Quotes About Transformation

Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All "word of God" vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.

We don't form our personal spiritual lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstances; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture. God does not put us in charge of forming our personal spiritualities. We grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by the Spirit.

The gospel doesn't impose a way of life on us from without and tell us that we have to live up to it. It creates a new life within and then encourages and directs us to the living out of it.

The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan. He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for a kingdom. A LONG OBEDIENCE

Jesus wasn't so much handing out information as reshaping our imaginations.

Prayer consists in the transformation of what we do in the name of Jesus to what Holy Spirit does in us as we follow Jesus.

Every day I review the ways he works, I try not to miss a trick. I feel put back together, and I'm watching my step. GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits. The

GOD made my life complete when I placed all the pieces before him. When I got my act together, he gave me a fresh start. Now I'm alert to GOD's ways; I don't take God for granted. Every day I review the ways he works; I try not to miss a trick. I feel put back together, and I'm watching my step. GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

That's the fullness of God's salvation. It's not only deliverance from something but also deliverance to something. He not only delivers us from sin, but he also delivers us into a land of salvation that's flowing with milk and honey.

If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.

The message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, and the life changes what we presently are. He is not a means by which we solve problems. He is not a means to avoid problems. He creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.

Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim.

GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.

Prayer is what develops in us after we step out of the center and begin responding to the center, to Jesus.

but there is a broad similarity between the directions in the psalm and the contemporary movement known as "behavior modification"—which in a rough-and-ready way means that you can act yourself into a new way of being.

Many think that the only way to change your behavior is to first change your feelings.

But there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behavior we can change our feelings.

Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.

Don't waste your time on useless work, mere busywork, the barren pursuits of darkness. Expose these things for the sham they are. It's a scandal when people waste their lives on things they must do in the darkness where no one will see. Rip the cover off those frauds and see how attractive they look in the light of Christ.   Wake up from your sleep, Climb out of your coffins; Christ will show you the light!  

To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us.

Congregation is composed of people, who, upon entering a church, leave behind what people on the street name or call them.

I'll call nobodies and make them somebodies; I'll call the unloved and make them beloved. In the place where they yelled out, 'You're nobody!' they're calling you 'God's living children.