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Eugene H. Peterson QUOTES

Eugene H. Peterson QUOTES

61 " Prayer is a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Spiritual Theology #4)

62 " Jesus breaks what we bring to Him. All too often we come to the table with our best manners and a pose of impenetrable self-sufficiency. We're all surface, all role - polished and poised performers in the game of life. But Jesus is after what is within, and He exposes the insides - our inadequacies. At the table we're not permitted to be self-enclosed. We're not permitted to remain self-sufficient. We are taken into the crucifixion. We dramatize it as we eat the common food. The breaking of our pride and self-approval opens us up to new life, to new action. Everything on the table represents some kind of exchange of life, some sacrifice to our Host. If we come crusted over, hardened within ourselves in lies and poses, He breaks through and brings new life. 'A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise' (Psalm 51:17). We discover this breaking first in Jesus. Jesus was broken, His blood poured out. And now we discover it in ourselves. Then Jesus gives back what we brought to Him, who we are. But it is no longer what we brought. Who we are, this self that we offer to Him at the table, is changed into what God gives, what we sing of as Amazing Grace. [Living the Resurrection] "

― Eugene H. Peterson

63 " Good poetry survives not when it is pretty or beautiful or nice but when it is true: accurate and honest. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

64 " Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Spiritual Theology #2)

65 " Not that the study is not important. A Jewish rabbi I once studies with would often say, 'For us Jews studying the bible is more important than obeying it because if you don't understand it rightly you will obey it wrongly and your obedience will be disobedience.

This is also true. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Spiritual Theology #2)

66 " The splendors of creation and the agonies of redemption combine in this event, this center where God in Christ invades existence with redeeming life and decisively defeats evil. "

― Eugene H. Peterson

67 " I am busy because I am lazy. I indolently let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself. It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us. "

― Eugene H. Peterson

68 " David's isn't an ideal life but an actual life. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Leap Over a Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians

69 " The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Spiritual Theology #1)

70 " (from chapter 20, "Bezalel")

"Worship is an art, using the sensory to bring us into an awareness of and attentiveness to the mystery of God. Worship has to do with practicing a way of life that is immersed in the salvation and revelation of Yahweh. Bezalel led the people whom Moses had led out of Egypt into making and worshipping in a sanctuary, a place designed to keep them aware and responsive to a way of life in which all their senses were brought into lively participation in the stuff of creation and the energies of salvation. he designed a worship center, the ark of the covenant, in which all visibilities converged into an Invisibility: Yahweh - a presence, a relationship - who can only be worshipped and never used. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , The Pastor: A Memoir

71 " What we are after is first noticing and then participating in the way the large world of the Bible absorbs the much smaller world of our science and economics and politics that provides the so-called worldview in which we are used to working out our daily concerns. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Spiritual Theology #2)

72 " 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. "

― Eugene H. Peterson

73 " 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. "

― Eugene H. Peterson

74 " And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily--open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

75 " When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves. "

― Eugene H. Peterson

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

― Eugene H. Peterson , Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Spiritual Theology #1)

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

― Eugene H. Peterson , A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

78 " There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

79 " The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , The Pastor: A Memoir

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

― Eugene H. Peterson , A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society