Quotes About Grace

It is not easy for us, busy people, to truly receive a blessing. Perhaps the fact that few people offer a real blessing is the sad result of the absence of people who are willing and able to receive such a blessing. It has become extremely difficult for us to stop, listen, pay attention, and receive gracefully what is offered to us.

In Christ we live as God's beloved before we were born and after we have died; all the circumstances in between will not negate that. Jean

God loves us before any human person can show love to us. He loves us with a "first" love, an unlimited, unconditional love, wants us to be his beloved children, and tells us to become as loving as himself.

One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God's forgiveness.

Personally I believe that being an elder can be a real grace. After having seen so much of life and having "made it" in so many ways there is still that possibility of growing into a second childhood, a second naiveté. I think that is quite an exciting possibility and I pray that God will allow you to be reborn in such a new way of being.

If you believe that you are the beloved, you can offer forgiveness, even when it cannot be received.

Learning how to die has something to do with living each day in full awareness that we are children of God, whose love is stronger than death.

What matters here is that the moment Cleopas and his friend recognized Jesus in the breaking of bread, his bodily presence was no longer required as a condition for their new hope.

When our love grows from God's love we no longer divide people into those who deserve it and those who don't. It is this love that allows us to see the enemy as someone loved with the same love with which we are loved.

Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. As we come to realize that it is not we who live, but Christ who lives in us, that he is our true self, we can slowly let our compulsions melt away and begin to experience the freedom of the children of God.

Just as a whole world of beauty can be discovered in one flower, so the great grace of God can be tasted in one small moment Just as no great travels are necessary to see the beauty of creation, so no great ecstasies are needed to discover the love of God.

our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

God is there. God's light is there. God's forgiveness is there. God's boundless love is there.

Whether I am the younger son or the elder son, God's only desire is to bring me home.

The return to the "Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name" allows me to let my dad be no less than the good, loving, but limited human being he is, and to let my heavenly Father be the God whose unlimited, unconditional love melts away all resentments and anger and makes me free to love beyond the need to please or find approval.

In the context of a compassionate embrace, our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

What I am called to make true is that whether I am the younger or the elder son, I am the son of my compassionate Father.

we find a place where people give one another grace.

The father is like me"? Do I want to be like the father? Do I want to be not just the one who is being forgiven, but also the one who forgives; not just the one who is being welcomed home, but also the one who welcomes home; not just the one who receives compassion, but the one who offers it as well?

To pray means to stop expecting from God the same small-mindedness which you discover in yourself.

When our love grows from God's love we no longer divide people into those who deserve it and those who don't.

Forgiveness is to allow the other person not to be God. Forgiveness says, "I know you love me, but you don't have to love me unconditionally, because no human being can do that." [...] If we want other people to give us something that only God can give, we become a heavy burden. We say, "Love me!" and before we know it we become demanding and manipulative [...] To forgive other people for being able to give us only a little love—that is a hard discipline.

The great spiritual call of the Beloved Children of God is to pull their brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing.

On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose, (pp. 49).