Quotes from John Ortberg

Welcome to the human race. It is somehow essential to human life as God has ordained it that we can know the final score of yesterday but not tomorrow. It doesn't mean we're condemned to anxiety. It does mean this: If you're looking for certainty, you've chosen the wrong species. You can walk by faith, but not by sight; not down here.

God wants to be known, but not in a way that overwhelms us, that takes away the possibility of love freely chosen. "God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away," said Meister Eckhart.

In the whole divine journey, no one else can walk your pathway. In the whole cosmic choir, no one else can sing your song.

The entire sum of Creation, each private and individual act of nature, is God waving hello.

Then MacDonald writes this insightful line: "that the same God who is in us, . . . also is all about us—inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us.

God's purpose in guidance is not to get us to perform the right actions. His purpose is to help us become the right kind of people.

Superstition seeks to use the supernatural for my purposes; faith seeks to surrender to God's purposes. Faith teaches us that there is a Person behind the universe, and that Person responds to communication just as all persons do. Prayer is the primary way we communicate with God, and that's why prayer is so closely associated with seeking and discerning open doors.

God's great, holy joke about the messiah complex is this: Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from it—except one. And he was the Messiah.

Jesus has made God's presence scandalously available to anyone who wants it.

C. S. Lewis was getting at this idea when he wrote, If your thoughts and passions were directly present to me, like my own, without any mark of externality or otherness, how should I distinguish them from mine?…You may reply, as a Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in fact, affect my consciousness in this direct way without signs of "externality." Yes: and the result is that most people remain ignorant of the existence of both.

God is determined that you should be in every respect his friend, his companion, his dwelling place.

God is not interested in your "spiritual life." God is just interested in your life.