John Ortberg
John Ortberg
John Ortberg, Jr.is an evangelical Christian author, speaker, and senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California, an evangelical church with more than 4,000 members. Ortberg has published many books including the 2008 ECPA Christian Book Award winner When the Game is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box, and the 2002 Christianity Today Book Award winner If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat. Another of his publications,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth5 May 1957
CountryUnited States of America
I need an inspiration that is grounded in reality while thoroughly transcendent.
Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.
Authority can be faked. That's why impersonating a police officer is a crime. Sometimes the outward appearances of authority can be deceiving.
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.
I hate how spiritual formation gets positioned as an optional pursuit for a small special interest group within the church.
Gratitude is what we radiate when we experience grace, and the soul was made to run on grace the way a 747 runs on rocket fuel.
The single dynamic that helps people be most aware of God and most experiencing the fruit of the Spirit is gratitude.
Sin is protean. It is a cancer that keeps mutating, and just when you think you have killed off one form, it turns out a deadlier strain yet is threatening your heart.
Prudence is not the same thing as caution. Caution is a helpful strategy when you're crossing a minefield; it's a disaster when you're in a gold rush.
The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.
This much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important in the spiritual formation of human beings.
In the context of worship, amusement is a waste of time and a waste of life, and therefore a form of sin.
Sin is very important to the soul because sin is what disintegrates the soul; it's what attacks the soul. Sin kind of is to the soul what cancer is to the body.
Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.