Top 180 Eugene H. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “We don’t form our personal spiritual lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstances; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture. God does not put us in charge of forming our personal spiritualities. We grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by the Spirit.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

152. “Meditation is the primary way in which we guard against the fragmentation of our Scripture reading into isolated oracles. Meditation enters into the coherent universe of God’s revelation. Meditation is the prayerful employ of imagination in order to become friends with the text. It must not be confused with fancy or fantasy.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

153. “The North American church at present is conspicuous for replacing the Jesus way with the American way.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

154. “All the great realities that we can’t touch or see take form on ground that we can touch and see.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

155. “We need alert listeners to give dignity to those stretches in our lives when we are not aware of participating in anything we think might be embraced by the kingdom of God.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

156. “We live most days and most of the hours of those days in a world permeated with the making and purchasing of idols.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

157. “The congregation is the pastor’s place for developing vocational holiness. It goes without saying that it is the place of ministry: we preach the word and administer the sacraments, we give pastoral care and administer the community life, we teach and we give spiritual direction. But it is also the place in which we develop virtue, learn to love, advance in hope – become what we preach.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

158. “Rather, our eyes have become lazy, our attention spans atrophied. Our self-preoccupation had reduced us to tunnel vision.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

159. “The Holy Spirit’s instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

160. “The gospel doesn’t impose a way of life on us from without and tell us that we have to live up to it. It creates a new life within and then encourages and directs us to the living out of it.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

161. “There is no living the life of faith, whether by prophet or person, without some kind of sustaining vision like this. At some deep level we need to be convinced, and in some way or other we need periodic reminders, that no words are mere words. In particular, God’s words are not mere words. They are promises that lead to fulfillments. God performs what he announces. God does what he says.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

162. “Unlike mere action, prayer is not subject to immediate evaluation or verification. If we are addicted to “results” we will quickly lose interest in prayer.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

163. “God uses language to create and command us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

164. “I want my prayers, and the prayers of my friends, to ricochet off the rock faces of mountains, reverberate down the corridors of shopping malls, sound ocean deeps, water arid deserts, find a foothold in fetid swamps, encounter poets as they search for the accurate word, mingle their fragrance with wildflowers in Alpine Meadows, sing with the looms of Canadian lakes.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

165. “But sooner or later we find that not everything is to our liking in this book. It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find it doesn’t sit well with us at all, it becomes bitter in our stomachs. Finding ourselves in this book is most pleasant, flattering even, and then we find that the book is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in a reality, God’s reality, that doesn’t cater to our fantasies of ourselves.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

166. “Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

167. “There are a thousand ways of being religious without submitting to Christ’s lordship, and people are practiced in most of them. We live in golden calf country. Religious feeling runs high but in ways far removed from what was said in Sinai and done on Calvary. While everyone has a hunger for God, deep and insatiable, none us has any great desire for him. What we really want is to be our own gods and to have whatever other gods that are around to help in this work.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

168. “Prayer consists in the transformation of what we do in the name of Jesus to what Holy Spirit does in us as we follow Jesus.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

169. “There is nothing more common than for people who want to talk about God to lose interest in the people they are talking to.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

170. “Jesus wasn’t so much handing out information as reshaping our imaginations.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

171. “The so-called spirituality that was handed to me by those who put me to the task of pastoral work was not adequate. I do not find the emaciated, exhausted spirituality of institutional careerism adequate. I do not find the veneered, cosmetic spirituality of personal charisma adequate.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

172. “Language consists in equal parts of speaking and silence.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

173. “America leads the world at present in golden-calf production.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

174. “Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with a swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

175. “Language is not primarily informational but revelatory. The Holy Scriptures give witness to a living voice sounding variously as Father, Son and Spirit, addressing us personally and involving us personally as participants. This text is not words to be studies in the quiet preserves of a library, but a voice to be believed and loved and adored in workplace and playground, on the streets and in the kitchen. Receptivity is required.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

176. “An interest in souls divorced from an interest in Scripture leaves us without a text that shapes these souls. In the same way, an interest in Scripture divorced from an interest in souls leaves us without any material for the text to work on.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

177. “GOD proves to be good to the man who passionately waits, to the woman who diligently seeks. It’s a good thing to quietly hope, quietly hope for help from GOD. It’s a good thing when you’re young to stick it out through the hard times. 28-30 When life is heavy and hard to take, go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions: Wait for hope to appear. Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

178. “We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

179. “There is a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

180. “So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, “I am holy; you be holy.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

181. “I am interested in cultivating the fundamentally holy nature of all language, including most definitely the casual, spontaneous, unselfconscious conversational language.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

182. “The temptations that use the raw material of good for evil can continue unrecognized for a long time without awareness.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

183. “The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

184. “Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world – wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important – has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out – but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

185. “We learn the language of prayer by immersing ourselves in the language that God uses to reveal Himself to us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

186. “The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

187. “If we don’t know where we are going, any road will get us there. But if we have a destination – in this case a life lived to the glory of God – there is a well-marked way, the Jesus-revealed Way. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to the details of living life on this way. It is a protest against theology depersonalized into information about God; it is a protest against theology functionalized into a program of strategic planning for God.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

188. “And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

189. “There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

190. “Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

191. “The very moment you separate body and spirit, you end up with a corpse. Separate faith and works and you get the same thing: a corpse.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

192. “The truth of God explained their lives, the grace of God fulfilled their lives, the forgiveness of God renewed their lives, the love of God blessed their lives.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

193. “It is far easier to deal with people as problems to be solved than to have anything to do with them in community.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

194. “Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

195. “We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone’s fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

196. “The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general-staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when the solutions don’t work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

197. “The Scriptures, read and prayed, are our primary and normative access to God as He reveals Himself to us. The Scriptures are our listening post for learning the language of the soul, the ways God speaks to us; they also provide the vocabulary and grammar that are appropriate for us as we in our turn speak to God.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

198. “The psalmist’s and the Christian’s waiting and watching – that is, hoping – is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

199. “In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego.”

— Eugene H. Peterson