Quotes about Grace

Lord, will those who are saved be few?" ... Jesus' answer seems so noncommittal, so evasive ... Strive to enter by the narrow door (Luke 13:23f.) ... this evasiveness is only apparent ... This is the answer to this question ... this question has been answered, once for all time.

Grace is at work even in fallen man ... to bend partially back in the right direction those human powers and endowments which were man left to himself would be wholly perverted.

Common grace ... an imperfect solution ... does centre our attention on the gracious act of God in protecting man's corrupt and apostate nature from total demonization.

The true nature of good works cannot be understood apart from Christ who is our 'sanctification' (1 Corinthians 1:30).

Sanctification is not the humanly operated successor to the divinely worked justification.

Genuine sanctification has a 'continued orientation toward justification.

The Spirit alone could perform the miracle of making man walk on the road of sanctity without a sense of his own worth.

God ... is hidden from corrupt eyes, from the proud and disdainful, but revealed to those who in confession of sin and receptive faith are open to His grace. Salvation is preached in Christ: it is not necessary for one to travel a long way to overcome its hiddenness: he should simply accept this gift in faith.

Remember that to these worlds and these beings and these ages we are to be the messengers of the grace and wisdom and glory of God. In that view the future loses its sense of dread, and one looks on to the new opportunities for art, and music, and poetry, and above all perchance of preaching, that are coming to the ransomed ones when the discipline of time is merged into the fitness of eternity, with reverent and holy desire.

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

The church may not function as a fearful border guard, but rather as one who brings good tidings (Romans 10:15; Isaiah 52:7 ... For Christ died for us 'while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies' (Romans 5:8,10). All hardness, imprudence and rashness can only be signs that she has forgotten the gracious overstepping of the boundaries at her birth.

It is possible to speak concretely about God's providnce only on the basis of the blood of the cross ... He who sees things this way will never succumb to the temptation to identify prosperity with blessing and adversity with curse. In faith ... one can accept prosperity as the gift of God and adversity as God's hand graciously leading him to faith.