Quotes About Self-emptying

the true followers of Jesus imitated his kenosis. As the Christ Hymn had pointed out, Jesus had achieved his high status only by emptying himself and accepting death on a cross.

In Christ, man who made himself God encounters God who made himself man. Unrivaled self-importance and pride encounters unrivaled self-emptying and humility.

only through losing ourselves and becoming reliant on God can we discover how to use those gifts the way he wants us to use them. We will find the artist God intends us to be when we empty ourselves of self and become open to his plan and to the inspiration of his Holy Spirit. Only then will we experience personal artistic revival.

Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms. In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the "suffering" of God. The Christ learned this self-emptying, or kenosis , 183 from his eternal life in the Trinity. It is not just Jesus who suffers, but the cross is the visible symbol of what is always going on inside of God!

The Christ, especially when twinned with Jesus, is a clear message about universal love and necessary suffering as the divine pattern—starting with the three persons of the Trinity, where God is said to be both endlessly outpouring and self-emptying.

In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate during Easter week.

Faith itself has no merit; in fact, by its nature it is self-emptying. It involves our complete renunciation of any confidence in our own righteousness and a relying entirely on the perfect righteousness and death of Christ.

I honor those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there.

Il ne saurait remplir des coupes impures. Tout ce qui provient du moi, si infime que cela soit, est péché :

Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.

The power of God is shown, not so much in his creation of the world or in any of his miracles, but rather in the fact that out of love God has "emptied himself" (Phil. 2:7), has poured himself out in generous self-giving, by his own free choice consenting to suffer and to die. And this self-emptying is a self-fulfillment: kenosis is plerosis.

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

A second guideline may be found from the implicit comparison between Christ and Adam.48 The heart of the Adamic temptation was to grasp for equality with God (Gen. 3:5: "You will be like God"). Adam attempted to seize equality with God; Christ did not. By contrast, Christ chose the way of self-emptying rather than self-aggrandizement. For these two reasons the second rendition is to be preferred.49

Imam Mawl?d speaks next about freedom, which is achieved when one realizes the qualities of shame and humility, and empties oneself of their opposites (shamelessness and arrogance).

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.

Counsels of Bahaudin You want to be filled. But something which is full has first to be emptied. Empty yourself so that you will fill properly, by observing these counsels, which you can do as duties to yourself: First Never follow any impulse to teach, however strong it might be. The command to teach is not felt as an impulsion.

Our self-forgetful gaze on God is immersed in God's self-emptying gaze on us, and in this mutual meeting we find rest.