Quotes about Transformation

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 aim of spiritual formation is the transformation of the self, and that it works through transformation of thought, transformation of feeling, transformation of social relations, transformation of the body, and transformation of the soul. When we work with all these, transformation of the spirit (heart, will) very largely, though not entirely, takes care of itself.

If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all…. One reason why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.

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

His Heart, Our Heart As disciples (literally students) of Jesus, our goal is to learn to be like him. We begin by trusting him to receive us as we are. But our confidence in him leads us toward the same kind of faith he had, a faith that made it possible for him to act as he did.

The full manifestation of the power of this death in your disposition and conduct depends upon the measure in which the Holy Spirit imparts the power of the death of Christ.

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

Love is something that has three essential characteristics: 1.) Love arises in people whose lives are already marked by certain qualities of the whole self, chief of which are faith in our all-sufficient God and joyful embracing of death to self. 2.) Love involves an orientation of the whole self toward what is good and right. 3.) Love has amazing, supernatural power for good as it indwells the individual.

In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not "Did I do the specific things in Jesus' illustrations?" but "Am I being the kind of person Jesus' illustrations are illustrations of?

An older Franciscan brother said to Brennan Manning on the day he joined the order, "Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another.

"Do I really want this?" This question needs answering for the simple reason that if God is going to be with us, we should expect that our lives will be extremely different from ordinary human life.