Self-Renunciation

I think the most selfish, self-centered individual in this world is not an unsaved person. It's a Christian who accepts the salvation God offers freely and goes out and lives for himself.

The 19th and 20th century Canadian-American pastor Harry Ironside once told a story of a new Christian who gave his testimony during a church service. Beaming with joy, the man spoke of how God had re...

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end...

I once heard a sermon that compared believers to commercials for God. “And God doesn’t need any bad commercials,” I remember the preacher saying. It stuck with me, and from then on I often made decisi...

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams observes that the biblical ideal is not so much that we need to deny the self as to decenter the self: To see the self in truth, as an integral member of a comm...

I can lose my job; I might be released from a position. My career can come to an end when I retire from the organization I work in. But my vocation comes from God; it remains and is not in the end som...

The one misery of man is self-will, the one secret of blessedness is the conquest over our own wills. To yield them up to God is rest and peace. What disturbs us in this world is not “trouble,” but ou...

The deeper we are willing to enter into the death of self, the more shall we know of the mighty power of God, and the perfect blessedness of a perfect trust.

Growth in grace is growth downward. It is the forming of a lower estimate of ourselves. It is a deepening realization of our nothingness. It is a heartfelt recognition that we are not worthy of the le...

Until you have given up your “self” to Him you will not have a real self.

Die before you have to die. There is no chance after.

We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.

The Christian life is a great paradox. Those who die to self, find self. Those who die to their cravings will receive many times as much in this age, and, in the age to come, eternal life (Luke 18:29)...

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the resu...

None of us are there yet, but if we each have this attitude, we will put to death our reactions to criticisms and offenses. And though we may still stumble, we will learn that carrying the cross is no...

The way to think about self-denial is to deny yourself only a lesser good for a greater good… Jesus wants us to think about sacrifice in a way that rules out all self-pity. This is, in fact, just what...

God creates out of nothing. Therefore, until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.

I sometimes think that the very essence of the whole Christian position and the secret of a successful spiritual life is just to realize two things: I must have complete, absolute confidence in God an...

If you are ever going to be an ambassador in the hands of a God of glorious and powerful grace, you must die. You must die to your plans for your own life. You must die to your self-focused dreams of ...

The moral project for a Christian is to die to the old self and rise to new life in Christ. This dying and rising is the rhythm of a life of discipleship, a life devoted to becoming more and more lik...

Self-renunciation is the way to world-dominion.

Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.

This being born again is no longer the active transfer of our will from the realm of inclination into that of obedience. It is, in the sense of the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, t...

The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.

You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.

A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-suffiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage.

“You will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.”

The people who have been made larger by suffering are brave enough to let parts of their old self die. Down in the valley, their motivations changed. They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered.

Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complain...

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.