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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

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John Ortberg
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 5
Author
Psychologist
Theologian
Rockford
Illinois
People
Gone
Judgmental
Church
Superior
Spiritual
Superiors
Hate
Transformation
Many
Bitter
Hard
Decades
Long
Remain
Thinking
Takes
Joyless

More quotes by John Ortberg

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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.
John Ortberg
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If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat.
John Ortberg
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Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit. And it's constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience.
John Ortberg
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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.
John Ortberg
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The reason our souls hunger so is that the life we could be living so far exceeds our strangest dreams.
John Ortberg
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If ever there were a true just as I am church, if ever there were a community where everybody could bring all their baggage and brokenness with them without neat and tidy happy endings quite yet, if ever there was a group where everyone was loved and no one pretended - we could not make enough room inside the building.
John Ortberg
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Over and over in the Bible, it is fear that threatens to keep people from trusting and obeying God.
John Ortberg
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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.
John Ortberg
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People who are servants-humbly, honestly, and joyfully-keep getting revealed as the biggest winners. People who recognize and embrace their smallness keep getting bigger and bigger in God's eyes. It's the oddest scoring system.
John Ortberg
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You have a turn every time you have an opportunity to choose. But most of us only see a tiny fraction of the choices we have.
John Ortberg
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The miracle of Sunday is that a dead man lives. The miracle of Saturday is that the eternal Son of God lies dead.
John Ortberg
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Greatness is never achieved through indecision.
John Ortberg
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True love is willing to warn, reprove, confront or admonish when necessary.
John Ortberg
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Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.
John Ortberg
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Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand.
John Ortberg
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We are tempted to live under the illusion that somewhere out there are people who are normal.
John Ortberg
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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
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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.
John Ortberg
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Jesus ... associated with the outcasts he spoke with them, touched them, ate with them, loved them.
John Ortberg
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For many 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.
John Ortberg