Quotes About Grace

Jesus' story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day's wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

Grace dispensers give out of their own bounty, in gratitude (a word with the same root as grace) for what we have received from God. We serve others not with some hidden scheme of making converts, rather to contribute to the common good, to help humans flourish as God intended.

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

Jesus did not eliminate evil; he revealed a God willing, at immense cost, to forgive it and to heal its damage.

Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.

God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist. Those

My slowness to act is a sign of mercy, not of weakness.

Who is my enemy? The abortionist? The Hollywood producer polluting our culture? The politician threatening my moral principles? The drug lord ruling my inner city? If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus' gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.

grace is the only force in the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations.

A Franciscan Benediction

Ungrace causes cracks to fissure open between mother and daughter, father and son, brother and sister, between scientists, and prisoners, and tribes, and races. Left alone, cracks widen, and for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness.

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

The things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labour for', as Sir Thomas More expressed it. The inner voice of prayer expresses itself naturally in action, just as the inner voice of my brain guides all my bodily actions.

God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love, said Augustine.

Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace.

if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor's prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet—Babette's feast—spread for me.

Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.

A human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.

Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus' love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace.

by denying forgiveness to others, we are in effect determining them unworthy of God's forgiveness, and thus so are we.

God is the ultimate judge of hypocrisy in the church, I decided; I would leave such judgment in God's capable hands. I began to relax and grow softer, more forgiving of others. After all, who has a perfect spouse, or perfect parents or children? We do not give up on the institution of family because of its imperfections—why give up on the church?

Throughout the Bible, in fact, God shows a marked preference for "real" people over "good" people.