Quotes About Forgiveness

God's grace is not a grandfatherly display of "niceness," for it cost the exorbitant price of Calvary.

Sadly, Jesus' followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy people feel unwelcome: "We don't want that kind of person in our church." Either way we fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all.

God shattered the inexorable law of sin and retribution by invading earth, absorbing the worst we had to offer, crucifixion, and then fashioning from that cruel deed the remedy for the human condition. Calvary broke up the logjam between justice and forgiveness. By accepting onto his innocent self all the severe demands of justice, Jesus broke forever the chain of ungrace.

a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.

God took a great risk by announcing forgiveness in advance, and the scandal of grace involves a transfer of that risk to us.

the down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome among his followers. What has happened?

God does some of God's best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

Dr. Paul Tournier expresses this pattern in the language of psychiatry: "God blots out conscious guilt, but He brings to consciousness repressed guilt.

On the one hand God passionately loved the people he had made; on the other hand, God had a terrible urge to destroy the evil that enslaved them. On the cross, God resolved that inner conflict, for there God's Son absorbed the destructive force and transformed it into love.

grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.

Apart from forgiveness, the monstrous past may awake at any time from hibernation to devour the present. And also the future.

In a letter to his brother, C. S. Lewis mentioned that he prayed every night for the people he was most tempted to hate, with Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini heading the list. In another letter he wrote that as he prayed for them, he meditated on how his own cruelty might have blossomed into something like theirs. He remembered that Christ died for them as much as for him, and that he himself was not "so different from these ghastly creatures.

grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less.

That stance of openness to receive is what I call the "catch" to grace. It must be received, and the Christian term for that act is repentance, the doorway to grace.

I will learn to smile at my enemies.

She was like a mother to me...and I betrayed as a daughter will betray her mother and yet, never stop loving her.

The tears in my eyes are now running down my cheeks at the thought that I have been his wife and his bedfellow, his companion and his duchess, and even now, though he is near to death, still he does not love me. He has never loved me. He never will love me.

I am sorry for you. And I am sorry for me. When you are sent back to me, perhaps a month from now, perhaps a year, I will try to remember this day, and you looking like a child, a little lost among all these clothes. I will try to remember that you were innocent of any plotting; that today at least, you were more a girl than a Boleyn.

Then life taught me a harder lesson, beloved: it is better to forgive an enemy than destroy him.

when you love a man who is less than you dreamed, you have to make allowances for the difference between a real man and a dream. Sometimes you have to forgive him. Perhaps you even have to forgive him often. But forgiveness often comes with love.

We are not ordered by God to judge each other. We are not even ordered by him to consider another person's sin. We are ordered by God to let Him consider it, to let Him be judge.

We are both people of faith," he said quietly. "Our enemies should be the people who have no faith, neither in their God, nor in others, nor in themselves. The people who should face our crusade should be those who bring cruelty into the world for no reason but their own power. There is enough sin and wickedness to fight, without taking up arms against people who believe in a forgiving God and who try to lead a good life.

God speaks to us individually, each and every one of us, that we need neither pope nor priest, nor bleeding statue, to find our way to faith. God is calling and we only have to listen. There are no clever tricks to forgiveness. There is only one way and there is only one Bible, and a woman can study it as well as a man.

I have loved you for years," she cried after him. "I gave my womanhood to you. Tell me, in what way have I offended you? What have I ever done which was displeasing?