Quotes about Salvation

Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church.

Every time we worship our minds are informed, our memories refreshed with the judgments of God, we are familiarized with what God says, what he has decided, the ways he is working out our salvation.

We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ.

Love is the most characteristic and comprehensive act of the human being. We are most ourselves when we love; we are most the People of God when we love. But love is not an abstract word defined out of a dictionary. In order to love maturely we have to live and absorb and enter into this world of salvation and freedom, find ourselves in the stories, become familiar with and follow the signposts, learn the life of worship, and realize our unique identity as the People of God who love.

JOHN 3:16-18 [Jesus said,] "This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.

We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.

There is no model conversion. There is no prescribed ritual, whether emotional or liturgical. We are all different. God is the same and has the same salvation to work in us, but he creates an original story every time.

Such insinuated insecurities need to be confronted directly and plainly. It is not possible to drift unconsciously from faith to perdition.

Our work goes wrong when we lose touch with the God who works "his salvation in the midst of the earth." It goes wrong both when we work anxiously and when we don't work at all, when we become frantic and compulsive in our work (Babel) and when we become indolent and lethargic in our work (Thessalonica).

For redemption is not a rescue from evil—it is a redemption of evil. Salvation is not luck but rather a courageous confrontation that is victorious in battle. And that is why praise is so exhilarating. It has nothing to do with slapping a happy face on a bad situation and grinning through it. It is fashioned deep within us, out of the sin and guilt and doubt and lonely despair that nevertheless believes. And, in that believing, becomes whole.

Pastoral work is a commitment to the everyday: it is an act of faith that the great truths of salvation are workable in the "ordinary universe."