There is another kind of forsaking that may fall to the lot of some, and which they may find very difficult: the forsaking of such notions of God and his Christ as they were taught in their youth, of which they have begun to doubt the truth, but which to cast away seems like parting with every assurance of safety....

Some of the things a man may have to forsake in following Christ, he has not to forsake because of what they are in themselves. Neither nature, art, science, nor fit society, is of those things a man will lose in forsaking himself: they are God’s, and have no part in the world of evil...

The one bliss, next to the love of God, is the love of our neighbor. If any say, “You love because it makes you blessed,” I deny it: We are blessed because we love...

There is no joy belonging to human nature, as God made it, that shall not be enhanced a hundredfold to the man who gives up himself—though, in so doing, he may seem to be yielding the very essence of life...

To be no longer any care to ourselves, but know God taking divinest care of us, his own! To revel in the unsought love of those who love us as we love them! To know that we are in the child’s secret of existence, that we are pleasing in the eyes and to the heart of the Father! What a self is this to receive again from him for that we forsook!

Christ sought not his own, not anything but the will of his Father: we have to grow diamond-clear, true as the white light of the morning. Hopeless task! –were it not that he offers to come himself, and dwell in us...

When Jesus tells us we must follow him, he speaks first and always as the Son of the Father—and that in the active sense, as the obedient God, the Son who came expressly and only to do the will of the Father. At the moment he says Follow me, he is following the Father. It is nothing even thus to think of him, except thus we believe in him—that is, we do as he does...

Self, you may be my consciousness, but you are not my being. If you were, what a poor miserable, weak wretch I should be! But my life is hid with Christ in God, whence it came, and whither it is returning—with you certainly, but as an obedient servant, not a master...

 It is God feeds us, warms us, quenches our thirst. The will of God must be to us all in all; the life of the Father must be the joy of the child; we must know our very understanding his—that we live and feed on him every hour in the closest way. To know these things in the depth of our knowing is to deny ourselves and take God instead...

The self is given to us that we may sacrifice it; it is ours that we like Christ may have something to offer—not that we should torment it, but that we should abandon it utterly...

True victory over self is the victory of God in the man, not of the man alone. In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably. In crossing his natural, therefore, in themselves, right inclinations, a man may develop a self-satisfaction which in its very nature is a root of all sin.

We must become as little children, and Christ must be born in us: we must learn of him, and the one lesson he has to give is himself:..