Quotes from Eugene Peterson

It was included in the Songs of Ascents to develop just those aspects of life under God and in Christ which my sometime friend Kelly lacked and which we all need.

And my work is not to fix people. It is to lead people in the worship of God and to lead them in living a holy life.

Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit.

Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim.

What we require is obedience—the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when an accurate memory of God's ways is combined with a lively hope in his promises.

Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church.

The fact that we are a family of faith does not mean we are one big happy family. The people we encounter as brothers and sisters in faith are not always nice people. They do not stop being sinners the moment they begin believing in Christ.

Evil is always temporary. "The worst does not last." Nothing counter to God's justice has any eternity to it.

Under the image of the Trinity we discover that we do not know God by defining him but by being loved by him and loving in return.

When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is turn it into an instrument for controlling others, either putting or keeping them "in their place." The history of such religious manipulation and coercion is long and tedious. It is little wonder that people who have only known religion on such terms experience release or escape from it as freedom. The problem is that the freedom turns out to be short-lived.

Sin destroys our capacity to live. It weakens our vitality. ... It incapacitates us from living out a healthy love and a vigorous peace. We need deliverance from it. God provides deliverance from it, decade after decade, generation after generation, 'according to the will of our God and Father.