“And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily—open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
“I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God’s business.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
“I think it’s important, according to me anyway, to have some mentors in the cemeteries. People who did it right, before there were crowds of people to become important.”
― 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.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
“I don’t think that brothers and sisters in the kingdom of God should fight. I think that’s bad family manners.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
“You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
“Self is the soul minus God. ”
― Eugene H Peterson
“No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most “entire” context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God’s revelation.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
“Pastors enter congregations vocationally in order to embrace the totality of human life in Jesus’ name. We are convinced there is no detail, however unpromising, in people’s lives in which Christ may not work his will. Pastors agree to stay with the people in their communities week in and week out, year in and year out, to proclaim and guide, encourage and instruct as God work his purposes (gloriously, it will eventually turn out) in the meandering and disturbingly inconstant lives of our congregations.
― Eugene H. Peterson
This necessarily means taking seriously, and in faith, the dull routines, the empty boredom, and the unattractive responsibilities that make up much of most people’s lives. It means witnessing to the transcendent in the fog and rain. It means living hopefully among people who from time to time get flickering glimpses of the Glory but then live through stretches, sometimes long ones, of unaccountable grayness. Most pastor work takes place in obscurity: deciphering grace in the shadows, searching out meaning in a difficult text, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life. This is hard work and not conspicuously glamorous.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
“The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”
― Eugene H. Peterson
May many of these Eugene Peterson quotes be immortalized for generations to come, and may his influence continue to impact those he loved dear while he was alive. Thank you, Lord, for the life of Eugene Peterson.
More of Eugene Peterson on ChurchLeaders:
Eugene Peterson Passes Joyfully Into Glory at 85
Eugene Peterson: What Most Pastors Don’t Know about Pastoring
This Is What Eugene Peterson Thinks Is Wrong With the Church Today
Bono & Eugene Peterson Discuss Their Love for the Psalms
