Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Exile (being where we don't want to be with people we don't want to be with) forces a decision: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself?...'I will do my best with what is here.'

Eugene H. Peterson
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
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.

Eugene H. Peterson
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
A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she acquires an appetite for the world of grace.

Eugene H. Peterson
One of the reasons that Christians read Scripture repeatedly and carefully is to find out just how God works in Jesus Christ so that we can work in the name of Jesus Christ.

Eugene H. Peterson
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
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.

Eugene H. Peterson
Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what's best - As above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You're in charge!

Eugene H. 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.

Eugene H. Peterson
The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has a time of harvest. All suffering, pain, emptiness, disappointment is seed: sow it in God and He will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.

Eugene H. Peterson
Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.

Eugene H. Peterson
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.

Eugene H. Peterson
You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.

Eugene H. Peterson
I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

Eugene H. Peterson
The life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which Gods grace and love are expereinced

Eugene H. Peterson
The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless.

Eugene H. Peterson
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.

Eugene H. Peterson
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.

Eugene H. Peterson
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
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.

Eugene H. Peterson
Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.

Eugene H. Peterson
Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God's conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn't get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests.

Eugene H. Peterson
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.

Eugene H. Peterson
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

Eugene H. Peterson
I don't want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of creation right now, any time now. Pay attention.

Eugene H. Peterson
Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.

Eugene H. Peterson
The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped — it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him.

Eugene H. Peterson