Quotes About Grace

I did mind and it did matter, otherwise there wouldn't be anything to forgive at all

Hence too the promise that those who receive the abundance of divine grace will "reign in life" (v. 17). Here again is the goal of salvation, the restoration of the truly human destiny, of the covenant of vocation in which humans are called as the royal priesthood. The passage is dense, but when we take it slowly it all makes sense—within this framework. The Adam project, for humans to share in God's rule over creation, is back on track.

Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross.

Something has happened, clearly, that has unleashed this new kind of power into the world. That something is the chain-breaking, idol-smashing, sin-abandoning power called "forgiveness," called "utter gracious love," called Jesus.

This is why too for every theologian who puzzles over abstract definitions of "atonement," there are thousands who will say, with Paul, "The son of God loved me and gave himself for me"—and who will then get on with the job of radiating that same love out into the world.

But Paul's vision of God's love, rising here like the sun on a clear summer's morning, shines through all the detail that has gone before. You need to wake up early, to get out of bed, and to throw back the curtains, to see it; that's what the previous four chapters are about. But now that we have done all that, the view is here for us to enjoy. And to be dazzled by. God's love has done everything we could need, everything we shall need.

I received mercy, because in my unbelief I didn't know what I was doing.

Forgiveness is the new reality. It is the power of the revolution.

Forgiveness isn't weakness. It was and is a great strength.

The minute you think you're good enough for God, God says, 'I'm not interested in people who are good enough for me.' And the minute you think you're too bad for God, God says, 'It's you I've come for.

This might be, after all, a way of smuggling in 'works' by the back door, into Paul's soteriology (something we Paulinists are trained to watch out for, like sniffer dogs at an airport ready to detect the slightest whiff of hard drugs).

many people today assume that Christianity is one or more of these things—a religion, a moral system, a philosophy. In other words, they assume that Christianity is about advice. But it wasn't and isn't. Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place.

Those who belong to him are to believe and to live by the belief that they died and rose again with him, so that they are no longer under any slavish obligation to obey the old master.

To imagine a world without the gospel of Jesus is to imagine a pretty bleak place

An over-authoritarian church, paying no attention to experience, solves the problem by paving the garden with concrete. An over-experiential church solves the (real or imagined) problem of concrete (rigid and "judgmental" forms of faith) by letting anything and everything grow unchecked, sometimes labeling concrete as "law" and so celebrating any and every weed as "grace.

And all of this can be summed up in the phrase "forgiveness of sins." None of it has to do with redeemed souls leaving the world of space, time, and matter for something better. All of it has to do with the strange, unanticipated fulfillment of the hope of Israel.

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more.

Justification" is the covenant declaration, establishing in a single family all who share the messianic pistis.

God grant us grace to be so filled with that love that we may work in our own day with mature, Christian, sober intelligence to address the problem of evil, to implement the victory achieved on the cross, and to be agents, heralds, and living embodiments of that new creation in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

In whatever way the New Testament tells the story of the cross, it is always the story of self-giving divine love.

Cornelius didn't want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.

Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins.

Punishment is what would happen later, if this opportunity were missed: "By your hard, unrepentant heart you are building up a store of anger for yourself on the day of anger" (2:5). What we have in the present passage, though, is not a statement of how that punishment fell on Jesus, but rather a statement of how the sins that had been building up were "passed over." God has drawn a veil over the past, as Paul said in Athens (Acts 17:30).

When Jesus calls, he certainly does demand everything, but only because he has already given everything himself, and has plans in store, for us and the world, that we would never have dreamed of.