Quotes About Grace

If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words.

Grace is when you aren't striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that's left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you're loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life. Another word for grace is gift.

God doesn't wait for us to get ourselves polished, shined, proper, and without blemish—God comes to us and meets us and blesses us while we are still in the middle of the mess we created.

This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.

This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone's side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God's side.

God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.

We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.

Grace is when you aren't striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that's left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you're loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life.

Forgiveness is unilateral. God isn't waiting for us to get it together, to clean up, shape up, get up - God has already done it.

Arguing about how it literally happened can be an easy way to avoid facing the people in your life you need to forgive. For the people who first heard this story, the story would have had a provocative, unsettling effect. The Assyrians? The Assyrians were like a huge, gaping, open wound for the Israelites. Bless the Assyrians? The story is extremely subversive because it insists that your enemy may be more open to grace and love than you are.

When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

Gospel is the divine announcement that you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, that everything has been taken care of, that everything you've been striving to earn has been yours the entire time, that you belong, in exactly this condition that you are currently in, nothing additional required or needed.

Jesus says, he "did not come to judge the world, but to save the world" (John 12). We can name Jesus, orient our lives around him, and celebrate

Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You're a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you're one of them.

When you are both intentional about moving toward the other in love, over time you build up tremendous reserves of love and grace and goodwill. Love - with spark and substance and sacrifice all together - is a cumulative phenomenon. It builds on itself, it gains a head of steam, it grows in depth and breadth and intensity. This propels you into an entirely different way of relating to each other - another kind of life altogether.

If the only answer ever to anything is You really need to do more and try harder your heart will eventually wear out. Along with your body. And your soul.

it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge that love, grace, and humanity can be rejected. From the most subtle rolling of the eyes to the most violent degradation of another human, we are terrifyingly free to do as we please. God gives us what we want, and if that's hell, we can have it. We have that kind of freedom, that kind of choice. We are that free.

Neither son understands that the father's love was never about any of that. The father's love cannot be earned, and it cannot be taken away. It just is.

Agape doesn't need a reason.

It's very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who "gets in" or how to "get in." What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he's interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.

that matters is how you respond to Jesus. And that answer totally resonates with me; it is about how you respond to Jesus. But it raises another important question: Which Jesus?

And now here's the twist, the mystery, the unexpected truth about admitting that takes us back to the counterintuitive power of gospel: When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.