How Does God Change Us? Quotes

“Have you been brought to despair of what you can achieve in your sanctification? If not, have the courage to look yourself squarely in the mirror. Repent. See your profound poverty. Ask the Lord to forgive your arrogance. As you descend down into death, into knowledge of the futility of what inner change you can achieve by your own efforts, it is there, right there, in that dismay and emptiness, that God lives. It is there in that desert that he loves to cause the waters to flow and the trees to bloom. Your despair is all he needs to work with. “Only acknowledge your guilt” (Jer. 3:13). What will ruin your growth is if you look the other way, if you deflect the searching gaze of Purity himself, if you cover over your sinfulness and emptiness with smiles and jokes and then go check your mutual funds again, holding at bay what you know in your deepest heart: you are wicked.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, How Does God Change Us?: "Real Change for Real Sinners"

“Mortification is just a theological word for "putting to death." It refers to the duty of every Christian to kill sin. As John Owen put it in the most important work ever written on killing sin, "Be killing sin or sin will be killing you." None of us is ever in neutral. Right now, every one of us who is in Christ is either killing sin or being killed by sin. Either getting stronger or getting weaker. If you think you're coasting, you're actually going backward. It may feel as if you're currently in neutral, but our hearts are like gardens: if we aren't proactively rooting out the weeds, the weeds are growing.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, How Does God Change Us?: "Real Change for Real Sinners"