Quotes from Eugene Peterson

If we don't know where we are going, any road will get us there. But if we have a destination - in this case a life lived to the glory of God - there is a well-marked way, the Jesus-revealed Way. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to the details of living life on this way. It is a protest against theology depersonalized into information about God; it is a protest against theology functionalized into a program of strategic planning for God.

If vocational holiness is to be anything more than a pious wish, pastors must dive to the ocean depths of prayer.

I am busy because I am lazy. I indolently let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself. It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us.

The church is never in so much danger as when it is popular and millions of people are saying "I'm born again, born again, born again.

That is Jeremiah's accusation: "You have found a safe place, haven't you! This nice, clean temple. You spend all week out in the world doing what you want to do, taking advantage of others, exploiting the weak, cursing the person who isn't pliable to your plans, and then you repair to this place where everything is in order and protected and right.

I didn't want to be a religious professional whose identity was institutionalized. I didn't want to be a pastor whose sense of worth derived from whether people affirmed or ignored me. In short, I didn't want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture.

So watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times! 17 Don't live carelessly, unthinkingly. Make sure you understand what the Master wants. 18-20 Don't drink too much wine. That cheapens your life. Drink the Spirit of God, huge draughts of him. Sing hymns instead of drinking songs! Sing songs from your heart to Christ. Sing praises over everything, any excuse for a song to God the Father in the name of our Master, Jesus Christ.

I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits.

Priest and wise man and prophet alike felt that their professional well-being was threatened by Jeremiah's singularity. Panicked, they plotted his disgrace. Their "law" and "counsel" and "words" were in danger of being exposed as pious frauds by Jeremiah's honest and passionate life.

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.

Soul" is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. "Soul" carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women.

Neither explaining suffering nor offering a program for the elimination of suffering, Lamentations keeps company with the extensive biblical witness that gives dignity to suffering by insisting that God enters our suffering and is companion to our suffering.