Quotes about Grace

we shouldn't attribute the power of justification to something formed in us that makes us pleasing to God. We must attribute it to faith, which takes hold of Christ the Savior and keeps him in our hearts. This faith justifies us apart from love and prior to love. We concede that we must also teach about good works and love. But we only teach these at the proper time and place—when the question deals with how we should live, not how we are justified.

Whenever you are being praised, remember it is not you who is being praised but Christ, to whom all praise belongs.

We despise the grace of God when we observe the Law for the purpose of being justified. The Law is good, holy, and profitable, but it does not justify. To keep the Law in order to be justified means to reject grace, to deny Christ, to despise His sacrifice, and to be lost.

So the salvation of Christ is called "salvations" and "mercies" (cf. Ps. 28:8; 17:7; 25:6), because it saves many and ascribes a manifold salvation to all.

But the kingdom of grace is a kingdom of mercy, of pardon, of redemption, and of liberation from sins and the punishments for sins.

the Lord has freed us from great evils to which we have been subjected, and that we have accepted many good things by faith.

We surely have no reason to be at odds with God. He gave us His holy Baptism, His Word, the Sacrament, the Office of the Keys, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Who then can say that we receive anything but sheer grace, love, and comfort from Him? If He promises us Christ's blood and death in Baptism and, by means of this, forgiveness of sin and absolution; if He closes hell and opens heaven for us, what animosity or displeasure toward us can there be in Him?

VIII. Beyond all this is the highest stage of faith, when; God punishes the conscience not only with temporal sufferings, but with death, hell, and sin, and refuses grace and mercy, as though it were His will to condemn and to be angry eternally. This few men experience, but David cries out in Psalm vi, "O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine anger." To believe at such times that God, in His mercy, is pleased with us, is the highest work that can be done by and in the creature;

When the article of justification is lost, nothing remains except error, hypocrisy, godlessness, and idolatry.

The truth is, I am all sin.

Those who lapse from the Gospel to the Law are no better off than those who lapse from grace into idolatry.

Thus a Christian, being consecrated by his faith, does good works; but he is not by these works made a more sacred person, or more a Christian.