Quotes from Renovare

The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Jesus-centered spiritual formation is the process of being transformed into the image of Christ, through a relationship of intimacy with God, by the power of the Spirit, in order to live a good and beautiful life of faith, hope, love, joy, and peace—a life that will be a blessing to oneself and to others and will glorify God now and for all eternity. — James Bryan Smith

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners. — Søren Kierkegaard

If then you are wise, you will show yourself rather as a reservoir than as a canal. A canal spreads abroad water as it receives it, and a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, and thus without loss to itself communicates its superabundant water. In the Church at the present day we have many canals but few reservoirs.

A world-class violinist was once asked how she came to master her instrument. "Planned neglect," she responded. When she began violin, she explained, other necessary work came before practicing violin. It wasn't until she decided to neglect everything else each day until after violin practice that she started becoming a virtuoso.

Second, one must intend and decide to actually do something to bring the vision into reality. A vision without intention is merely a daydream.

Relationship with God is personal but not private, intimate but not individualistic. When you choose to follow Jesus, you join a community, the church: a community so connected to Jesus that Scripture calls it his very body, the body of Christ.

over many centuries and through multiple human authors, God has so superintended the development of the Bible that it speaks to us about real life (zoë) and teaches us how to live "with God

When Jesus walked among humankind there was a certain simplicity to being his disciple. Primarily it meant to go with him, in an attitude of observation, study, obedience, and imitation. There were no correspondence courses. One knew what to do and what it would cost.

Jesus Christ is alive and here to teach his people himself. He has not contracted laryngitis. His voice is not hard to hear, his vocabulary is not difficult to understand. — Richard Foster

Jesus Christ carries on intercession for us in heaven; the Holy Ghost carries on intercession in us on earth; and we the saints have to carry on intercession for all men. — Oswald Chambers

So take good care of your time. Watch how you spend it, for nothing is more precious. In the twinkling of an eye, heaven can be won or lost.

The Spiritual Disciplines in and of themselves have no merit whatsoever. They possess no righteousness, contain no rectitude. Their purpose—their only purpose—is to place us before God. After that they have come to the end of their usefulness. But it is enough.

Spiritual Disciplines involve doing what we can do to receive from God the power to do what we cannot do. And God graciously uses this process to produce in us the kind of person who automatically will do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.

Freedom comes not from the absence of restraint but from the presence of discipline.

The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace. — Thomas Merton

Our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. Jesus is the divine life operating under human conditions. — C. S. Lewis

Any kingdom that defines glory in terms of a bloody cross is obviously peculiar. — Stanley Hauerwas

God has a name. This points to a key difference between persons and things. God is not a nameless energy or abstract idea. — Thomas Oden

A Spiritual Discipline is an intentionally directed action by which we do what we can do in order to receive from God the ability (or power) to do what we cannot achieve by direct effort.

The purpose of God's gifts is to unite us in a unity which is like the unity of the Father and the Son. — Thomas Aquinas

The truth is, we cannot just think ourselves into a new way of being; we must live ourselves into a new way of being.

The truth is that we only learn to pray all the time everywhere after we have resolutely set about praying some of the time somewhere. — John Dalrymple