Quotes about Development

This process is a slow one, but one that will always bear fruit.

More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.

The intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children. But character, the inner directedness of the self, must develop to the point where that is possible.

In relation to spiritual disciplines, the most helpful distinction is the difference between trying to do something and training to do something.

To train means arranging our life around those practices that enable us to do what we cannot now do by direct effort. The point of training is to receive power, so we arrange our life around practices through which we get power.

The spiritual side of the human being, Christian and non-Christian alike, develops into the reality that it becomes, for good or ill.

Christ is the only one capable of communicating to and developing within the believer an accurate image and idea of God.

Disciplines are activities that are in our power and that enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort.

Religion as a historical human practice was therefore not of divine origin, and its developments and activities had to be of an entirely human origin.

Things good and bad will happen to us, of course. But what our life amounts to, at least for those who reach full age, is largely, if not entirely, a matter of what we become within.

So my fifth point is this: spiritual formation is the process whereby the inmost being of the individual takes on the quality or character of Jesus himself.

Spiritual formation is a matter of reworking all aspects of the self.