Thomas a Kempis Quotes

A rebirth out of spiritual adversity causes us to become new creatures.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but he is building a palace.

I am my own sanctuary and I can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.

Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

We all want to be renewed, don't we?

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds

Like any other spiritual transformation or renewal, conversion must begin with an honest and a sincere admission that we need God's trans-formative power in our lives to achieve any real change, no matter the perspective from which we might begin.

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

Do not despair, thinking that you cannot change yourself after so many years. Simply enter into the presence of Jesus as you are and ask him to give you a fearless heart where he can be with you. You cannot make yourself different. Jesus came to give you a new heart, a new spirit, a new mind, and a new body. Let him transform you by his love and so enable you to receive his affection in your whole being.

One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

The baptism of the spirit will do for you, what a phone booth did for Clark Kent, it will change you into a different being.

I want to be healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor-sharp.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.

I used to believe that people are only born once, but now I feel I have been reborn, like I was given a new life. I see myself as a child, full of energy and hope.

Kabbalah is all about change. It isn't about being proud of our good qualities: the wisdom is about transforming our darkness into light.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

The grace thou hast will soon be less, if thou addest not more to it.

To him who, though by no means near the end, is yet advancing, He is the way; to him who has put off all that is dead He is the life.

We all hope for breakthrough rebirth moments.

We are Jesus Christ's; we belong to him. But even more, we are increasingly him. He moves in and commandeers our hands and feet, requisitions our minds and tongues. We sense his rearranging: debris into the divine, pig's ear into silk purse. He repurposes bad decisions and squalid choices. Little by little, a new image emerges.

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.

In the life of the spirit there is no ending that is not a beginning.

One can be emptied out and be filled up.

We need to understand that Christianity is about changing; it is not about a religion.