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
When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.
Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.
Jesus gave the world its most influential movement.
Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.
When people feel they're getting to speak into what's being preached, there is high built-in motivation to participate.
Better to be a loving person without knowing how you got there, than an expert no one can stand to be around.
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.
For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.
To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.
The church is in the hope business. We, of all people, ought to be known most for our hope because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking.
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.
Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.
Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church.
People cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible - they just don't actually read the Bible.