Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.

All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.

One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.

Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.

Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.

No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.

Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.

I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

Waiting means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.

Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.

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.

The life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which Gods grace and love are expereinced

My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

There are no experts in the company of Jesus. We are all beginners, necessarily followers, because we don’t know where we are going.

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

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.

The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.

Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.

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.

Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.

Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.

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.

God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

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.

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.

People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.

The silence that makes it possible to hear God speak also makes it possible for us to hear the world's words for what they really are - tinny and unconvincing lies.

There's nobody who doesn't have problems with the church, because there's sin in the church. But there's no other place to be a Christian except the church.

Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.

The life of faith isn't meant for tourists. It's meant for pilgrims.

I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.

Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.

You're here to be LIGHT... Shine! Be generous with your lives.

That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.

If we get our information from the biblical material there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.

When you are part of a megachurch you have no responsibility to anybody else.

We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

The task of the prophet is not to smooth things over but to make things right.

Suffering attracts fixers the way road-kills attract vultures.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.

The poor are not a problem to be solved but a people to join.

People learn to shop for churches; there is no loyalty to the church. They're consumers being attracted to one product or another. I think it's sacrilege, to tell you the truth, it really is.

Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.

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.

Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.

Religion is a very scary thing, because a pastor is in a position of power. And if you use that power badly, you ruin people's lives, and you ruin your own life.