A Long Obedience in the Same Direction Quotes

“religion is an inconvenience only to those who are traveling against the grain of creation, at cross-purposes with the way that leads to redemption.7”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“People who are forever breaking the rules, trying other roads, attempting to create their own system of values and truth from scratch, spend most of their time calling up someone to get them out of trouble and help repair the damage, and then ask the silly question “What went wrong?” As H. H. Farmer said, “If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, in that one. When we are in a community with those Christ loves and redeems, we are constantly finding out new things about them. They are new persons each morning, endless in their possibilities. We explore the fascinating depths of their friendship, share the secrets of their quest. It is impossible to be bored in such a community, impossible to feel alienated among such people.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“P. T. Forsyth wrote: The depth is simply the height inverted, as sin is the index of moral grandeur. The cry is not only truly human, but divine as well. God is deeper than the deepest depth in man. He is holier than our deepest sin is deep. There is no depth so deep to us as when God reveals his holiness in dealing with our sin . . . . [And so] think more of the depth of God than the depth of your cry. The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have no God to cry to out of the depth.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

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

“Everyone wants to be happy, to be blessed. Too many people are willfully refusing to pay attention to the One who wills our happiness and ignorantly supposing that the Christian way is a harder way to get what they want than doing it on their own. They are wrong. God’s ways and God’s presence are where we experience the happiness that lasts.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Fear GOD.” Reverence might be a better word. Awe. 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 we are not dealing with the God of creation and the Christ of the cross, but with a dime-store reproduction of something made in our image, usually for commercial reasons.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Evil is always temporary. “The worst does not last.”2 Nothing counter to God’s justice has any eternity to it.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“God loves you. He’s on your side. He’s coming after you. He’s relentless.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Traveling in the way of faith and climbing the ascent to Christ may be difficult, but it is not worrisome. The weather may be adverse, but it is never fatal. We may slip and stumble and fall, but the rope will hold us.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.”
― 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 tranquility, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“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

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

“If Christians worshipped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship...Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Mercy, GOD, mercy!”: the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ. In”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“And so Psalm 121 says no. It rejects a worship of nature, a religion of stars and flowers, a religion that makes the best of what it finds on the hills; instead it looks to the Lord who made heaven and earth. Help comes from the Creator, not from the creation. The Creator is always awake: he will never doze or sleep. Baal took long naps, and one of the jobs of the priests was to wake him up when someone needed his attention—and they were not always successful. The Creator is Lord over time: he “guards you when you leave and when you return,” your beginnings and your endings. He is with you when you set out on your way; he is still with you when you arrive at your destination. You don’t need to, in the meantime, get supplementary help from the sun or the moon. The Creator is Lord over all natural and supernatural forces: he made them. Sun, moon and rocks have no spiritual power. They are not able to inflict evil upon us: we need not fear any supernatural assault from any of them. “GOD guards you from every evil.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Good poetry survives not when it is pretty or beautiful or nice but when it is true: accurate and honest.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society