Quotes about Merit

Finally, I would like to close with a Buddhist practice of dedicating merit. Whatever benefit and merit may have arisen here, we dedicate it for the benefit of all beings.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those shown themselves worthy of it.

Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

For the kingdom is not being prepared, but has been prepared, while the sons of the Kingdom are being prepared, not preparing the Kingdom; that is to say, the Kingdom merits the sons, not the songs the Kingdom. So all hell merits and prepares its children rather than they it.

what is sought by means of free choice is to make room for merits.

We also know that God is no respecter of persons. A plain factory hand who does his work faithfully pleases God just as much as a minister of the Word.

faith alone makes all other works good, acceptable and worthy

Trying to merit grace by preceding works, therefore, is trying to placate God with sins, which is nothing but heaping sins upon sins, making fun of God, and provoking His wrath.

Those who are already righteous and heirs of eternal life through Christ, whose merit they accept by faith — they do good, not with the purpose of attaining eternal life, to which they are already entitled by an alien merit, namely, Christ's, but with the purpose of being pleasing and obedient to the divine voice, so that the glory of God as well as holy teaching and life are promoted.

Therefore neither discipline nor other virtues which can be invented by the will, nor works taken upon oneself, no matter how difficult, merit forgiveness of sins or reconcile us with God, but only faith in the Son of God.