A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.
And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. "I pray to GOD-my life a prayer-and wait for what he'll say and do. My life's on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning. "

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

7 " We live in what one writer has called the "age of sensation."' We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured. "

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

8 " The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. "

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

9 " We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world. "

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

10 " Mercy, GOD, mercy!”: the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ. "

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

11 " My primary pastoral work had to do with Scripture and prayer. I was neither capable nor competent to form Christ in another person, to shape a life of discipleship in man, woman or child. That is supernatural work, and I am not supernatural. Mine was the more modest work of Scripture and prayer- helping people listen to God speak to them from the Scriptures and then joining them in answering God as personally and honestly as we could in lives of prayer. This turned out to be slow work. From time to time, impatient with the slowness, I would try out ways of going about my work that promised quicker results. But after a while it always seemed to be more like meddling in these people's lives than helping them attend to God. More often than not I found myself getting in the way of what the Holy Spirit had been doing long before I arrived on the scene, so I would go back, feeling a bit chastised, to my proper work: Scripture and prayer; prayer and Scripture. "

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

12 " The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts. Subjected "

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

13 " We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs. "

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

14 " Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God-it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship-it deepens. "

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

15 " The depth is simply the height inverted, as sin is the index of moral grandeur. The cry is not only truly human, but divine as well. God is deeper than the deepest depth in man. He is holier than our deepest sin is deep. There is no depth so deep to us as when God reveals his holiness in dealing with our sin.... [And so] think more of the depth of God than the depth of your cry. The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have no God to cry to out of the depth. "

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

16 " Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. "

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

17 " Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests."1 "

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

18 " We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone’s fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time. "

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

19 " Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshipped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. "

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

20 " And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes. "

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