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On Living Well

Brief Reflections on Wisdom for Walking in the Way of Jesus

Author Eugene H. Peterson

Foreword by Rich Villodas

Hardcover

$20.00 US

PRH Christian Publishing | WaterBrook

5.75"W x 8.52"H x 0.83"D | 12 oz | 12 per carton

On sale Nov 16, 2021 | 240 Pages | 9781601429797

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In these never-before-published stories, sayings, and biblical teachings, the beloved author and translator of The Message Bible shows us how the wisdom of deep faith helps us live well.

“Calming, encouraging, and profound.”—Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church

“Jesus’ words bring us the news of an expanded world, a bright world, a full-dimensioned world, a world in which God rules, mercy is common experience, and love is the daily working agenda.”

Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) was one of the most beloved authors, pastors, poets, and professors of our time. While millions have read his bestselling paraphrased Bible translation, The Message, far fewer have heard his direct practical insights and wisdom about how to live well.

Eugene knew the extraordinary spirituality of ordinary life. He understood that we actually become more, not less, human as we grow to live like Jesus. And living like Jesus means living well.

On Living Well collects some of Eugene’s best never-before-published short writings to help you walk in the way of Jesus with a little more courage, passion, and hope—by offering new ways to practice generosity, community, prayer, simplicity, worship, inner peace, and so much more . . . even with the challenges of today.

This book is a rich feast for the soul, ideal as a daily spiritual touchpoint or simply to nourish a heart hungry for pastoral wisdom. It is your invitation to enter into the meaningful simplicity of life with Jesus in a world of immense beauty, real difficulty, and endless wonder.

“Among the many gifts of human language, the greatest is the use of words for the worship of God, who is the Word. On these pages, over and over, Peterson’s words raise our sense of God’s sheer worthiness out of the clutter of confusion and complication. The simplicity and strength of language in On Living Well is seldom found but should be greatly treasured. These words are pure acts of worship that will bring the reader into beautiful worship of the source of all beauty.”—Karen Swallow Prior, research professor of English, as well as Christianity and Culture, at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of On Reading Well

“Wisdom literature in the biblical tradition helps us discern the good life as God intends it. Here we have a collection of Eugene Peterson’s pastoral wisdom, reflections on the Scriptures, and meditations on the life and way of Jesus. These words carry the tenderness of Peterson’s voice and the keenness of his insight. Here is fertilizer for our formation and flourishing in the Jesus kind of life.”—Rev. Glenn Packiam, associate senior pastor of New Life Church and author of Blessed Broken Given

“We don’t hear the word sage much anymore because there are so few sages these days. But Eugene Peterson was one of deep wisdom. In an age awash in banal how-to books, On Living Well is something else entirely—something we need. On Living Well is a series of meditations on what constitutes the good life, written by a man who indeed knew how to live well. This book brims with the wisdom our day needs.”—Brian Zahnd, pastor of Word of Life Church and author of When Everything’s on Fire

“Eugene insisted that the crux of Christian spirituality was to get all these God-truths lived, to get them moving into the street. God’s wisdom, Eugene knew, is always relational, always drawing us into the questions, complications, dangers, and joys of genuine life pursued before God and alongside one another. This is why the context of much that we read here—pastoral words written to Eugene’s small congregation—matters so much. These pages are not pious abstractions but personal words to friends, inviting all of us to embrace God’s enchanting invitation to truly live.”—Winn Collier, director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary and author of Love Big, Be Well and A Burning in My Bones

Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message Bible, authored more than thirty books, including Every Step an Arrival, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, and the spiritual classics Run with the Horses and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. He earned a degree in philosophy from Seattle Pacific University, a graduate degree in theology from New York Theological Seminary, and a master’s degree in Semitic languages from John Hopkins University. He also received several honorary doctoral degrees. He was founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, where he and his wife, Jan, served for twenty-nine years. Peterson held the title of professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College, British Columbia from 1998 until his death in 2018. View titles by Eugene H. Peterson

The Word Was First

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

Jeremiah 1:5

The Word was first. The Word was previous to everything else. Before we were conceived and took shape in our mothers’ wombs, before we were born, before anything happened, there was the Word.

Before there was a sun or a moon or stars, there was the Word. Before there were trees and flowers and fish, there was the Word. Before there were governments and hospitals and schools, there was the Word.

