Quotes about Grace

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more.

God grant us grace to be so filled with that love that we may work in our own day with mature, Christian, sober intelligence to address the problem of evil, to implement the victory achieved on the cross, and to be agents, heralds, and living embodiments of that new creation in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

This is how the cross establishes God's kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death.

Cornelius didn't want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.

Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins.

When Jesus calls, he certainly does demand everything, but only because he has already given everything himself, and has plans in store, for us and the world, that we would never have dreamed of.

How we are saved is closely linked to the question of what we are saved for.

Jesus is sheer, absolute gift of God. He is not a mere product of human history; he is the humanity of the God who graciously identifies with us and shares our human condition. No less human for that, for God's solidarity with us requires his full humanity. But human as God's self-gift to humanity, as 'Immanuel

The reign of the crucified Jesus only had to be announced for it to become effective.

Since Paul knew that his own hard and bitter heart had been changed by God's grace, he also knew that there was nobody this side of the grave who could not in principle be similarly reached and changed.

And this 'justification', which is, of course, possible only because of the sheer grace and mercy of God acted out in the death and resurrection of his son, is made not on the basis of a new 'personal relationship with God' or some other religious experience but rather on the basis of the belief that Jesus is lord and that God raised him from the dead.

the victory of the cross will be implemented through the means of the cross.