Sermon quotes on redemption
Randy Alcorn
The cost of redemption cannot be overstated. The wonders of grace cannot be overemphasized. Christ took the hell He didn’t deserve so we could have the heaven we don’t deserve.
The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance, Multnomah, 2009, p.29.
Dan B. Allender
We’re in the presence of a good story when the flaw that shatters shalom is also the doorway to redemption… Whether it be our own flaw or the sin of others, God uses the raw material of sin to create the edifice of his redeemed glory. The point cannot be overemphasized: your plight is also your redemption. The Bible assumes that its stories are also our story… We are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their stories are a paradigm of our own. Each of us is called, redeemed, and exiled – again and again.”
Wendell Berry
I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.
Martin Buber
We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.
Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic Sayings, Routledge, 2013, p.64.
Horace Bushnell
There is a Gethsemane hid in all love
Anton Chekhov (For Contrast)
“We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It’s so clear, you see, that if we’re to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.”
Thomas Dubay
We have been created and redeemed for the eternal ecstasy of an interpersonal immersion in the triune God, seeing infinite Beauty face to face.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
The only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.
Michael B. Jordan (For Contrast)
I think redemption is about righting a wrong, and in that pursuit it’s about trying. You can stumble, you can make mistakes, but it’s about trying to do the right thing.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.
A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Meredith Kline
Redemption is a recovering and restoring of the original. The person who experiences redemption in Christ remains the same person, even though the transformation from the sinner dead-in-sins to the saint alive-forevermore-in-Christ is so radical as to be called a new creation.
Kenneth Leech
In order to speak of the crucified God we need a theology of abandonment, of dereliction, of an alienation so profound that it can only be expressed in language marked by paradox and by great daring and risk. The Crucifixion of the Son of God by one of the most advanced civilizations in the ancient world does not seem to be an acceptable or reasonable method of redeeming the world. There is something so outrageous and obscene about it that the agony in Gethsemane becomes the only comprehensible part of the whole saga.
C.S. Lewis
Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people.
Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis
Non-Christians seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002, p.94.
John Murray
The language of redemption is the language of purchase and more specifically of ransom… [which] presupposes some kind of bondage or captivity.
Thomas Paine (For Contrast)
The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.
Lewis B. Smedes
To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.
Patti Smith
The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times.
Charles Spurgeon
The heart of the gospel is redemption, and the essence of redemption is the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ.
J.R.R. Tolkien
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.
A.W. Tozer
If man had his way, the plan of redemption would be an endless and bloody conflict. In reality, salvation was bought not by Jesus’ fist, but by His nail-pierced hands; not by muscle but by love; not by vengeance but by forgiveness; not by force but by sacrifice. Jesus Christ our Lord surrendered in order that He might win; He destroyed His enemies by dying for them and conquered death by allowing death to conquer Him.”
Paul David Tripp
God is the ultimate musician. His music transforms your life. The notes of redemption rearrange your heart and restore your life. His songs of forgiveness, grace, reconciliation, truth, hope, sovereignty, and love give you back your humanity and restore your identity.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
Mike Wilkerson
If your story of redemption stops at your healing or your freedom, then you do not yet have God’s vision for redemption.
Dallas Willard
Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.
Christopher J. H. Wright
If you had asked a devout Israelite in the Old Testament period “Are you redeemed?” the answer would have been a most definite yes. And if you had asked “How do you know?” you would be taken aside to sit down somewhere while your friend recounted a long and exciting story—the story of the exodus. For indeed it is the exodus that provided the primary model of God’s idea of redemption, not just in the Old Testament but even in the New, where it is used as one of the keys to understanding the meaning of the cross of Christ.
The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, InterVarsity, 2006, p.265.
Christopher J. H. Wright
[The exodus] points beyond itself to a greater need for deliverance from the totality of evil and restoration to relationship with God than it achieved by itself. Such a deliverance was accomplished by Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection.
Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992), p.29.
Donald Fairbairn
In the great drama of redemption, all arrows point down, not up. To say this more plainly, at no point in the biblical panorama is redemption a matter of our rising up to achieve a higher condition ourselves. Instead, at every point, God comes down to us, and at every point this world is the focus of God’s gracious activity…in the next great redemptive event (yet to happen) the Son will come down a second time to this world…just as the arrow has pointed down in at the incarnation, so the arrow will point down again as the Son returns to the world.”
Dick Ryan
Whatever happens to me in life,
I must believe that somewhere,
In the mess or madness of it all,
There is a sacred potential—
possibility for wondrous redemption
In the embracing of all that is.
D. Douglas Meeks
Hope orients all thought, action, and relationships to God’s ultimate redemption of the creation and to the ultimate communion with the triune God…hope is the steady orientation to God’s making all things new in the “constant communion” God creates with us and with the whole creation.
Wesleyan Perspectives on the New Creation. Kingswood Books, 2004.
P.T. Forsyth
The feeble gospel preaches, “God is ready to forgive”; the mighty gospel preaches, “God has redeemed.”
Sandra L. Richter
In Israel’s tribal society redemption was the act of a patriarch who put his own resources on the line to ransom a family member who had been driven to the margins of society by poverty, who had been seized by an enemy against whom he had no defense, who found themselves enslaved by the consequences of a faithless life. Redemption was the means by which a lost family member was restored to a place of security within the kinship circle.
Taken from The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament by Sandra L. Richter Copyright (c) 2008 by Sandra L. Richter. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Eustace
And I thought to myself, oh dear, however many skins have I got to take off?
C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
William Shakespeare
Oh villain! Thou art condemned into everlasting redemption.
Much Ado about Nothing
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