If the Word were not first, everything would have gone awry. If the Word were second—or third or fourth—we would have lost touch with the deep, divine rhythms of creation. If the Word were pushed out of the way and made to be a servant to the action and program, we would have lost connection with the vast interior springs of redemption that flow out of our Lord, the Word made flesh.

When the Word is treated casually or carelessly, we wander away from the essential personal intimacies that God creates . . . by his Word.

On Birth

Every birth is a wonder. The world is invaded by life. Space and time are penetrated by being. Emptiness is displaced by shape and movement. Silence is filled with tone and melody. Solitude becomes society. A birth produces tremors and shakes us in the depths of our person, moving our very universe.

Uncalculated energies are released; unpredictable creations are formed. We are moved by those energies, changed by them, and loosed from death and plunged into life by them. Birth is both a physical experience and a faith event.

Our first birth thrusts us kicking and squalling into the light of day. Our second birth places us singing and believing in the light of God. By acts of love previous to us, we are launched into ways of seeing and being that become truly ours. We are launched into life.

Though an everyday reality, birth is always awesome, whether as a new baby in the world or as a new creature in Christ.

We Are Not Stuck

Distracted, inconstant people like us need a large attention-getting device for noticing the main show, seeing the huge God-dimensions of our lives, and listening to the large God-story into which all our stories fit.

There is much about those stories that we, of course, cannot change. We cannot change our heights or our ages. We cannot change our basic intelligences. We cannot change our places of birth or our parentages. We can, at best, make modifications on only our bodily shapes and emotional temperaments. There is a great deal of sheer givenness in our lives, circumstances, and conditions that we must deal with as it is.

Frequently, we project fantasies of what we want onto the church and then walk away grumpy because we don’t find what we expect. Other times, we become paralyzed with guilt because we feel the church isn’t living up to its calling, but all our guilt does is drain more energy out of us. What we simply must do is attend to what is going on—this Holy Spirit work that is continuous between the Acts of the Apostles and the acts of the Christians of our community, here in our place, now in our time.

But still, we are not stuck with these lives of ours the way they are. We can change—can be changed. That is the promise of God in Jesus Christ and the experience that is at the heart of Christian living: conversion.

What this means is simple. At the center, at the core of our beings, change is possible. A change from being lost to found, a change from self-centeredness to God-centeredness, a change from anxiously grasping to confidently receiving the life of faith in Jesus Christ.

These changes are going on all around us. Sometimes they are taking place in us. An American view of conversion sees it as characteristically sudden and dramatic, and if it isn’t sudden and dramatic, then it doesn’t qualify. But most conversions are long and quiet. We miss the drama of these stories because we are not sufficiently trained biblically to discern Spirit work.

You don’t have to stay the way you are.

On Growing

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.

Matthew 4:1–2

It is hard to be a human being. Of all the creatures in this world, we have the toughest task. It is easy to be a crocus: no decisions to make, no schedules to keep, and no disappointments to endure. The crocus sleeps all winter, and then as the snow recedes and the sun warms the earth, the crocus breaks through the ground with blossoms that bring standing applause from all of us. It is easy to be a cat: no anxieties about aging, no perplexities about world affairs, and no guilt about real or imagined adulteries. The cat grooms itself on the carpet, purrs on any convenient lap, and holds the opinions of the servile humans in haughty disdain.

But being human is not easy. Not at all easy. The seasons do not automatically develop us into maturity. Our instincts do not naturally guide us into a superior contentment. We falter and fail. We doubt and question. We work and learn. And just when we think we have it figured out, something else comes up that throws us for a loop.

Jesus is the best look we have at what it means to be human—really human. We look at him and see the incredible attractiveness and profound wonder of being a woman or a man. We also see how difficult it is. We see him in contest against every force that would diminish us into something less than human. We see him confront and deal with every influence that would divert us from living to the glory of God.

We get our basic orientation in the difficulties of being human by carefully attending to what Jesus said and did in his forty days of temptation and testing in the wilderness. To become like him, we must be changed, shaped, and deepened by the Word of God.

Fresh Salt

Remember the words of our Lord when he said, “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” (Luke 14:34).

The answer to his question is simple.

It can’t.

You have to go back to the salt mines. You have to dig some fresh salt.