Quotes About Transformation

Spiritual transformation does not result from fixing our problems. It results from turning to God in the midst of them and meeting God just as we are. Turning to God is the core of prayer. Turning to God in our sin and shame is the heart of spiritual transformation.

If God loves and accepts you as a sinner, how can you do less? You can never be other than who you are until you are willing to embrace the reality of who you are. Only then can you truly become who you are most deeply called to be.

Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves, for no one can give up what he or she does not first possess.6 Jesus puts it this way: "If you're content with simply being yourself, you will become more than yourself" (Luke 18:14 The Message). Before we can become our self we must accept our self, just as we are. Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.

The secret place where we encounter God in a truly transformational way is in our inner self. Prayer is meeting God in the darkness and solitude of that secret place. Nothing less than such an encounter with God in the depths of our soul will provide access to the deep knowing of both God and self that is our true home.

As we see how deeply loved we are by God—in our depths, complexity, totality and sinfulness—we dare to allow God more complete access to the dark parts of our soul that most need transformation. And God precedes us on this journey, waiting to meet us in the depths of our self.

The problem with the false self is that it works. It helps us forget that we are naked. Before long, we are no longer aware of the underlying vulnerability and become comfortable once again.

But God wants something better than fig leaves for us. God wants us to be aware of our helplessness so we can know that we need Divine help. God's deepest desire for us is to replace our fig leaves with garments of durability and beauty (Genesis 3:21).

Guilt is not enough to motivate surrender.

Often looking back at who we have been helps us discern who we are called to be.

The more we identify with our psychologically and socially constructed self, the more deeply we hide from God, ourselves and others.

It is surprising how we fight against Love's accepting what we do not want to accept in ourselves—our defective, wounded, malicious self. But what a transformation when we can accept this poor self and allow love in!

The spiritual life of one person should never be a carbon copy of that of another. Peter and John had quite different personalities and quite different transformational journeys as they followed Jesus. Mary and Martha, two sisters whom Jesus loved deeply, each expressed their love for him uniquely. And he received both, not discouraging Martha from busying herself in service, simply encouraging her to not fret in doing so (Luke 10:38-42).

there are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ.

We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christlikeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become more like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

The mystery of the Christian gospel is that our deepest, truest self is not what we think of as our own separate self but the self that is one with Christ. This is the reason that the self that embarks on the journey of Christ-following is not the self that arrives.

Kingdom of Self The Kingdom of God • Ruled by self-interest • Ruled by love • Grasping • Releasing • Achievement • Gift • Effort • Consent • Independence • Interdependence • Holding • Releasing • Willful • Willing • Clenched fists and closed heart • Open hands and heart • Hard and brittle • Soft and malleable • Determination • Transformation

Transformational knowing of God comes from meeting God in our depths, not in the abstraction of dusty theological propositions.

A cynic by experience, a romantic by inclination and now a hero by necessity.

He never conquered polio, but he wrote a new narrative about his life that not only transformed him but won him the presidency.

We as a human community need to develop a new competency. We need to move from a single-cell social organism to a multicellular social organism. While making this evolutionary leap is no easy task, staring into the abyss is a strong motivator.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society—its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its key institutions—rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time. —Peter Drucker

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. —CARL JUNG

Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.

When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me.