Spiritual Formation Quotes

“The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.”
― Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

“We become either agents of God's healing and liberating grace or carriers of the sickness of the world.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation. We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image--destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenness upon them . . . The direction of our spiritual growth infuses all we do with intimations of either Life or Death.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“There is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like truth at all because it carries responsibility.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“By extending love and comfort to the broken places around us, we keep watch with Jesus in his sorrow.”
― Erin M. Straza, Comfort Detox: Finding Freedom from Habits that Bind You

“He must increase, but I must decrease.”
― John the Baptist

“If a church is good at making disciples it will be good at making leaders because in the end, a good spiritual formation plan will lead to an accelerated spiritual multiplication.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Next Steps For Leading a Missional Church

“Although we should affirm the wonder and mystery of sexual intimacy and romantic attraction as God's good creations, we need to set these aesthetic enjoyments within the context of the Christian virtues of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and patience in suffering.

Bringing this together, our pastoral approach should be double-edged, seeking to challenge our culture's worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formative involves both RESISTANCE and REDIRECTION. But is is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries. Failure to attend to the dynamics of our desires leads to inevitable self-deception regarding the 'freedom' of our actions. Especially within our sexual lives, our hearts must be truly captivated by the goodness of the Christian vision of life, so that our whole self is drawn toward it, or our commitment to live in tune with it will be brittle.”
― Jonathan Grant, Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision for Christian Relationships in a Hypersexualized Age

“Knowing what we believe and why we believe it is not an option for the Christian, because as believers, OUR BELIEFS ARE THE VERY HEART OF WHO WE ARE.”
― Patty Houser, A Woman's Guide to Knowing What You Believe: How to Love God With Your Heart and Your Mind

“God gave us His Word so we could know truth. His truth. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth.”
― Patty Houser, A Woman's Guide to Knowing What You Believe: How to Love God With Your Heart and Your Mind

“The sort of people that we become is, in large part, determined by the voices that we choose to listen to. Truly, we do not have a choice of listening versus not listening. We all obey certain voices, and thus the question is not “Will I listen?” but “Which voices will I listen to?” But it is not only a matter of choosing to listen to good voices over bad ones. If only it were as simple as the proverbial whispering angel and devil on our shoulders. It is also a matter of whether we will choose to listen to different voices, voices that don’t sound the same as our own. Will we listen to the voices of different cultures, ethnicities, backgrounds and beliefs? Will we listen to the voices that unsettle us and might make us feel anxious or guilty? If we choose to listen only to voices that echo our own, we will be limited in our growth and stunted in our spirituality. Choosing to tune in to only one or two stations may be comfortable, but it is not transformative. The voices we want to hear are not always the same as the voices we need to hear.”
― Adam McHugh

“We need to retrain our brains, our hearts, and our wills to seek a comfort that truly satisfies.”
― Erin M. Straza, Comfort Detox: Finding Freedom from Habits that Bind You

“What if our common sense has been negatively influenced by our addiction to comfort?”
― Erin M. Straza, Comfort Detox: Finding Freedom from Habits that Bind You

“No one has to teach God's people to know God.”
― Henry Hon, ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House

“There is no quick and easy way to make the life of God the life we lead. It takes years of sacred reading, years of listening to all of life, years of learning to listen through the filter of what we have read. A generation of Pop Tarts and instant cocoa and TV dinners and computer calculations and Xerox copies does not prepare us for the slow and tedious task of listening and learning, over and over, day after day, until we can finally hear the people we love and love the people we've learned to dislike and grow to understand how holiness is here and now for us. But someday, in thirty years and thirty days perhaps, we may have listened enough to be ready to gather the yield that comes from years of learning Christ in time, or at least, in the words of the Rule of Benedict, to have made "a good beginning.”
― Joan Chittister

“And Our Lord took me by the hand, and led me through an underground passage where it is neither hot nor cold, where the sun shines not, and where neither wind nor rain can enter—a place where I see nothing but a half-veiled light, the light that gleams from the downcast Eyes of the Face of Jesus.

My Spouse speaks not a word, and I say nothing save that I love Him more than myself; and in the depths of my heart I know this is true, for I am more His than mine. I cannot see that we are advancing toward our journey's goal since we travel by a subterranean way; and yet, without knowing how, it seems to me that we are nearing the summit of the Mountain.”
― Thérèse de Lisieux

“The secret to extraordinary faith is fully engaging our MINDS, as well as our hearts, because DYNAMIC FAITH REQUIRES A HEALTHY BALANCE OF BOTH.”
― Patty Houser, A Woman's Guide to Knowing What You Believe: How to Love God With Your Heart and Your Mind

“I believe that the Gospel was never intended to solely be the wedding music of our relationship with Jesus, an expression of the Beginning of our lives with Christ. Rather, it is to be a life giving song that is heard in our souls every moment of our spiritual lives - a beautiful sound track that plays from beginning to end.”
― Alan Kraft

“Believers need to be drawing nourishment from Christ continually.”
― Henry Hon, ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House

“Most believers learn passively from clergy. However, no matter how good and uplifting this person's teaching, as long as the members are not actively ministering and speaking Christ themselves, growth lacks.”
― Henry Hon, ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House

“When I reflect on the legacies left behind from my childhood, I am indebted to acknowledge the role my mother, grandmother, and godmothers played in my spiritual formation and personal development.”
― Monét Robinson, Morning By Morning Volume 1

“Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow.”
― Joan Chittister

“Into the midst of all this indistinguishable cacophony of life, the bell tower of every Benedictine monastery rings "listen." Listen with the heart of Christ. Listen with the lover's ear. Listen for the voice of God. Listen in your own heart for the sound of truth, the kind that comes when a piece of quality crystal is struck by a metal rod.”
― Joan Chittister

“The spiritual life... is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.”
― Joan Chittister

“I come, in conclusion, to the difference between "projecting" the future and making a promise. The "projecting" of "futurologists" uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one only to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else's future. If the promise is serious enough, one is brought to it by love, and in awe and fear. Fear, awe, and love bind us to no selfish aims, but to each other. And they enforce a speech more exact, more clarifying, and more binding than any speech that can be used to sell or advocate some "future." For when we promise in love and awe and fear there is a certain kind of mobility that we give up. We give up the romanticism of progress, that is always shifting its terms to fit its occasions. We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“Spiritual formation without the circumcision of the heart is simply behaviour modification and no real transformation really happens.”
― Kingsley Opuwari Manuel

“Now the realm of feelings may appear on first approach to be an area of total chaos. But this is not so. There is also an order among feelings, and it is a much simpler one than most people think. When we properly cultivate, with divine assistance, those few feelings that should be prominent in our lives, the remainder will fall into place.

What then are the feelings that will dominate in a life that has been inwardly transformed to be like Christ? They are the feelings associated with love, joy, and peace... [which] are not mere feelings, but conditions of the whole person which are accompanied by characteristic positive feelings.

Love, joy, and peace are--we recall--the three fundamental pieces of the fruit (note the singular) of the spirit. They mutually interpenetrate and inform one another, and naturally express themselves in the remainder of that *one* fruit: patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
― Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

“Whenever God is conceived in the soul, it is always an allowing, never an accomplishment.”
― Richard Rohr, Just This

“The goal of our time is not productivity, but presence.”
― Jen Pollack Michel

“To take up one's cross is to proclaim, "My made-up self is dead to missing the mark of my original design. It has been crucified with Christ. I will not find real life apart from faith in the One who lives in me. The prideful, independent self of no use to God or to me, and I claim that it is no more,”
― Marilyn Vance, Self to Loser Self to Find