Quotes about Grace

I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!

I do not know if that theory is correct, but I do know that singling out one behavior as "sin" and emphasizing it over others provides a convenient way of dodging our own need for grace. High-minded moralism and shrill pronouncements of judgment may help fundraising, but they undermine a gospel of grace.

There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to. We are judged by the righteousness of the Christ who lives within, not our own.

Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of

I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues—in short, our lack of grace—may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs.

Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.

Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change—these are the gates to God's kingdom.

Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self-absorbed children. Volunteers in soup kitchens and hospices and mission projects learn this lesson by doing.* What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver.

Jesus' story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day's wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

Grace dispensers give out of their own bounty, in gratitude (a word with the same root as grace) for what we have received from God. We serve others not with some hidden scheme of making converts, rather to contribute to the common good, to help humans flourish as God intended.

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.