Eugene H. Peterson Quotes & Sayings

But you never got thirsty for me. You ignored me. GOD'S Decree. 9 — Eugene H. Peterson

A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook. — Eugene H. Peterson

When I look for help in developing my pastoral craft and nurturing my pastoral vocation, the one century that has the least to commend it is the twentieth. Has any century been so fascinated with gimmickry, so surfeited with fads, so addicted
to nostrums, so unaware of God, so out of touch with the underground spiritual streams which water eternal life? — Eugene H. Peterson

Without stories we end up with stereotypes
a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR. — Eugene H. Peterson

Like a child exploring the attic of an old house on a rainy day, discovering a trunk full of treasure and then calling all his brothers and sisters to share the find, Richard J. 'Foster has 'found' the spiritual disciplines that the modern world has stored away and forgot, and has excitedly called us to celebrate them. For they are, as he shows us, the instruments of joy, the way into mature Christian spirituality and abundant life. — Eugene H. Peterson

Liturgy is the means that the church uses to keep baptized Christians in living touch with the entire living holy community as it participates formationally in Holy Scripture. — Eugene H. Peterson

Maturity cannot be hurried, programmed, or tinkered with. There are no steroids available for growing up in Christ more quickly. Impatient shortcuts land us in the dead ends of immaturity. — Eugene H. Peterson

Now that we know what we have - Jesus, this great High Priest with ready access to God - let's not let it slip through our fingers. We don't have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He's been through weakness and testing, experienced it all - all but the sin. So let's walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help. — Eugene H. Peterson

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. — Eugene H. Peterson

The terrible threat against life, he said in his book God Is Not Yet Dead, is not death, nor pain, nor any variation on the disasters that we so obsessively try to protect ourselves against with our social systems and personal stratagems. The terrible threat is "that we might die earlier than we really do die, before death has become a natural necessity. The real horror lies in just such a premature death, a death after which we go on living for many years."[6] — Eugene H. Peterson

025 GOD, you are my God. I celebrate you. I praise you. — Eugene H. Peterson

Skilled living gets its start in the Fear-of-GOD, insight into life from knowing a Holy God. — Eugene H. Peterson

The devil does some of his best work behind stained glass. — Eugene H. Peterson

We are most ourselves when we love; we are most the People of God when we love. — Eugene H. Peterson

Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with a swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God. — Eugene H. Peterson

I think pastors are the worst listeners. We're so used to speaking, teaching, giving answers. We must learn to be quiet, quit being so verbal, learn to pay attention to what's going on, and listen. — Eugene H. Peterson

Suffering attracts fixers the way road-kills attract vultures. — Eugene H. Peterson

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets? — Eugene H. Peterson

Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner. — Eugene H. Peterson

I'm in charge of all this - I run this universe! — Eugene H. Peterson

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

Prayer gets us in on what God is doing. — Eugene H. Peterson

Love is not a word that describes my feelings; it is not a technique by which I fulfill my needs; it is not an ideal, abstract and pure, on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence with or in response to God in relation to persons. — Eugene H. Peterson

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. — Eugene H. Peterson

The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements. First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and attention, listening and receiving and believing before God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives ordered to all aspects of the revelation of God in Jesus.

Then it gets us out of the sanctuary into the world into places of obeying and loving ordering our lives as living sacrifices in the world to the glory of God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives out on the street participating in the work of salvation. — Eugene H. Peterson

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say. — Eugene H. Peterson

There's nobody who doesn't have problems with the church, because there's sin in the church. But there's no other place to be a Christian except the church. — Eugene H. Peterson

Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth. — Eugene H. Peterson

The guards stood shoulder to shoulder: six Levites per day on the east, four per day on the north and on the south, and two at a time at the storehouse. At the — Eugene H. Peterson

The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ. — Eugene H. Peterson

What Berry sees in his farm as a form, I see in Scripture as a form. Think of the farm as an organic whole, but with boundaries so that you are aware and stay in touch with all the interrelations: the house and barn, the horses and the chickens, the weather of sun and rain, the food prepared in the house and the work done in the fields, the machinery and the tools, the seasons. There are steady, relaxed rhythms in place. — Eugene H. Peterson

No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others. — Eugene H. Peterson

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

Apart from childhood and crisis, prayers have a way of being abstracted from the homely and distinctive details that are part and parcel of our ordinary and daily life. — Eugene H. Peterson

