John Ortberg Quotes

God desires to change us from the inside out. Renewing our minds, starving our self-destructive tendencies, and teaching us to form new habits.

Things have changed. Now it's not the outward appearance, it's the inward man that I'm trying to change. And that's the message I bring to the people.

Whatever God wants to do through you, He will do in you first. You've got to be what you want to see.

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.

A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings.

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

Being somebody who wants to be religious doesn't make me perfect and doesn't make me necessarily any better than anybody else. It maybe makes me better than I would have been if I didn't have that level.

We are all on a journey of faith, and we have to polish that faith.

We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.

You change your life by changing your heart.

You can't have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation.

To transcend limitations and form positive new patterns of life based on who you know you can be rather than who you were yesterday, you must give up the modes of thinking, feeling and behaving that only keep you chained to your past.

As we regularly spend time reading God's Word and talking to Him in prayer, we put ourselves in position for Him to do things in our lives we could never do on our own.

It is not because we are drawn to prayer that we first begin to pray; more often, we have to begin prayer, and then the taste and the desire for it come.

I'm not big on faith rules, but if I had to choose one, it would be that every person must choose a faith issue upon which to hang her hat that requires her to change - not somebody else.

True change is within; leave the outside as it is.

Replacing physical priorities with spiritual priorities can change everything.

The ultimate reason for meditating is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world or, to put it another way, to transform ourselves so we can become better human beings in order to serve others in a wiser and more efficient way. It gives your life the noblest possible meaning.

God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us.

There are people that say they will do better but they never do better. They have no power in them to do better until they come to Christ.

Transforming yourself is a means of giving light to the whole world.

Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. What provides the motive, the energy for discipline? This force I believe to be love. I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.

Remember that this is not something we do just once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.