Quotes About Grace

we are saved by Christ alone who raises us from the dead - from the absolution of our death. We come before him at the judgement with no handwriting whatsoever against us. It's simply cheating to say you believe that and then renege on it by postulating some list of extra-rotten crimes for which Christ has to send you to hell. He, the universal Redeemer, is the only judge; as far as he's concerned, the only mandatory sentence is to life and life abundant.

We are supposed to represent a Lord who came not to judge the world but to save it. Our business should be simply to keep everybody in the net of his kingdom until we reach the farther shore. Sorting is strictly his department, not ours.

There is only one unpardonable sin, and that is to withhold pardon from others.

It cannot be said too often that in the New Testament, the opposite of sin is not virtue, it is faith.

judgment, as it is portrayed in the parables of Jesus (not to mention the rest of the New Testament) never comes until after acceptance: grace remains forever the sovereign consideration. The difference between the blessed and the cursed is one thing and one thing only: the blessed accept their acceptance and the cursed reject it; but the acceptance is already in place for both groups before either does anything about it.

We were never told that it would not hurt, only that nothing would ever finally go wrong; not that it would not often go hard with us but that there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.

Jesus didn't shy away from sinners, so why should the church? And don't tell me the church welcomes sinners. I know better. It welcomes only sinners who repent and then never seriously need forgiveness again.

Grace doesn't sell; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line. The world of winners will buy case lots of moral advice, grosses of guilt-edged prohibitions, skids of self-improvement techniques, and whole truckloads of transcendental hot air. But it will not buy free forgiveness because that threatens to let the riffraff into the Supper of the Lamb.

Grace perennially waits for us to accept our destruction and, in that acceptance, to discover the power of the Resurrection and the Life.

Your stew, so long deferred, stands finally extra causas. Greet it as your fellow creature. It is as deliciously unnecessary as you are.

What role have I left for religion? None. And I have left none because the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ leaves none. Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement of the end of religion.

It's just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting.

To make belief the touchstone of the kingdom's operation is simply to turn faith into just one more cold work. Of course we must believe; but only because there is nothing left for us to do but believe.

What God effects in the reconciliation does the work of forgetting without the danger of forgetting. He does better than forget: he remembers our evil in grace as the only read thing it ever could have been. He takes away the flaming sword between us and our self-knowledge, and brings us home to ourselves.

If, while we hold our times here in our own hands, all we have to do to be reconciled is believe he has them in his, how much less will we have to do there when we shall see they are in Christ's hand alone - that is, see them held for our eternal enjoyment as all right?

Any authentically Christian system is going to have to keep off the kick of human merit and demerit and stick resolutely to a universalism of grace that overrides the subject of human works.

At the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.

Only when you are finally able, with the publican, to admit that you are dead will you be able to stop balking at grace.

What saves us is Jesus, and the way we lay hold of that salvation is by faith. And faith is something that, throughout this book, I shall resolutely refuse to let mean anything other than trusting Jesus. It is simply saying yes to him rather than no. It is, at its root, a mere "uh-huh" to him personally.

God's program is grace, not scorekeeping; free gift, not reward and punishment in this world.

Salvation is not a matter of getting a reward that will make up for a rotten deal; it is a matter of entering by faith into the happiness - the hilarity beyond all liking and happening - that has been pounding on our door all along.

We spend our lives invoking upon ourselves imagined necessities, creating God in the image of our own fears - and all the while, he is beating us over the head with the balloon of grace and the styrofoam baseball bat of a vindicating judgment. The history of salvation is slapstick all the way, right up to and including the end.

So what if God made a "mistake"; if the Someone who set up the world so that evil is possible is willing to commit suicide over that mistake rather than blame you for it, then trusting such a person doesn't seem like an altogether bad idea.

Straight theologizing about grace is more, not less, outrageous than parabolic theologizing. The more clearly you make grace sovereign over human life, the more unacceptable become your efforts to harmonize it with life as we know it. The farther you go in expounding grace as the ultimate goodness of God, the deeper you find yourself mired in the manifest badness of God.