Sermon quotes on grace
Augustine of Hippo
For grace is given not because we have done good works, but in order that we may be able to do them.
Karl Barth
Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.
Church Dogmatics 2/2, The Doctrine of God, Hendrickson Publishers.
Henry Ward Beecher
Every time your enemy fires a curse, you must fire a blessing, and so you are to bombard back and forth with this kind of artillery. The mother grace of all graces is Christian good-will.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
Thomas W. Currie III
We sometimes find God’s forgiveness to be offensive: “It reveals us to be distressingly like everyone else!” (And we are so special.)
Billy Graham
The will of God will not take us where the grace of God cannot sustain us.
Jen Hatmaker
It is incredibly tempting to disparage people who didn’t “change” with us. I have criticized the words of others when the same words came out of my own mouth just two years earlier, which is incredibly un-self-aware. We need to get better at permission and grace. What is right for us may not be right for everyone, and we don’t have to burn down the house simply because we’ve moved our things out. Other good folks probably still live there, and until one minute ago, we did too. We can bless the honorable parts of that house and express sincere gratitude for what we learned under its roof. It is unwise and shortsighted to isolate the remaining inhabitants, because there is a lot of life left, and as it turns out, we are all still neighbors.
Max Lucado
God loves you just as you are but too much to leave you that way.
Brennan Manning
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
Eugene O’Neill
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
Eugene Peterson
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.
Eugene Peterson
My job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.
John Stott
Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.
Dallas Willard
Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.
The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship.
Philip Yancey
Grace is a gift that costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient.
John Stott
Faith’s only function is to receive what grace offers.
A.T. Robertson
Grace is God’s part, faith ours.
Word Pictures in the New Testament, Volume 4
Annie Johns Flint
When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere that day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father’s full giving has only begun.
His love has no limit,
His grace has no measure,
His power has no boundary known unto men;
For out of his infinite riches in Jesus,
He giveth, and giveth and giveth again.
He Giveth More Grace
Philip Yancey
Grace is a gift that costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.
Brennan Manning
We cannot will ourselves to accept grace. There are no magic words, preset formulas, or esoteric rites of passage. Only Jesus Christ sets us free from indecision. The Scriptures offer no other basis for conversion than the personal magnetism of the Master.
Brennan Manning
Living by grace inspires a growing consciousness that I am what I am in the sight of Jesus and nothing more.
Philip Yancey
It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me . . . The more we love, and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God — who, after all, loves ornery creatures like us.
James Merritt
Through Jesus’s family tree, God puts his grace on display. God is reminding us that he can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: pick up broken pieces and put them together, take broken lives and make them whole, gather broken hopes and make them reality. That is the message of Jesus’s family tree.
John Newton
I am not what I might be, I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be. But I thank God I am not what I once was, and I can say with the great apostle, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”
Eugene Peterson
We can’t save ourselves by pulling on our bootstraps, even when the bootstraps are made of the finest religious leather.
Leadership, Vol. 4, no. 3.
Karl Barth
Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning.
Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation (London: Clark, 2004), pp. 41–42.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade
[God’s grace is] always hidden under the strangest appearances.
The Joy of Full Surrender (Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 2008).
John Newton
I am not what I might be, I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be. But I thank God I am not what I once was, and I can say with the great apostle, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”
Charles Spurgeon
If we give God service it must be because He gives us grace. We work for Him because He works in us.
Dag Hammarskjöld
To forgive oneself”? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.
Ben Patterson
Karl Barth was right when he termed God’s grace his great “nevertheless.”
Taken from Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent by Ben Patterson Copyright (c) 1989 by Ben Patterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Grace is costly because it compels a person to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Catherine the Great
Dieu pardonerra; c’est son métier; God forgives you — it’s his thing.
Karl Barth
We are forbidden to take sin more seriously than grace, or even as seriously as grace.
Jared C. Wilson
Grace is not simply about pardoning sinful behavior; it’s also about rewiring the sinners themselves. The grace the Bible talks about is power not just for justification but also for transformation.
The Gospel According to Satan: Eight Lies about God that Sound Like the Truth, Nelson Books, 2020.
Samuel Storms
Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit. . . . Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to withdraw it in the presence of human demerit. . . . [Grace] is treating a person without the slightest reference to desert whatsoever, but solely according to the infinite goodness and sovereign purpose of God.
Donald Grey Barnhouse
Love that reaches up is adoration. Love that reaches out is affection. But love that stoops is grace.
Nancy Spiegelberg
Lord, I crawled across the barrenness to you with my empty cup. . . . If only I had known you better, I’d have come running with a bucket.
P.T. Forsyth
The feeble gospel preaches, “God is ready to forgive”; the mighty gospel preaches, “God has redeemed.”
Charles Spurgeon
Our Lord Jesus is ever giving, and does not for a solitary instant withdraw His hand. As long as there is a vessel of grace not yet full to the brim, the oil shall not be stayed…. He is a rock in the desert, ever sending out streams of life from His smitten side; the rain of His grace is always dropping; the river of His bounty is ever-flowing, and the well-spring of His love is constantly overflowing. As the King can never die, so His grace can never fail.
Morning and Evening (1866)
Randy Alcorn
Birds need two wings to fly. With only one wing, they’re grounded. The gospel flies with the wings of grace and truth. Not one, but both.
The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance (Multnomah, 2003).
Randy Alcorn
Truth-oriented Christians love studying Scripture and theology. But sometimes they’re quick to judge and slow to forgive. They’re strong on truth, weak on grace. Grace-oriented Christians love forgiveness and freedom. But sometimes they neglect Bible study and see moral standards as “legalism.” They’re strong on grace, weak on truth.
The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance (Multnomah, 2003).
Randy Alcorn
The story is told of a little girl who prayed, “Lord, make the bad people good and the good people nice.”
The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance (Multnomah, 2003).
Randy Alcorn
If we minimize grace, the world sees no hope for salvation. If we minimize truth, the world sees no need for salvation.
The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance (Multnomah, 2003).
Madeleine L’Engle
We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.
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