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Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You QUOTES

Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You QUOTES

1 " A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

2 " I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one,” writes Douglas Coupland. “I know because it hurts. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

3 " A lot of people are dissatisfied with their jobs. “Theologian” Drew Carey said, “You hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody. They meet at the bar.” A research group affiliated with the University of Chicago recently listed the ten least happy jobs in the world and the ten happiest jobs in the world. What they found was the ten least happy jobs actually were more financially lucrative and offered higher status than the ten happiest jobs. The difference? People in the happiest jobs had a higher sense of meaning. Less money, less status, but a higher sense of meaning. The main thing you bring home from your work is not a paycheck. The main thing you bring home from work is your soul. Work is a soul function. We’re made to create value. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing better for a person than that he should make his soul enjoy good in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

4 " A soul can be saved. But it will take softness and depth and space. The world won't help much. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

5 " Many Christians expend so much energy and worry trying not to sin. The goal is not to try to sin less. In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him. To be with him. “Abide in me.” Just relax and learn to enjoy his presence. Every day is a collection of moments, 86,400 seconds in a day. How many of them can you live with God? Start where you are and grow from there. God wants to be with you every moment. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

6 " For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

7 " Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

8 " The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

9 " A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That’s why the psalmist says to God, “Because your love is better than life . . . my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.” Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible — the soul craves because it is meant for God. “My soul, find rest in God. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

10 " The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

11 " The best place to start doing life with God is in small moments. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

12 " The soul was not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle: • Things seem to bother you more than they should. Your spouse’s gum-chewing suddenly reveals to you a massive character flaw. • It’s hard to make up your mind about even a simple decision. • Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave are harder to resist than they otherwise would be. • You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that leave you with high long-term costs. Israel ended up worshiping a golden calf simply because they grew tired of having to wait on Moses and God. • Your judgment is suffering. • You have less courage. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” is a quote so ubiquitious that it has been attributed to General Patton and Vince Lombardi and Shakespeare. The same disciples who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

13 " I was operating on the unspoken assumption that my inner world would be filled with life, peace, and joy once my external world was perfect. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

14 " You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

15 " A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

16 " Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy — well-ordered — when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

17 " The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

18 " Prayer, meditation, and confession actually have the power to rewire the brain in a way that can make us less self-referential and more aware of how God sees us. But these impediments to sin may not come easily. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

19 " The psalmist says “I have set the LORD always before me.” Paul says, “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” They speak to the need for our souls to be completely and thoroughly with God. But as both of these verses suggest, it does not happen automatically. “Set” and “take captive” are active verbs, implying that you have a role in determining where your soul rests. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

20 " We demean people when we forget they have the depth and dignity of a soul. Even the people I don’t like have souls. "

― John Ortberg , Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You