Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Jones is selling surrender as a kind of upgraded agency: hand the keys of your inner life to the Holy Spirit and you don’t shrink into passivity, you graduate into power. The cunning move is where he places the takeover: not the conscious mind, where arguments and doubts live, but the subconscious, the workshop of habits, reflexes, and hidden fears. He’s diagnosing the modern religious problem as less about belief than about automation. People want to do the good; they just keep doing the same.

That’s why “consent and cooperation” matters. It cushions the authoritarian edge of “take over” with a liberal-sounding contract. You’re not being invaded; you’re opting in. The theology here is synergistic: divine power, human participation. But it’s also psychologically shrewd. By promising change at the “basis of our lives,” Jones implies that moral effort alone is too flimsy against the machinery of the self.

The repeated “ought” is the quote’s moral throttle. This isn’t an altar-call to limitless self-actualization; it’s a disciplined fantasy of freedom within obligation. “Anything” sounds expansive, but it’s fenced in by duty: do what you ought, go where you ought, be what you ought. Jones offers an answer to the anxiety of choice by recasting vocation as obedience powered from below, not strained from above.

Contextually, Jones wrote in a 20th-century Protestant world newly conversant with psychology and newly exhausted by moralism. He translates sanctification into interior re-patterning, pitching holiness not as grit, but as a deeper kind of rewiring-with God as the electrician.