Quotes about Redemption

To Jesus she already is somebody. Like the loving father of the prodigal son, Jesus is frantically scanning the horizon, watching for Madonna to return to him. He's absolutely convinced that she's so valuable that she's worth dying for. 'Greater love has no one than this,' said Jesus in John 15:13, 'that one lay down his life for his friends.' That's what He did for her on the cross!

The question is not "Will God grant you a do-over?" The Bible promises, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). God is anxious to give you a do-over; the question is whether you're willing to reach out and ask for one.

if you do something against me, I have the right to forgive you. However, if you do something against me and somebody else comes along and says, 'I forgive you,' what kind of cheek is that? The only person who can say that sort of thing meaningfully is God himself, because sin, even if it is against other people, is first and foremost a defiance of God and his laws.

To use a popular illustration, all other religions are spelled "D-O." That is, they are based on people doing something, through their struggling and striving, to somehow earn the good favor of God. [...] By contrast, Christianity is spelled "D-O-N-E," because it's based on what Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross.

We can never sink so far that God's grace will not reach us. At the same time, grace does not leave us there. It raises us to new heights.

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. Philip Yancey1

At the time of the crucifixion, the disciples couldn't see how anything good could result; similarly, as we face struggles and trials and suffering, we sometimes can't imagine good emerging. But we've seen how it did in the case of Jesus, and we can trust it will in our case too. For instance, the greatest Christians in history seem to say that their sufferings ended up bringing them the closest to God—so this is the best thing that could happen, not the worst.

Hope is] the unswerving belief that better days are ahead, probably in this world and most certainly in the next.

If Jesus overcame the grave, he's still alive and available for me to personally encounter.

He's firmly, irrevocably, unambiguously convinced that you're somebody worth dying for.

My mistakes didn't destroy the image of God that was inscribed in me, so my errors can't eliminate the reason why I have value in his eyes.

People who have difficulty forgiving themselves for their past transgressions usually make one of two mistakes: they imagine their wrongdoing as being so big that it outstrips God's power to forgive, or they picture God's forgiveness as being too small to cover them. On either count, they're simply mistaken.