents him as a single man because... he was a single man.

John Ortberg

Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'

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

Gratitude is what we radiate when we experience grace, and the soul was made to run on grace the way a 747 runs on rocket fuel.

John Ortberg

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

John Ortberg

When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.

John Ortberg

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

John Ortberg

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

John Ortberg