Quotes About Grace

Similarly, unless we suffer from a remarkably restricted range of acquaintances, we all know that there are people who please God and have his blessing without being poor, hungry, grief-stricken, or persecuted. They

We cannot behave on the spot as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does. The on the spot episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness. Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world.

Jesus went on to say to the woman, "Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you. Go with peace in your heart." Here is God's rule in action.

Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. In fact, nothing inspires and enhances effort like the experience of grace.

You will consume much more grace by leading a holy life than you will by sinning, because every holy act you do will have to be upheld by the grace of God.

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (2 Corinthians 9:8).

Now, Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue thinking of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl.

Third, the "correcting" to be done is not a matter of "straightening them out." It is not a matter of hammering on their wrongness and on what is going to happen to them if they don't change their ways. It is a matter of restoration. The

Set aside days to spend alone with God to seek his face and to imagine that face shining with joy as it looks at you. As the ancient Jewish benediction puts it: The LORD bless you and keep you; The LORD make His face shine upon you, And be gracious to you; The LORD lift up His countenance upon you [look right at you] And give you peace. (NUM. 6:24–26)

It is the experience of having God look you right in the eye and saying, "I love you! I approve of you!" that is the unshakable ground of our self-worth.

keep a right heart we must remember that the face of God shining upon us in gracious approval is the basis of our value.

IF WE ARE CHRISTIANS simply by believing that Jesus died for our sins, then that is all it takes to have sins forgiven and go to heaven when we die. Why, then, do some people keep insisting that something more than this is desirable? Lordship, discipleship, spiritual formation, and the like?

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.

We are blessed to live in a world where there is a fully self-sufficient, generous God who wants to provide what is best for us and loves us more than we could ever imagine.

Jesus, by contrast, brings us into a world without fear. In his world, astonishingly, there is nothing evil we must do in order to thrive.

Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change, and when we are right, make us easy to live with!

God is not mean, but he is dangerous.

I routinely watched Dallas, like no one I had encountered before or since, wipe clean people's vision of who God was, what his Son did and why, and what the Holy Spirit wishes to do in and through his church and then replace it with an all-consuming, hope-filled, grace-empowered, joy-seeking, love-giving gospel of God's boundless goodness and power. All the while he never manipulated emotions, overcame people's will, or used fear as a motivator.

Content with beholding His face, My all to His pleasure resigned; No changes of season or place Would make any change in my mind; While blessed with a sense of his love, A palace a toy would appear; And prisons would palaces prove, If Jesus would dwell with me there.

Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort.

the situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our "spiritual" side. A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying "Why?

We forgive someone of a wrong they have done us when we decide that we will not make them suffer for it in any way. This

invite Jesus into each new situation or interaction.

As I often point out to folks, today we are not only saved by grace, we are paralyzed by it. We will preach to you for an hour that you can do nothing to be saved, and then sing to you for forty-five minutes trying to get you to do something to be saved. That is confusing, to say the least.