A Long Obedience in the Same Direction Quotes

“For if a pastor is not in touch with joy, it will be difficult to teach or preach convincingly that the news is good.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Because he refused to take himself seriously and decided to take God seriously, Barth burdened neither himself nor those around him with the gloomy, heavy seriousness of ambition or pride or sin or self-righteousness. Instead, the lifting up of hands, the brightness of blessing.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“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, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“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, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquillity, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. 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, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Patience is drawing on underlying forces; it is powerfully positive, though to a natural view it looks like just sitting it out. How would I persist against positive eroding forces if I were not drawing on invisible forces? And patience has a positive tonic effect on others; because of the presence of the patient person, they revive and go on, as if he were the gyroscope of the ship providing a stable ground. But the patient person himself does not enjoy it. PAUL GOODMAN”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, starting over.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“True knowledge of God is born out of obedience.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We do not have a God who forever indulges our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies. The Christian is not a naive, innocent infant who has no identity apart from a feeling of being comforted and protected and catered to but a person who has discovered an identity given by God which can be enjoyed best and fully in a voluntary trust in God. We do not cling to God desperately out of fear and the panic of insecurity; we come to him freely in faith and love.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Humility is the obverse side of confidence in God, whereas pride is the obverse side of confidence in self.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Charles Williams once described as the “passion of patience.” We are in a similar apprenticeship. But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis. We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“George MacDonald put it with epigrammatic force: “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.”5”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“My feelings are important for many things. They are essential and valuable. They keep me aware of much that is true and real. But they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. “As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the LORD is round about his people.” The image that announces the dependable, unchanging, safe, secure existence of God’s people comes from geology, not psychology.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“One threat to our security comes from feelings of depression and doubt. The person of faith is described in this psalm as “a rock-solid mountain . . . nothing can move it.” But I am moved. I am full of faith one day and empty with doubt the next. I wake up one morning full of vitality, rejoicing in the sun; the next day I am gray and dismal, faltering and moody. “Nothing can move it”?—nothing could be less true of me. I can be moved by nearly anything: sadness, joy, success, failure. I’m a thermometer and go up and down with the weather.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding that you were wrong in thinking that you had, or could get, the strength, education and training to make it on your own; it is deciding that you have been told a pack of lies about yourself and your neighbors and your world. And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“The usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“The truth about what is wrong with the world is that I and the neighbor sitting beside me have sinned in refusing to let God be for us, over us and in us.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us. Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“enervates”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him: Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will we always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle? But then”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“But we do know that much of what we commonly describe as Christian behavior is not volitional at all—it is enforced. But worship is not forced. Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Every time we worship our minds are informed, our memories refreshed with the judgments of God, we are familiarized with what God says, what he has decided, the ways he is working out our salvation.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“A Christian,” wrote Augustine, “should be an alleluia from head to foot.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“We are invited to bless the Lord; we are commanded to bless the Lord. And then someone says, “But I don’t feel like it. And I won’t be a hypocrite. I can’t bless God if I don’t feel like blessing God. It wouldn’t be honest.” The biblical response to that is “Lift up your praising hands to the Holy Place, and bless GOD!” You can lift up your hands regardless of how you feel; it is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated. Go through the motions of blessing God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along. “For why do men lift their hands when they pray? Is it not that their hearts may be raised at the same time to God?”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Every community of Christians is imperiled when either of these routes are pursued: the route of defining others as problems to be solved, the way one might repair an automobile; the route of lumping persons together in terms of economic ability or institutional effectiveness, the way one might run a bank. Somewhere between there is community—a place where each person is taken seriously, learns to trust others, depend on others, be compassionate with others, rejoice with others. “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Scripture knows nothing of the solitary Christian. People of faith are always members of a community. Creation itself was not complete until there was community, Adam needing Eve before humanity was whole. God never works with individuals in isolation, but always with people in community.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Christians who master Psalm 132 will be protected from one danger, at least, that is ever a threat to obedience: the danger that we should reduce Christian existence to ritually obeying a few commandments that are congenial to our temperament and convenient to our standard of living. It gives us, instead, a vision into the future so that we can see what is right before us. If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. And they must be connected. There must be an organic unity between them.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“I’ll shower blessings on the pilgrims who come here, and give supper to those who arrive hungry.” The devout mind goes back to those years in the wilderness when God gave water from the rock, manna from the ground and quail from the skies, and fashions a hope for abundant, eternal providence.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society