Jesus is the descent of God to our lives, just as they are, not the ascent of our lives to God, hoping he might approve when he sees how hard we try. — Eugene H. Peterson

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

The bawling of babies, always in a way
Inappropriate - why should the love and innocent
Greet existence with wails? - is proof that not all
Is well. Dreams and deliveries never quite mesh. — Eugene H. Peterson

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

If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. — Eugene H. Peterson

Cross and resurrection are the South and North polls, true gospel polarities, of a single, undivided, salvation world. Remove either Paul and you've got salvation. — Eugene H. Peterson

Jeremiah ends inconclusively. We want to know the end, but there is no end. The last scene of Jeremiah's life shows him, as he had spent so much of his life, preaching God's word to a contemptuous people (Jer 44). We want to know that he was finally successful so that, if we live well and courageously, we also will be successful. Or we want to know that he was finally unsuccessful so that, since a life of faith and integrity doesn't pay off, we can get on with finding another means by which to live. We get neither in Jeremiah. He doesn't get married and he doesn't get shot.[5] In Egypt, the place he doesn't want to be, with people who treat him badly, he continues determinedly faithful, magnificently courageous, heartlessly rejected - a towering life terrifically lived. — Eugene H. Peterson

We need alert listeners to give dignity to those stretches in our lives when we are not aware of participating in anything we think might be embraced by the kingdom of God. — Eugene H. Peterson

Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what's best - As above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You're in charge! — Eugene H. Peterson

The power that the world acknowledges comes out of the mouth of a gun; the power that the person of faith respects comes from the mouth of Christ. — Eugene H. Peterson

Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream. — Eugene H. Peterson

To live only for some future goals is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have the sides. It's the top that defines the sides.8 — Eugene H. Peterson

Drugged their despair with Thunderbird and buried their dead visions and dreams in the alley behind the Pastime, ignorant of the God at work beneath their emptiness. — Eugene H. Peterson

Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience. — Eugene H. Peterson

The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation. — Eugene H. Peterson

The birth of Jesus is a birth with a message. It takes the entire Bible to bring the complete message, but this birth is the core of it: In Jesus, God is here to give us life, real life. — Eugene H. Peterson

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human. — Eugene H. Peterson

There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help. — Eugene H. Peterson

Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples - when they see the love you have for each other. — Eugene H. Peterson

We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don't see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone. — Eugene H. Peterson

I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything. — Eugene H. Peterson

My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives. — Eugene H. Peterson

The Holy Spirit's instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne — Eugene H. Peterson

Because a loveless world," said Jesus, "is a sightless world. If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him - we'll move right into the neighborhood! Not loving me means not keeping my words. The message you are hearing isn't mine. It's the — Eugene H. Peterson

Prayer is a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul. — Eugene H. Peterson

God's providence is never characterized
in broad generalities or pious abstractions but always in the particular, in the personal, in the recognition of grace in an unlikely time, at an unlikely place. Who could have anticipated ravens? — Eugene H. Peterson

Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness ... in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things. — Eugene H. Peterson

Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive. — Eugene H. Peterson

My uncle Ernie didn't believe in God.
At least that's what he said. But he always
Went to church on Christmas. Which I thought
Seriously compromised his atheism. — Eugene H. Peterson

Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be - you get a fresh start, your slate's wiped clean. Count yourself lucky - God holds nothing against you and you're holding nothing back from Him. — Eugene H. Peterson

Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble ... [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality ... a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict. — Eugene H. Peterson

The witness is frequent and insistent that God is inherently relational and personal. So God cannot be either received or understood apart from our being personal and realtional as well. That most emphatically excludes the detached intellect as a way of knowing God. It excludes programmatic work as a way of knowing God. It excludes cultivation of the ecstatic and visionary as a way of knowing God. God is not an abstract idea that can be mastered, not an impersonal force that can be used, not a private experience that can be indulged." Eugene Peterson, "Living the Resurrection" (106). — Eugene H. Peterson

What do you think God meant when he said, "Remove your sandals from your feet. You're standing on holy ground"? — Eugene H. Peterson

O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you. — Eugene H. Peterson

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

If people don't know their pastor, it's easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It's also easy for pastors, who don't know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers. — Eugene H. Peterson

