Quotes about Redemption

Jesus did not eliminate evil; he revealed a God willing, at immense cost, to forgive it and to heal its damage.

Even the greatest of miracles do not resolve the problems of this earth: all people who find physical healing eventually die. We need more than miracle. We need a new heaven and a new earth, and until we have those, unfairness will not disappear.

if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor's prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet—Babette's feast—spread for me.

If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.

The redemptive way goes through pain, not around it.

A human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.

by denying forgiveness to others, we are in effect determining them unworthy of God's forgiveness, and thus so are we.

How differently will I relate to the uncommitted if I view them not as evil or unsaved but rather as lost.

The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

The deepest longings we feel on earth, as parents, as lovers, are mere flickers of the hungering desire God feels for us. It is a desire that cost him the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.

Everywhere a greater joy is preceded by a greater suffering

Suffering offers a general message of warning to all humanity that something is wrong with this planet, and that we need radical outside intervention