Quotes About Redemption

If reduced to a single phrase, the Bible's message would be something like this: God gets his family back. The Bible tells the story of how God, wanting to live in harmony with all that he had made, set out to win a rebellious world back to himself.

God does not seek the people most outwardly capable, nor the most naturally "good." He works with the most unlikely material so that everyone can see the glory is his and his alone.

Moralism apart from grace solves little.

God has entrusted flawed human beings with a message so powerful that it sometimes does its work in spite of us.

Those who mourn sense the rupture of a world severed from God and thus edge closer to the Father who promises to make all things new.

The novelist Reynolds Price says there is one sentence above all that people crave from stories: The Maker of all things loves and wants me. Christians still believe in that truth.

Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten

The sufferings of Jesus show us that pain comes to us not as punishment but rather as a testing ground for faith that transcends pain. In truth, pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed.

Modern humanity does not perceive the world as worth God dying for. We Christians must demonstrate it.

when we appeal to God's grace and compassion the fearsome God soon disappears.

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.

When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You disengage that person from his hurtful act.

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

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?

Self-sufficiency, which first reared its head in the Garden of Eden, is the most fatal sin because it pulls us as if by a magnet away from God.

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.

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.

God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.