Quotes about Transformation

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.

The focus of spiritual formation is the formation of our spirit.

We cannot behave "on the spot" as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does.

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives—is simply the person we become.

Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. It combines freedom and power with service and love.

A great deal of what goes into "training them [us] to do everything I said" consists simply in bringing people to believe with their whole being the information they already have as a result of their initial confidence in Jesus—even if that initial confidence was only the confidence of desperation.

We are not only asking to be forgiven, we are asking for guidance and wisdom and strength to respond differently tomorrow.