Top 200 John Ortberg Jr. Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Our soul’s problem, however, is not its neediness; it’s our fallenness. Our need was meant to point us to God. Instead, we fasten our minds and bodies and wills on other sources of ultimate devotion, which the Bible calls idolatry.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

102. “Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

103. “Going through open doors means I will have to be able to trust God with my future when the path I’m called to take does not look like the obvious one.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

104. “A boss who interrupts an employee a lot is called an extrovert, whereas an employee who interrupts a boss too often is called an ex-employee.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

105. “The church is in the hope business.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

106. “You have a “turn” every time you have an opportunity to choose. But most of us only see a tiny fraction of the choices we have.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

107. “Jesus is mysterious not just because of what we don’t know about him, but because of what we do know about him.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

108. “The life of Abraham Lincoln is by most accounts an amazing study in character formation. Yet he was notoriously disorganized; he even had a file in his law office labeled If you can’t find it anywhere else, try looking here.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

109. “Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

110. “Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

111. “Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

112. “Jesus gave the world its most influential movement.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

113. “The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

114. “Make your life about something bigger than your life.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

115. “To paraphrase a line from a movie: There will be great pain, and there will be great joy. In the end, joy wins. So if joy has not yet won, it is not yet the end. Jesus is crucified. The pain is overwhelming – not the end. Jesus is risen – the joy is overwhelming.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

116. “True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness. This is most visible in extraordinary lives, in saints and martyrs. But it is no less true for ordinary people like us.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

117. “It only makes sense to ask God for guidance in the context of a life committed to “seeking first the kingdom.””

— John Ortberg Jr.

118. “Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

119. “The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

120. “God sees with utter clarity who we are. He is undeceived as to our warts and wickedness. But when God looks at us that is not all He sees. He also sees who we are intended to be, who we will one day become.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

121. “We are too often double espresso followers of a decaf Sovereign.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

122. “The Holy Spirit will lead you to be with people as Jesus would be with them if He were in your place.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

123. “Waiting on the Lord is a confident, disciplined, expectant, active, sometimes painful clinging to God.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

124. “Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

125. “Good habits are enormously freeing – we accomplish good things almost on autopilot. One study from Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people take every day aren’t decisions, but habits. Good habits free us, but when sin becomes a habit, our souls lose their freedom.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

126. “The miracle of Sunday is that a dead man lives. The miracle of Saturday is that the eternal Son of God lies dead.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

127. “Ever console or scold people hurt in human relationships that satisfaction comes from God alone? Stop. Adam’s fellowship with God was perfect, and God Himself declared Adam needed other humans.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

128. “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” No, I am its keeper, not its captain. I did not make it, and I cannot save it from death. That’s why soul-care is a different task than self-care. I do not care for my soul only for my own sake. It is only mine on loan, and it is coming due soon.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

129. “To follow Jesus means learning to arrange my life around those practices that will enable me to stay connected to him and live more and more like him. In short, this is just another way of defining a spiritual discipline. A spiritual discipline is any activity that can help me gain power to live life as Jesus taught and modeled it.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

130. “It’s better to have the faith to embrace reality with all its pain than to cling to the false comfort of a painless fantasy.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

131. “Normally, if someone’s legacy will outlast their life, it’s apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

132. “We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

133. “It’s not what’s on the other side of the door that gives me confidence to go through; it’s the one who goes with me.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

134. “Brother Lawrence called this “practicing the presence” of God, and the most important part of that practice lay in “renouncing, once and for all, whatever does not lead to God.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

135. “It may not quite reflect the maturity of “Thy will be done,” but it is better to be an honest mess before God than a dishonest “saint.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

136. “In the beginning, we’re told, was the word. Every once in a while someone shows up on the planet who is word-obsessed and word-gifted; and the light and darkness get named again. In our day, that someone is Buechner.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

137. “No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.” Elie Wiesel.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

138. “A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?”

— John Ortberg Jr.

139. “Because you have been created by God as a unique person, his plan to grow you will not look the same as his plan to grow anyone else. What would grow an orchid would drown a cactus.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

140. “What do we do in the dark night? We do nothing. We wait. We remember that we are not God. We hold on. We ask for help. We do less. We resign from things, we rest more, we stop going to church, we ask somebody else to pray because we can’t. We let go of our need to hurry through it. You can’t run in the dark.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

141. “The Bible does not say you are God’s appliance; it says you are his masterpiece. Appliances get mass-produced.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

142. “Jesus was often busy, but never hurried.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

143. “Dear God, I sinned yesterday, I sinned again today, and I’m planning to go out and do the same sin tomorrow. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

144. “We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

145. “Underneath the surface of the skeptic is fear – fear of being disappointed.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

146. “God never grows two people the same way. God is a hand-crafter, not a mass-producer.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

147. “A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

148. “The soul of one person can become intertwined with the soul of another. Aristotle is supposed to have said: “What is friendship? It is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” The ancient term for such a relationship is “soul friend,” defined as one with whom I have no secrets. The ancient Celtic Christians said that “a person without a soul friend is like a body without a head.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

149. “God says, “I have set before you an open door,” not “I have set before you a finished script.”

— John Ortberg Jr.

150. “The more concerned you are about your own fulfillment, the less fulfilled you will be.”

— John Ortberg Jr.