Quotes from John Ortberg

Joy is God's basic character. Joy is his eternal destiny. God is the happiest being in the universe.

Prayer, perhaps more than any other activity, is the concrete expression of the fact that we are invited into a relationship with God.

When you're in your twenties, someone once wrote, you live to please other people. When you're in your thirties, you get tired of trying to please others, so you get miffed with them for making you worry about it. When you're in your forties, you realize nobody was thinking about you anyway.

When God calls people to do something, their initial response is almost always fear. If there is a challenge in front of you, a course of action that could cause you to grow and that would be helpful to people around you, but you find yourself scared about it, there's a real good chance that God is in that challenge.

Somebody once said that the biggest difference between you and God is that God doesn't think he's you. In pain, we get very clear about not being God.

There is a very important theological distinction between being a prophet and being a jerk. What burns deeply in the heart of a true prophet is not just anger but love.

I can buy baseball cards to view an entire career on the back of a little square of cardboard. But nobody sells major league father cards with key statistics on the back ("Had a great season in 2005: set career highs in unforced expressions of affection and averaged 87 minutes of quality time per day.")

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible.

eschatological thinking.

Author Evelyn Waugh was a Catholic who fell pretty woefully short of his faith's standards. Somebody asked Waugh one time, "How can you call yourself a Catholic and be so badly behaved, so mean, such a jerk, so spiteful?" Waugh responded, "Just imagine me if I were not a Catholic." And

The one thing needed is the decision to live so continually in Jesus' presence as to be always covered with the dust of the rabbi. Martha got

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least. DOROTHY DAY You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. ANNE LAMOTT