No matter what we’ve done, or who we’ve been, we always have the choice to start anew — to be reborn. This is the beautiful message of this holiday season: that even in the darkest time of the year, a new light can be born that illuminates and transforms the world.

Throughout the ages, great souls have pointed to the continuing cycle of rebirth and the promise it holds for the transfiguration of each of us as individuals. Here are some inspiring quotes to help us make the life-affirming choice as it presents itself in each new moment:

Life, death and rebirth are inevitable.
— Rig Veda

Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.
— Buddha

Marvel not that I say unto thee, Ye must be born again.
— New Testament

So long as a person is capable of self-renewal they are a living being.
— Henri Frederic Amiel

The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.
— G.K. Chesterton

The Right Request for Spiritual Rebirth

Guy Finley, founder of the OneJourney project, has an inspiring message about how we can all experience renewal in this special writing:

When it comes to the possibility of spiritual rebirth, it isn’t that God does not will this for all of his earth-clad children. Quite the contrary: In this world of ours the goodness of God’s Will is always active through his Son. What nullifies the birth of this eternal Life within us is that we have yet to learn how to ask and receive it. What is freely offered to us goes unaccepted because we haven’t yet the heart to surrender ourselves for it. We cannot let go. Too many parts of us cling to their fleeting and altogether conditional sense of self – so that we remain willful and self-certain instead of being reborn a citizen of Heaven.

For anyone willing to see the truth of this secret self-centeredness, and the sorrow of the separate sense of existence it perpetuates, this unseen state of arrogance may be found running through many, if not all, of our prayers. Just see how the sense of “I” dominates our dialogues with God. With this finding in mind we must ask ourselves a spiritually telling question: “How many times need the word ‘I’ appear in any prayer of ‘Thy will be done’?”

In the majority of our supplications to God a perpetual sense of “what I want” rests squarely above all that it requests. Virtually undetected by us is that this same petitioning nature sits there within us as a would-be ruler over the very relationship that it asks God to come in and be the King of! We are betrayed in the very core of ourselves by an imagined wealth of sincerity coupled with certainty. In these self-pleasing states of self are found ample amounts of selfish motive and its attendant means, neither of which (it turns out) can bring about the release of one drop of God’s Good Grace.

What must be done spiritually is the undoing of our self, something that this earth-bound nature has neither the will nor the heart to do. And that is precisely the point. Once we can see that of ourselves “we can do nothing” because, in realty, we are nothing (as we imagine ourselves to be) then – empowered and rightly emboldened by this light of Higher self-understanding – we can agree to our nothingness, our poverty, before God.

Here, in this conscious prostration, we have let go of the illusion of our will in favor of the reality of His Will to run our lives. This is the right request. It is the sacrifice that is the seed of spiritual rebirth. And it will be done.

Have a wonderful holiday season, and may the coming New Year be a time of renewal for all of us.

Best wishes,

Dr. Ellen Dickstein
The OneJourney Project

P.S. Please share with us your favorite quotes on rebirth and renewal by submitting them to our Living Book. Here’s one more:

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

P.P.S. The holiday is a perfect time to share your discoveries with others!

Give your friends the gift of timeless wisdom with Guy Finley’s groundbreaking work, The Seeker, The Search, The Sacred. Click here to download a free PDF Sampler of the book (no email sign up required).

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