Patriotism was used to muddle the sense of morality: "Our beloved country is being attacked and we must be loyal to it; in times of crisis it is not right to criticize your leaders. It is disloyal, an act of treachery." Using jingoist language is far easier than taking responsibility for righteousness in the nation. Far easier to shout patriotic slogans than to work patriotically for justice. — Eugene H. Peterson

Never walk away from someone who deserves help; your hand is God's hand for that person. — Eugene H. Peterson

But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight. — Eugene H. Peterson

I do not have more information after reading a poem; I have more experience. — Eugene H. Peterson

The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.
When — Eugene H. Peterson

It's your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words. — Eugene H. Peterson

And so we gain hope - not from the darkness of our suffering, not from pat answers in books, but from the God who sees our suffering and shares our pain. — Eugene H. Peterson

My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move. — Eugene H. Peterson

Some of us try desperately to hold on to ourselves, to live for ourselves. We look so bedraggled and pathetic doing it, hanging on to the dead branch of a bank account for dear life, afraid to risk ourselves on the untried wings of giving. We don't think we can live generously because we have never tried. But the sooner we start the better, for we are going to have to give up our lives finally, and the longer we wait the less time we have for the soaring and swooping life of grace. — Eugene H. Peterson

A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she acquires an appetite for the world of grace. — Eugene H. Peterson

You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best - the sun to warm and the rain to nourish - to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. 48 "In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you." THE WORLD IS NOT A STAGE — Eugene H. Peterson

19-21 "Don't hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or - worse! - stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it's safe from moth and rust and burglars. It's obvious, isn't it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being. 22-23 "Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have! 24 "You can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you'll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can't worship God and Money both. — Eugene H. Peterson

The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We're called to have people follow Jesus. We're called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies. — Eugene H. Peterson

An honest answer is like a warm hug. — Eugene H. Peterson

Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in church, and only a couple mention the name God. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren't about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded! — Eugene H. Peterson

Parents are in a position to forgive when they remember two things. One, the child that I am rearing is God's child. God loved the child before I did; He will continue this love long after I am gone. Two, God's method of dealing with sin, even the most destructive kind, is forgiveness. I am not going to be able to improve on God's methods. — Eugene H. Peterson

As silver in a crucible and gold in a pan, so our lives are assayed by GOD. — Eugene H. Peterson

The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract. — Eugene H. Peterson

Sabbath is the time set aside to do nothing so that we can receive everything, to set aside our anxious attempts to make ourselves useful, to set aside our tense restlessness, to set aside our media-satiated boredom. Sabbath is the time to receive silence and let it deepen into gratitude, to receive quiet into which forgotten faces and voices unobtrusively make themselves present, to receive the days of the just completed week and absorb the wonder and miracle still reverberating from each one, to receive our Lord's amazing grace. — Eugene H. Peterson

The prayer of David traditionally assigned to this story is Psalm 57. While there are lines in that psalm that convey David's fugitive state at the time, its overwhelming impression is of energetic and ebullient praise of God. This means that while Saul was the occasion for David's being in the wilderness, Saul neither defined nor dominated the wilderness. The wilderness was full of God, not Saul. — Eugene H. Peterson

Any understanding of God that doesn't take into account God's silence is a half truth - in effect, a cruel distortion - and leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by leaders who are quite willing to fill in the biblical blanks with what the Holy Spirit never tells us. — Eugene H. Peterson

Mercy to the needy is a loan to Got), and Got) pays back those loans in full. — Eugene H. Peterson

Christian spirituality means living in the mature wholeness of the gospel. It means taking all the elements of your life - children, spouse, job, weather, possessions, relationships - and experiencing them as an act of faith. God wants all the material of our lives. — Eugene H. Peterson

Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets. — Eugene H. Peterson

Pride first, then the crash, but humility is precursor to honor. — Eugene H. Peterson

So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It's your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it. — Eugene H. Peterson

The congregation is the pastor's place for developing vocational holiness. It goes without saying that it is the place of ministry: we preach the word and administer the sacraments, we give pastoral care and administer the community life, we teach and we give spiritual direction. But it is also the place in which we develop virtue, learn to love, advance in hope - become what we preach. — Eugene H. Peterson

Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. — Eugene H. Peterson

If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life. — Eugene H. Peterson

The moment the organic unity of belief and behaviour is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created. — Eugene H. Peterson