Quotes about Renewal

In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen. ... Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ.

And it seems to me the world is a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again and again. You've got your mind on so many other things. You are so busy with this and that, you don't see it. You don't notice it.

Men talk much of a new birth. The fact is fundamental. But the mistake is in treating it as an incident which can only happen to a man once in a lifetime: whereas the whole journey of life is a succession of them. A new life springs up in the soul with the discovery of every new agency by which the soul is raised to a higher level of wisdom: goodness and joy.

Because God is full of life, I imagine each morning Almighty God says to the sun, Do it again; and every evening to the moon and the stars, Do it again; and every springtime to the daisies, Do it again; and every time a child is born into the world asking for curtain call, that the heart of the God might once more ring out in the heart of the babe.

He stands at the door and knocks, but the latch is on the inside, and only we can open it. He has enacted the consecration, but the communion depends upon us; and whether our work will ever be finished depends entirely on how we relive His life and become other Christ's, for His Good Friday and His passion avail us nothing unless we relive it in our own lives.

The Old Testament begins with the Genesis of heaven and earth through God making all things. The New Testament had another kind of Genesis, in the sense that it describes the making of all things new.

We grow weary, of course, but God is unwearied in giving us new strength.

Thanks to the Spirit, though the priest grows older in years, he becomes younger through ascent to the altar of God where youth is renewed.

But where the surrender is to God, we get ourselves back ennobled and enriched.

Before He gives strength, He makes us feel our emptiness.

But He pointed to His torn and battered Self on a hill, and then added that only through the Cross in their lives will there ever be beauty of soul in the newness of life.

It is wise for us to forget our troubles, there are always new ones to replace them.