Quotes from Eugene Peterson

Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests.

An interest in souls divorced from an interest in Scripture leaves us without a text that shapes these souls. In the same way, an interest in Scripture divorced from an interest in souls leaves us without any material for the text to work on.

Left to ourselves we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some thing we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image.

One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly non- heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous models. That always comes as a shock to newcomers to Scripture: Abraham lied; Jacob cheated; Moses murdered and complained; David committed adultery; Peter blasphemed.

Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All "word of God" vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.

When besieged, I'm calm as a baby. When all hell breaks loose, I'm collected and cool.

There is nothing more common than for people who want to talk about God to lose interest in the people they are talking to.

Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.

All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.

We don't form our personal spiritual lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstances; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture. God does not put us in charge of forming our personal spiritualities. We grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by the Spirit.

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

The gospel doesn't impose a way of life on us from without and tell us that we have to live up to it. It creates a new life within and then encourages and directs us to the living out of it.