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
Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.
My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two.
To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.
Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.
As much as we complain about it, though, there's part of us that is drawn to a hurried life. It makes us feel important. It keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means I don't have to look too closely at my heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness.
Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them.
I wrote 'Soul Keeping' because we are taught more about how to care for our cars than how to steward our souls. But you cannot have an impactful life with an impoverished soul.
The only true and lasting inspiration for life is genuine love for God, and submitted gratitude that I get to be a part of the redemptive quest.
Jesus viewed his own destiny - to be glorified in and through death - as an expression of a kind of cosmic principle: the pathway to life runs through death.
Jesus' life as a foot-washing servant would eventually lead to the adoption of humility as a widely admired virtue.
In the context of worship, amusement is a waste of time and a waste of life, and therefore a form of sin.
The hurried can become unhurried. But it will not happen by trying alone, nor will it happen instantly. You will have to enter a life of training.
The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.
Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.