Quotes about Justification

Faith and pride. If people think that sanctification adds anything to their justification, there is room for them to become spiritually prideful. At the very least, they can begin to congratulate themselves that they are less in need of God's sheer grace than they once were and no doubt less in need than other believers now are.

If God had intended me to make excuses for who I am, He would have given me better excuses.

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.

Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation to discipleship...The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship.

Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God's activity in the present and future... Justification is primarily concerned with the relation between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian's separation from the world until the second coming of Christ... Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification is his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.

It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.

The justification of my life before God is to live because of and toward the living, dying, and rising of Jesus Christ.

That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin.

Only those who in following Christ leave everything they have can stand and say that they are justified solely by grace. They recognize the call to discipleship itself as grace and grace as that call. But those who want to use this grace to excuse themselves from discipleship are deceiving themselves.

The word of the justifying grace of God never departs from its position as the final word; it never yields itself simply as a result that has been achieved... The word remains irreversibly the last; for otherwise it would be reduced to the quality of what is calculable, a merchandise, and would thereby be robbed of its divine character. Grace would be venal and cheap. It would not be a gift.

The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves.