Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Eugene H. Peterson's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Eugene H. Peterson's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 99 quotes on this page collected since November 6, 1932! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.

    Eugene H. Peterson (2006). “God's Message for Each Day: Wisdom from the Word of God”, Thomas Nelson Inc
  • People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.

  • In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

  • There are no experts in the company of Jesus. We are all beginners, necessarily followers, because we don’t know where we are going.

    Jesus  
  • Too much of the world's happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower his. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn't have to be that way.

    Eugene H. Peterson (2012). “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society”, p.118, InterVarsity Press
  • If we don't understand how metaphor works we will misunderstand most of what we read in the Bible. No matter how carefully we parse our Hebrew and Greek sentences, no matter how precisely we use our dictionaries and trace our etymologies, no matter how exactly we define the words on the page, if we do not appreciate the way a metaphor works we will never comprehend the meaning of the text.

  • One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.

    Jesus  
  • The word 'christian' means different things to different people. To one person it means a stiff, upright, inflexible way of life, colorless and unbending. To another it means a risky, surprised-filled adventure, lived tiptoe at the edge of expectation...If we get our information from the biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.

    Mean  
  • The moment the organic unity of belief and behaviour is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created.

  • If we get our information from the biblical material there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.

  • I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

  • I get asked, 'What do you miss most about being a pastor?' I think it's the intimacy, the incredible gift of intimacy. You go through death with somebody, with their families, and there's an intimacy that comes through that that is just incomparable.

    Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. August 12, 2011.
  • People learn to shop for churches; there is no loyalty to the church. They're consumers being attracted to one product or another. I think it's sacrilege, to tell you the truth, it really is.

  • When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

    Stories  
  • Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.

    Eugene H. Peterson (1997). “Leap over a wall: earthy spirituality for everyday Christians”
  • I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

    Eugene H. Peterson (2006). “God's Message for Each Day: Wisdom from the Word of God”, Thomas Nelson Inc
  • Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?

  • That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.

    Eugene H. Peterson (1999). “Stories of Jesus: From the Text of the Message”, Navpress Publishing Group
  • The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account.

  • Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.

  • The gospel is never about everybody else; it is always about you, about me. The gospel is never truth in general; it's always a truth in specific. The gospel is never a commentary on ideas or cultures or conditions; it's always about actual persons, actual pains, actual troubles, actual sin; you, me; who you are and what you've done; who I am and what I've done.

    Eugene H. Peterson (1997). “Leap over a wall: earthy spirituality for everyday Christians”
  • Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.

  • Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

    Eugene H. Peterson (2012). “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society”, p.54, InterVarsity Press
  • The silence that makes it possible to hear God speak also makes it possible for us to hear the world's words for what they really are - tinny and unconvincing lies.

    Eugene H. Peterson (1993). “Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community”, p.93, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
  • Love is not a word that describes my feelings; it is not a technique by which I fulfill my needs; it is not an ideal, abstract and pure, on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence with or in response to God in relation to persons.

    Eugene H. Peterson (2006). “God's Message for Each Day: Wisdom from the Word of God”, Thomas Nelson Inc
  • Repentance is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. Repentance is the most practical of all words and the most practical of all acts. It is a feet-on-the-ground-kind-of-word. It puts a person in touch with the reality that God creates.

    Jesus  
  • To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can't separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes" (The Way of Jesus, Eugene H. Peterson, 22).

    Jesus   Mean  
  • It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.

  • If people don't know their pastor, it's easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It's also easy for pastors, who don't know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers.

  • Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be - you get a fresh start, your slate's wiped clean. Count yourself lucky - God holds nothing against you and you're holding nothing back from Him.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 99 quotes from the Author Eugene H. Peterson, starting from November 6, 1932! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!