Quotes from Eugene Peterson

GOD made my life complete when I placed all the pieces before him. When I got my act together, he gave me a fresh start. Now I'm alert to GOD's ways; I don't take God for granted. Every day I review the ways he works; I try not to miss a trick. I feel put back together, and I'm watching my step. GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help.

The exile was the "crucible of Israel's faith". They were pushed to the edge of existence where they thought they were hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and they found that in fact they had been pushed to the center, where God was.

Christian spirituality means living in the mature wholeness of the gospel. It means taking all the elements of your life - children, spouse, job, weather, possessions, relationships - and experiencing them as an act of faith. God wants all the material of our lives.

Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.

That's the fullness of God's salvation. It's not only deliverance from something but also deliverance to something. He not only delivers us from sin, but he also delivers us into a land of salvation that's flowing with milk and honey.

When I look for help in developing my pastoral craft and nurturing my pastoral vocation, the one century that has the least to commend it is the twentieth. Has any century been so fascinated with gimmickry, so surfeited with fads, so addicted to nostrums, so unaware of God, so out of touch with the underground spiritual streams which water eternal life?

Psalm 131 is a maintenance psalm. It is functional to the person of faith as pruning is functional to the gardener: it gets rid of that which looks good to those who don't know any better, and reduces the distance between our hearts and their roots in God.

Morris again. "This is good, helpful. Now that we are talking this way, I realize that for those twenty years that I was an engineer sitting in the pew each Sunday, I never had a patient pastor—they were all trying to get me 'with the program,' shape me up, get me, as they put it, 'involved.' I don't want to become a pastor like that. I don't think that is what pastors are for.

Cross and resurrection are the South and North polls, true gospel polarities, of a single, undivided, salvation world. Remove either Paul and you've got salvation.

God at his best (and he always is) does not have favorite children.

What is described in Scripture as the basic sin, the sin of taking things into your own hands, being your own god, grabbing what is there while you can get it, is now described as basic wisdom: improve yourself by whatever means you are able; get ahead regardless of the price, take care of me first.