spiritual maturation Quotes

At times God's best pupils experience the most rigorous and continuous courses. Eventually those who prove to be men of Christ will thereby become distinguished alumni of life's school of affliction, graduating with honors.

The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality . . . the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega . . . critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion.

Christian living does not mean to be good but to become good; not to be well, but to get well; not being but becoming; nor rest but training. We are not yet, but we shall be. It has not yet happened, but it is the way. Not everything shines and sparkles as yet, but everything is getting better.

Truth is we must plant and we must water if we are to make progress with our children in holiness but only the Holy Spirit can change our children more and more into the likeness of Jesus. Our problem is we tend to depend upon our planting and watering rather than the Lord.

As it is with spiritual discoveries and affections given at first conversion, so it is in all subsequent illuminations and affections of that kind; they are all transforming. There is a like divine power and energy in them as in the first discoveries; they still reach the bottom of the heart, and affect and alter the very nature of the soul, in proportion to the degree in which they are given. And a transformation of nature is continued and carried on by them to the end of life, until it is brought to perfection in glory.

Spiritual growth is like childbirth: you dilate, then you contract, you dilate, then you contract again. as painful as it all feels, it's the necessary rhythm for reaching the ultimate goal of total openness.

Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.