John Ortberg Quotes

I want to help people understand how to study the Scriptures with other people, to give them an overview of Scripture and assume that by understanding the Scriptures better, the Holy Spirit will bring to mind the right stories, the right teachings.

My aim is that every sermon series I preach is prepared as though I were teaching a college-level course.

Someone recommended that I read the Bible, and it was then I discovered that I knew nothing about it.

There are usually multiple messages that could be preached from the same text.

If you want to understand Jesus, you have to study the whole Bible. Christian duty is not defined solely by the words in red.

Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible - that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that.

I deal with more practical issues of the Bible.

My father was a no-nonsense, dedicated, and focused minister, and there was usually a sermon he needed to prepare for or a Scripture he needed to study, and that always came first.

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

I am no theologian. I am a layman. I am among those who are preached to, and who listen. It is not for me to preach. I should not willingly forego being a listener, a man who reads the Gospels and then listens to what others say that our Lord meant. But sometimes a listener speaks out, and listens to his own voice.

One thing that helps to stretch me is to listen to other preacher's sermons. Every year, I will listen to at least ten other preachers, both to hear God speak to me, and also to evaluate their preaching to see what I can learn and how I can improve my own preaching.

I hear people all the time say, well I read through the Bible last year. Well, so what? I'm all for reading through the Bible. But how much of that got on the inside, or did they just cover three more chapters today? I would never discredit reading the Scriptures, but it is important to meditate on it.

Make the study of the Torah your chief occupation; speak little, but accomplish much.

I've been studying the Bible for a long time. I remember that after the first five years or so of diligently studying the Word, I didn't feel like I had made any progress. There were a lot of things in my life that were out of order, and I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere.

One of my passions is helping people understand the Word. I think the most important thing we should be thinking about is who created us and how we were created to live. So I thought that I want to spend a lot of my time actually studying God's Word.

Because education is such a broad area, I chose to focus on language learning.

He that has but one word of God before him, and out of that word cannot make a sermon, can never be a preacher.

The Bible and studying the Bible has been an important part of my life.

If there is any verse that you would like left out of the Bible, that is the verse that ought to stick to you, like a blister, until you really attend to its teaching.

Some clergymen make a motto, instead of a theme, of their texts.

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things-eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies-since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.

Not fault of teaching spider if little spider pay more attention to catching fly than doing lesson.

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.

It's not by amusing oneself that one learns.

Study the Bible to know about God. Obey the Bible to really know God.