Quotes about Redemption

The Christmas story is not intended to teach you a bunch of moral lessons that require no history to be helpful. It's a story that is rooted in real history, real acts of God that are intended to provide for you and me the one thing we desperately need: moral rescue. The Christmas story is about a God of glorious grace on the march, invading human history with the grace of redemption.

The blinding ability of sin is so powerful and persuasive that you and I literally need daily intervention.

We're not only held captive by our sin, but also by the delusion of our righteousness. Resting in God's grace isn't just about confessing your sin; it's about forsaking your righteousness as well.

God is not willing for this broken-down world to stay in its sorry condition. As Creator, he is able to look at it and see promise, the promise of a total restoration of its beauty. And he has asked you to move in with him to be one of his tools of restoration. While it is hard to live in a house that needs to be restored in some ways it is even harder to live there while the restoration takes place.

Our deepest problem is that we seek to find our identity outside the story of redemption.

None of us gets our dream in the way that we dreamt it, because none of us is writing our own story. God, in his love, writes a better story than we could ever write for ourselves. He has a better dream than the one we conceive. He knows much better than we do what is best for us. He will take us places that we never intended to go because, in doing so, we become more of what he re-created us in Christ to be.

I understand why many people who call themselves Christians are not excited about grace. If you think your environment is your problem, you won't esteem grace, but once you admit that you're your biggest problem, you will celebrate the grace that rescues you from you.

It is grace to not be paralyzed by regret. The cross teaches that you are not stuck, not cursed to pay forever for your past.

God has chosen to let you live in this fallen world because he plans to employ the difficulties of it to continue and complete his work in you.

There's not a day without sin rearing its ugly head and not a day in which God's abundant mercies are not new.

Scripture never looks down on the sufferer, it never mocks his pain, it never turns a deaf ear to his cries, and it never condemns him for his struggle. It presents to the sufferer a God who understands, who cares, who invites us to come to him for help, and who promises one day to end all suffering of any kind once and forever.

In a real way, things are worse than you ever thought they could be, but God's grace is greater than you could ever have imagined it would be. Biblical faith lives at the intersection of shocking honesty and glorious hope.