Quotes About Redemption

Both heaven and hell are populated entirely and only by forgiven sinners. Hell is just a courtesy for those who insist they want no part of forgiveness.

Everybody, even the worst stinker on earth, is somebody for whom Christ died.

The new heavens and the new earth are not replacements for the old ones; they are transfigurations of them. The redeemed order is not the created order forsaken; it is the created order - all of it - raised and glorified.

we are saved by Christ alone who raises us from the dead - from the absolution of our death. We come before him at the judgement with no handwriting whatsoever against us. It's simply cheating to say you believe that and then renege on it by postulating some list of extra-rotten crimes for which Christ has to send you to hell. He, the universal Redeemer, is the only judge; as far as he's concerned, the only mandatory sentence is to life and life abundant.

We are supposed to represent a Lord who came not to judge the world but to save it. Our business should be simply to keep everybody in the net of his kingdom until we reach the farther shore. Sorting is strictly his department, not ours.

It cannot be said too often that in the New Testament, the opposite of sin is not virtue, it is faith.

We were never told that it would not hurt, only that nothing would ever finally go wrong; not that it would not often go hard with us but that there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.

The Christian religion is not about the soul; it is about man, body and all, and about the world of things -with- which he was created, and -in- which he is redeemed. Don't knock materiality. God invented it.

It's just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting.

What God effects in the reconciliation does the work of forgetting without the danger of forgetting. He does better than forget: he remembers our evil in grace as the only read thing it ever could have been. He takes away the flaming sword between us and our self-knowledge, and brings us home to ourselves.

Any authentically Christian system is going to have to keep off the kick of human merit and demerit and stick resolutely to a universalism of grace that overrides the subject of human works.

At the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.

Only when you are finally able, with the publican, to admit that you are dead will you be able to stop balking at grace.

What saves us is Jesus, and the way we lay hold of that salvation is by faith. And faith is something that, throughout this book, I shall resolutely refuse to let mean anything other than trusting Jesus. It is simply saying yes to him rather than no. It is, at its root, a mere "uh-huh" to him personally.

Salvation is not a matter of getting a reward that will make up for a rotten deal; it is a matter of entering by faith into the happiness - the hilarity beyond all liking and happening - that has been pounding on our door all along.

So what if God made a "mistake"; if the Someone who set up the world so that evil is possible is willing to commit suicide over that mistake rather than blame you for it, then trusting such a person doesn't seem like an altogether bad idea.

If our Fall was our re-cognition, our re-knowing of the good as evil, then our Reconciliation is our re-cognition in Christ - our re-knowing in the risen humanity of the Word - of evil as the good he has made it once more.

the world is going down the drain; only a Savior who is willing to work at the bottom of the drain can redeem it.

He does not come to see if we are good: he comes to disturb the caked conventions by which we pretend to be good. He does not come to see if we are sorry: he knows our repentance isn't worth the hot air we put into it. He does not come to count anything. Unlike the lord in the parable, he cares not even a fig for any part of our record, good or bad. He comes only to forgive. For free. For nothing. On no basis, because like the fig tree, we are too far gone to have a basis.

On the last day, Jesus will not do anything new; he will simply make manifest what he has been doing all along - what, in fact, he has long since done by preparing for us a kingdom from the foundation of the world. It will be in seeing him, as he is, that it will finally dawn on us what, in him, we have always been.

it is precisely our sins, and not our goodnesses, that most commend us to the grace of God.

We are saved gratis, by grace. We do nothing and we deserve nothing; it is all, absolutely and without qualification, one huge, hilarious gift.

It is us he saves, not our lives. It is the person he dies for, not the suit of clothes in which the person hides from the bare truth about himself. He does not save you or me as we dress ourselves up at high noon on a good day; he saves us only as we stumble naked and uncombed from lumpy mattress to cold shower after a long, hard night - as, that is, we limp in faith from the bed of our death, through the blood of the cross, to the joy of his resurrection.

God in Jesus didn't prevent sinners from sinning, he went around forgiving them right and left.