Quotes About Grace

Jesus was able to love men because he loved them right through the layer of mud.

Grace is Christianity's best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate.

He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself. GEORGE HERBERT

Jesus requires—no, demands—a response of forgiveness.

We're all bastards but God loves us anyway.

somehow throughout history the church has managed to gain a reputation for its ungrace. As a little English girl prayed, "O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice.

It occurs to me, in fact, that laughter has much in common with prayer. In both acts, we stand on equal ground, freely acknowledging ourselves as fallen creatures. We take ourselves less seriously. We think of our creatureliness. Work divides and ranks; laughter and prayer unite. Finding God in Unexpected Places(245

we in the body of Christ are called to show love when God seems not to.

Our only option, then, is honesty that leads to repentance. As the Bible shows, God's grace can cover any sin, including murder, infidelity, or betrayal. Yet by definition grace must be received, and hypocrisy disguises our need to receive grace. When the masks fall, hypocrisy is exposed as an elaborate ruse to avoid grace.

If God's kingdom had a "No Oddballs Allowed" sign posted, none of us could get in.

La única sabiduría que podemos esperar adquirir es la sabiduría de la humildad. La humildad no tiene límite. —T. S. ELLIOT

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

Indeed, how could we experience grace at all except through our defects?

C. S. Lewis once said that God sometimes shows grace by drawing us to himself while we kick and scream and pummel him with our fists. That is my story.

that 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.

The One who had the right to destroy the world—and had nearly done so once in Noah's day—chose instead to love the world, at any cost.

Jesus' kingdom calls us to another way, one that depends not on our performance but his own. We do not have to achieve but merely follow.

To gain the hearing of a post-Christian society already skeptical about religion will require careful strategy. We must, in Jesus' words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our stridency — ?in short, our lack of grace — ?has proved so damaging that society will no longer look to us for the guidance it needs.

What greater gift could Christians give to the world than the forming of a culture that upholds grace and forgiveness?

The free offer of grace extends not just to the undeserving but to those who in fact deserve the opposite: to Ku Klux Klanners as well as civil rights marchers, to P.

Paul harped on grace because he knew what could happen if we believe we have earned God's love. In the dark times, if perhaps we badly fail God, or if for no good reason we simply feel unloved, we would stand on shaky ground. We would fear that God might stop loving us when he discovers the real truth about us. Paul—"the chief of sinners" he once called himself—knew beyond doubt that God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Does the Christian emphasis on love, grace, and forgiveness have any relevance outside quarreling families or church encounter groups? In a world where force matters most, a lofty ideal like forgiveness may seem as insubstantial as vapor.

Because of Jesus, I can never say about a person, "She must be suffering because of some sin she committed"; Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.

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.