Quotes about Redemption

Our lives are best understood, and our sorrows are best borne, when they are recognized as "playing" within a drama that God himself entered, in the person of his Son, so that the human drama might become, through the redemption, a divine comedy, not a cosmic tragedy or absurdity.

It is not so true that "prayer changes things" as that prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man's disposition.

Pray, always pray; beneath sins heaviest load, Prayer claims the blood from Jesus' side that flowed. Pray, always pray; though weary, faint, and lone, Prayer nestles by the Father's sheltering throne.

Intercessory prayer for one who is sinning prevails. God says so! The will of the man prayed for does not come into question at all, he is connected with God by prayer, and prayer on the basis of the Redemption sets the connection working and God gives life.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'

Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God's … Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn't point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one.

God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God.

When the crucified Jesus is called the image of the invisible God, the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.

God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity.

In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself. ~ Theology of Play, p.33

For us Jesus does not merely place His fingers in the ears and say, "Be opened"; for us He does not merely say "Arise and walk." For us He has done a greater thing—for us He died.

In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened... I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?