Invitation to a Journey Quotes

“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

“Our cross is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised by God into wholeness of life in the image of Christ right there at that point.

So the process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place at the points of our unlikeness to Christ, and the first step is confrontation.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“We depend upon cognitive assent and affective assurances to substantiate the reality of our relationship with God. If we can't "know" or "feel" God, we customarily doubt our relationship with God. But such "knowing" and "feeling" restrict God to the narrow limits of our minds and senses and reduce our relationship with God to the maintenance of such feedback.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Our attitudes, our perspectives, our ways of relating to others, our methods of responding to the circumstances of the world around us, our self-image, even our understanding of God have all been shaped by the destructive values and dehumanizing structures of the world's brokenness.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“This means that our spiritual journey is not our setting out (by gathering information and applying it correctly) to find God (as an object "out there" to be grasped and controlled by us). It is a journey of learning to yield ourselves to God and discovering where God will take us.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Our relationship with God, not our doing, is the source of our being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.4”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“As long as we try to fill this yearning with things other than God and activities other than God's purposes, we are unfulfilled and incomplete.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“purgation deals essentially with our "trust structures," especially those deep inner postures of our being that do not rely on God but on self for our well-being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Holistic spirituality is a pilgrimage of deepening responsiveness to God’s control of our life and being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Spiritual formation is not an option! The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland Jr., Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Without a holistic corporate spirituality, there is a powerful tendency to become heterodox or heretical. Corporate spirituality is essential, because privatization always fashions a spirituality that in some way allows us to maintain control of God. Without brothers and sisters to call us to accountability, we will work powerfully to maintain that control.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“When we continue to offer the discipline, that discipline becomes a means of grace God works through and moves to transform that dead portion of our body into life in the image of Christ. One morning you wake up and discover, often to your amazement, that the discipline is no longer a discipline; it is now the natural outflow of a being that has been raised to new life in Christ—that the Spirit of the One who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, the Spirit who also dwells in you, has made alive your dead body also. You did not do it. God did it. But God did it through the discipline you offered.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“The Old Testament prophets continually remind God’s people that the worship of God is incompatible with social”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“the process of spiritual shaping is a primal reality of human existence. Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation! Every thought we hold, every decision we make, every action we take, every emotion we allow to shape our behavior, every response we make to the world around us, every relationship we enter into, every reaction we have toward the things that surround us and impinge upon our lives—all of these things, little by little, are shaping us into some kind of being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Gracious and loving God, you know the deep inner patterns of my life that keep me from being totally yours. You know the misformed structures of my being that hold me in bondage to something less than your high purpose for my life. You also know my reluctance to let you have your way with me in these areas. Hear the deeper cry of my heart for wholeness and by your grace enable me to be open to your transforming presence in this reading. Lord, have mercy.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“If spiritual formation is”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Since the disciplines are activities we perform”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“A genuine spiritual discipline is an act of loving obedience that becomes a means of God’s grace to make us alive where we have been dead in our sins.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“It is possible for the practice of the classical disciplines itself to become a subtle form of works righteousness in which we come to think that by our faithful exercise of the disciplines we are transforming ourselves into the image of Christ.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Holistic spiritual disciplines are acts of loving obedience we offer to God steadily and consistently, to be used for whatever work God purposes to do in and through our lives.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Such empowerment is what Paul describes as the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22-23 RSV). These come not by our effort or by attempts to inculcate them in our actions, but are gifts that emerge as we release control of our lives and come to entrust ourselves to God.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Our relationships with others are not only the testing grounds of our spiritual life but also the places where our growth toward wholeness in Christ happens. There is a temptation to think that our spiritual growth takes place in the privacy of our personal relationship with God and then, once it is sufficiently developed, we can export it into our relationships with others and “be Christian” with them. But holistic spirituality, the process of being formed in the image of Christ, takes place in the midst of our relationships with others, not apart from them. We learn to be Christ’s for others by seeking to be yielded and obedient to God in the midst of our relationships.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Our cross is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised by God into wholeness of life in the image of Christ right there at that point. So the process of being formed in the image of Christ takes place at the points of our unlikeness to Christ, and the first step is confrontation.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“We live in a culture that has reversed the biblical order of being and doing. Being and doing are integrally related, to be sure, but we have to have the order straight. Our doing flows out of our being. In spiritual formation the problem with being formed is that we have a strong tendency to think that if only we do the right things we will be the right kind of Christian, as though our doing would bring about our being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“If you are the Son of God, speak, that these stones may become bread” (Mt 4:3). Do you see the nature of this temptation? The temptation is for Jesus to use his empowerment by the Spirit to do something that will authenticate God’s call. More significantly, it is a temptation to reverse the roles of being and doing, the temptation our culture has succumbed to. We tend to evaluate our own meaning, value and purpose, as well as those of others, not by the quality of our being but by what we do and how effectively we do it.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

“Spiritual formation is not an option! The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being.”
― M. Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation