O God give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed courage to change what should be changed and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

The will of God will not take you where the grace of God cannot keep you.

Being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.

Maybe God isn't trying to tell us anything specific each time we hurt. Pain and suffering are part and parcel of our planet, and Christians are not exempt.

God. Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more —no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And 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.

But the Lord say he won't put more on us than we can stand. If we can't take it, he'll be right there beside us giving stren'th we didn't know we had.

Paul says that Spirit lives inside us, detecting needs we cannot articulate and expressing them in a language we cannot comprehend. When we don't know what to pray, he fills in the blanks. Evidently, it is our very helplessness that God, too, delights in. Our weakness gives opportunity for his strength.

Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of

Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Jesus' story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day's wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.