A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (The IVP Signature Collection)

by Eugene H. Peterson

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

two biblical designations for people of faith that are extremely useful: disciple and pilgrim.

Everyone who travels the road of faith requires assistance from time to time.

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.

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision.

Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.

We Christians believe that life is created and shaped by God and that the life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which God’s grace and love are experienced.

listen (with a straight face) and go home and pray that person will one day find the one sufficient reason for going to church, which is God.

worship is not forced. Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to.

An excellent way to test people’s values is to observe what we do when we don’t have to do anything,

worship gives us a workable structure for life; worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God; worship centers our attention on the decisions of God.

God made us, redeems us, provides for us.

natural, honest, healthy, logical response to that is praise to God.

Judgment is not a word about things, describing them; it is a word that does things, putting love in motion, applying mercy, nullifying wrong, ordering goodness.

God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life. Too often we think of religion

frequently, it is not saying anything about