Quotes about Transformation

Have I not destroyed my enemy when I have made him into my friend?

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Having looked the beast of the past in the eye, having asked and received forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

Love, in the sense of spontaneous, unreflective action, spells the death of the old man.

The truth of the matter is that the whole world has already been turned upside down by the work of Jesus Christ

The real difference in the believer who follows Christ and has mortified his will and died after the old man in Christ, is that he is more clearly aware than other men of the rebelliousness and perennial pride of the flesh, he is conscious of his sloth and self-indulgence and knows that his arrogance must be eradicated. Hence there is a need for daily self-discipline.

Nevertheless, it is the free grace of the resurrected One that now also goes after the individual, overcomes the doubter, and creates in him the Easter faith.

Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the "religious." The world had crept into the very heart of the monastic life, and was once more making havoc. The monk's attempt to flee from the world turned out to be a subtle form of love for the world.

How impossible, how utterly absurd it would be for the disciples-- these disciples, such men as these!--to try and become the light of the world! No, they are already the light, and the call has made them so.

No one can become a new man except by entering the Church, and becoming a member of the body of Christ. It is impossible to become a new man as a solitary individual. The new man means more than the individual believer after he has been justified and sanctified. It means the Church, the Body of Christ, in fact it means Christ himself.

When a man really gives up trying to make something out of himself—a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called clerical somebody), a righteous or unrighteous man,… when in the fullness of tasks, questions, success or ill-hap, experiences and perplexities, a man throws himself into the arms of God… then he wakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian.

After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.