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
The single dynamic that helps people be most aware of God and most experiencing the fruit of the Spirit is gratitude.
Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.
The question isn't if someone will sign up for spiritual formation; it's just who and what our spirits will be formed by.
Genuine brokenness pleases God more than pretend spirituality.
One of the great misconceptions about spiritual growth that develops in a lot of churches is that information alone is adequate to produce transformed human beings. So if we want to have a church of spiritually mature people, let's just keep cramming more and more information into them... Information alone is not adequate for the transformation of the human personality.
I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.
In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.
Spiritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.
Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit. And it's constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience.
One reason why we fail to hear God speak is that we are not attentive. We suffer from what might be called 'spiritual mindlessness.'
At the deepest level, pride is the choice to exclude both God and other people from their rightful place in our hearts. Jesus said the essence of the spiritual life is to love God and to love people. Pride destroys our capacity to love.
God is not interested in our spiritual life. He's interested in our life.
We must learn to cast off our anxieties because we have so many of them. The world destroys spiritual life by generating constant anxiety. Jesus said that the life of the gospel is choked out by the cares of this world. We know this to be true yet we are more chained and tethered to the world than ever before in the human race.
The primary goal of spiritual life is human transformation.