Quotes about Transformation

So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and "trying to carry it out." Rather, "The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to 'inject' His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin

We must put all our desires on the cross.

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

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.

Third, the "correcting" to be done is not a matter of "straightening them out." It is not a matter of hammering on their wrongness and on what is going to happen to them if they don't change their ways. It is a matter of restoration.

What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ from a life that is one with his resurrected reality day by day, learning obedience through inward transformation.

He ruined soul must be willing to recognize its own ruin before it can discover how to enter a different path.

Change only comes through breakdown or revolution.

Yet, without this realization of our utter ruin and without the genuine revisioning and redirecting of our lives, which that bitter realization naturally gives rise to, no clear path to inner transformation can be found. It is psychologically and spiritually impossible.

They bring the life of the kingdom to other people. They bring that life in themselves. That's what Jesus himself said, and that's what he did. When he came, he said, "Repent for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand." What was at hand? The kingdom that was in him. As people looked at him and listened to him, they realized that the kingdom of God was there and that it was available to them, and they became disciples of Jesus because of that.