Quotes about Transformation

God is the ultimate salvage artist. He loves to restore things to their original condition—and make them even better.

For anyone who knows what it is to weep over sin or loss or pain, Heaven offers a beautiful promise: one day God himself will wipe the tears from our eyes. And even better, one day he will transform those tears into laughter.   The Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Revelation 7:17

An unholy world will never be won to Christ by an unholy church.

R. A. Torrey writes, "We will not be disembodied spirits in the world to come, but redeemed spirits, in redeemed bodies, in a redeemed universe.

Christ's resurrection is the forerunner of our own, and our resurrection is the forerunner of the earth's.

Now, in comparison to both Matthew 17 and Revelation 1, it appears that the risen Christ, before his ascension, was not yet fully glorified. If he would have been glorified, surely his identity would have been immediately apparent to Mary Magdalene (John 20:14), the disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:15-16), and Peter and the apostles when they saw him on the shore (John 21:4). Consider

God isn't just preparing a place for us. He is preparing us for that place.

So where does one begin? With self-crucifixion. In effect, we go to our own funeral and bury the self-will so that God's will can reign supremely in our hearts. Our will has no power to do God's will until it first dies to its own desires and the Holy Spirit brings a fresh power within.

When God brings us to salvation, the most remarkable thing we see is that he transforms our hungers. He changes not just what we do but what we want to do. This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us — "for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose" (Philippians 2:13).

The radically changed behavior of the disciples after the resurrection is the best evidence of the resurrection," declares Thomas C. Oden of Drew University. "Some hypothesis is necessary to make plausible the transformation of the disciples from grieving followers of a crucified messiah to those whose resurrection preaching turned the world upside down. That change could not have happened, according to the church's testimony, without the risen Lord.

Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us: Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

Capturing the beauty of the conversion of the water into wine, the poet Alexander Pope said, "The conscious water saw its Master and blushed.