Quotes about Salvation

As a pastor in a Protestant church, my whole ministry centers on the conviction that by grace we are saved through faith. And it's not our faith that delivers us, as if believing something, anything at all were pleasing to God. It's the object of our faith - Christ's life, death, and resurrection - that saves us.

Christ was God in human flesh, and He proved it by rising from the dead.

This, then, do you consider, and devise how both you yourselves may be saved and this land, and I be not brought into ill odor with the citizens; for I have not absolute sovereignty, as over barbarians; but if I do just things, I shall receive just things.

Therefore, so long as we live in this fallen world, we are simul iustus et peccator (saint and sinner simultaneously), until the destruction of the old Adam is completed as God makes all things new (Rev. 21:5; Isa. 42:9; 43:19; Gal. 6:15).

It is God's new creative act, his great reclamation project that is even greater than the creation itself, because whereas we are "wonderfully created," we are "yet more wonderfully restored."

God did not change his mind about us on account of the cross or on any other account. He did not need to have his mind changed. He was never opposed to us. It is not his opposition to us but our opposition to him that had to be overcome, and the only way it could be overcome was from God's side, by God's initiative, from inside human flesh — the human flesh of the Son. The divine hostility, or wrath of God, has always been an aspect of his love.

Christ's recapitulation of the human story does not simply invite us into the divine life. There is an objective reality about it; it has happened over our dead bodies, so to speak.

The Son of God did not come to make good people better but to give life to the dead.

All the references to judgment in the Bible should be understood in the context of God's righteousness—not just his being righteous (noun) but his "making right" (verb) all that has been wrong.

In other words, God's righteousness involves not only a great reversal ("the first will be last") but also an actual transformation and re-creation.

To summarize, then: the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.

The gospel is a message of deliverance from the grip of evil and Death.