Quotes About Grace

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

There is a simple cure for people who doubt God's love and question God's grace: to turn to the Bible and examine the kind of people God loves.

I yearn for a grace-abounding church that rewards rather than punishes honesty, and that, in Jesus' words, exists for the sinners and not the righteous, the sick and not the healthy.

Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.

God welcomes home anyone who will have him and, in fact, has made the first move already.

Ungrace plays like the background static of life for families, nations, and institutions. It is, sadly, our natural human state.

Forgiveness is not the same as pardon, he advises: you may forgive one who wronged you and still insist on a just punishment for that wrong.

for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness

Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative.

Forgiveness has its own extraordinary power which reaches beyond law and beyond justice.

Forgiveness is achingly difficult, and long after you've forgiven, the wound—my dastardly deeds—lives on in memory.

grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us.

Then the question becomes, "How do we treat sinners?

Justice has a good and righteous and rational kind of power. The power of grace is different: unworldly, transforming, supernatural.

forgiveness must be taught and practiced, as one would practice any difficult craft.

unless we learn dependence we will never experience grace.

When I ask, "Tell me the first word that comes to your mind when I say Christian," not one time has someone suggested the word love. Yet without question that is the proper biblical answer.

the sound of a man forgiving.

Despite a hundred sermons on forgiveness, we do not forgive easily, nor find ourselves easily forgiven.

Forgiveness—undeserved, unearned—can cut the cords and let the oppressive burden of guilt roll away.

what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to "out-grace" its rivals.

Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be

Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in this sin something alien, something that really did not belong to him, something that merely chained and mastered him and from which he would free him and bring him back to his real self.