Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

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

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Distance Quotes

2. “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.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

3. “Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

4. “Waiting means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

5. “The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

6. “If you don’t take a Sabbath, something is wrong. You’re doing too much, you’re being too much in charge. You’ve got to quit, one day a week, and just watch what God is doing when you’re not doing anything.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

7. “We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

8. “Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

9. “My job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

10. “Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

11. “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

12. “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

13. “Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

14. “No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

15. “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

16. “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

17. “People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

18. “Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

21. “Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

22. “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

23. “God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible – at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

25. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

26. “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

27. “O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

28. “We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don’t see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

29. “There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

30. “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

31. “I believe God takes the things in our lives – family, background, education – and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don’t think God wastes anything.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

32. “Suffering attracts fixers the way road-kills attract vultures.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

33. “That’s the whole spiritual life. It’s learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

34. “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

35. “The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We’re called to have people follow Jesus. We’re called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

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

— Eugene H. Peterson

40. “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.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

41. “I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God’s business.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

44. “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

45. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

46. “Resurrection does not have to do exclusively with what happens after we are buried or cremated. It does have to do with that, but first of all it has to do with the way we live right now. But as Karl Barth, quoting Nietzsche, pithily reminds us: “Only where graves are is there resurrection.” We practice our death by giving up our will to live on our own terms. Only in that relinquishment or renunciation are we able to practice resurrection.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

47. “If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

48. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

49. “Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

50. “When you are part of a megachurch, you have no responsibility to anybody else.”

— Eugene H. Peterson