Quotes About Grace

It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.

I find that many Christians are in trouble about the future; they think they will not have grace enough to die by. It is much more important that we should have grace enough to live by. It seems to me that death is of very little importance in the meantime. When the dying hour comes, there will be dying grace; but you do not require dying grace to live by.

[Grace] is given not to make us something other than ourselves but to make us radically ourselves. Grace is given not to implant in us a foreign wisdom but to make us alive to the wisdom that was born with us in our mother’s womb. Grace is given not to lead us into another identity but to reconnect us to the beauty of our deepest identity. And grace is given not that we might find some exterior source of strength but that we might be established again in the deep inner security of our being and in learning to lose ourselves in love for one another to truly find ourselves.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Any concept of grace that makes us feel more comfortable sinning is not biblical grace. God's grace never encourages us to live in sin, on the contrary, it empowers us to say no to sin and yes to truth.

Today is [the feast of] Santa Rita, Patron Saint of impossible things - but this seems impossible: let us ask of her this grace, this grace that all, all, all people would do good and that we would encounter one another in this work, which is a work of creation, like the creation of the Father. A work of the family, because we are all children of God, all of us, all of us! And God loves us, all of us! May Santa Rita grant us this grace, which seems almost impossible. Amen.

We can say that true gratitude does not give rise to the debtor's ethic because it gives rise to faith in future grace. With true gratitude there is such a delight in the worth of God's past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future...it is done by transforming gratitude into faith as it turns from contemplating the pleasures of past grace and starts contemplating the promises of the future.

Obedience does not consist in paying God back and thus turning grace into a trade. Obedience comes from trusting in God for more grace - future grace - and thus magnifying the infinite resources of God's love and power.

Free will does not enable any man to perform good works, unless he is assisted by grace; indeed, the special grace which the elect alone receive through regeneration. For I stay not to consider the extravagance of those who say that grace is offered equally and promiscuously to all

If grace is obligated it is no longer grace. The very essence of grace is that it is undeserved.

Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.

Faith is the champion of Grace, and Love the nurse; but Humility is the beauty of Grace.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship.

The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.

In one way, I'm never going to get out of this material world unless it's by His grace but then again, His grace is relative to the amount of desire I can manifest in myself.

If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.

I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, shew me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight: and consider that this nation is thy people.

Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.

Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.

He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark. It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years.

I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints - to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.

Youth, large, lusty, loving -- Youth, full of grace, force, fascination. Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?

There is no grace more excellent than faith; no sin more execrable and abominable then unbelief. Faith is the saving grace and unbelief the damning sin. (Mark 16:16) ... Before Christ can be received, the heart must be emptied and opened: but men's heart's are full of self-righteousn ess and vain confidence (Rom 10:3).

The grace of God is infinite and beyond our ability to measure. His grace has no beginning and therefore no end.

Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace.

Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.

God's grace consists in the fact that He shines in the heart of every one as the Self; that power of grace does not exclude any one, whether good or otherwise.

Grace is not something one possesses; instead, grace is something one receives.

Love is the overflow of joy in God! It is not duty for duty's sake, or right for right's sake. It is not a resolute abandoning of one's own good with a view solely to the good of the other person. It is first a deeply satisfying experience of the fullness of God's grace, and then a doubly satisfying experience of sharing that grace with another person.

To see sin without grace is despair. To see grace without sin is arrogance. To see them in tandem is conversion.

Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace">Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

God won't permit temptation beyond your strength. It is true that temptations come to all, but God will give you the graces you need to withstand them, if you ask him to and if you are willing to cooperate with his grace...In God's presence, consider: Do I put up a fight when temptations beset me, or do I give up quickly and surrender myself to them without a struggle? Do I rely on God's grace to conquer temptations, or am I conquered by them?

Through the Holy Spirit comes our restoration to paradise, our ascension into the kingdom of heaven, our return to the adoption of sons, our liberty to call God our Father, our being made partakers of the grace of Christ, our being called children of light, our sharing in eternal glory, and, in a word, our being brought into a state of all "fulness of blessing," both in this world and in the world to come, of all the good gifts that are in store for us, by promise hereof, through faith, beholding the reflection of their grace as though they were already present, we await the full enjoyment.

Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church. I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn't stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn't help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race.

The sinner is not the one who uses a lot of grace... The saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on take off.

In the new covenant, God doesn't want us to be blessed when we obey the law and cursed when we fail. Doesn't such a system sound awfully similar to the old covenant? Grace is the undeserved, unmerited and unearned favor of God - the moment you try to merit the free favors of God, His grace is nullified.

Grace surrounds us and holds us like the sky holds everything in it … and as soon as I find a way to let go of my story, I keep seeing over and over again that grace is always here and it includes the forgetting and the remembering. The practice is the opening of the hand to catch the raindrops, which are always falling. If you don't open your hand, you get wet, but you don't get much to drink.

A sweet attractive kind of grace, A full assurance given by looks, Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of Gospel books; I trow that countenance cannot lie, Where thoughts are legible in the eye. Was never eye, did see that face, Was never ear, did hear that tongue, Was never mind, did mind his grace, That ever thought the travel long- But eyes, and ears, and ev'ry thought, Were with his sweet perfections caught. [trow; believe or think]

God takes the most eminent and choicest of His servants for the choicest and most eminent afflictions. They who have received most grace from God are able to bear most afflictions from God. Affliction does not hit the saint by chance, but by direction. God does not draw His bow at a venture. Every one of His arrows goes upon a special errand and touches no breast but his against whom it is sent. It is not only the grace, but the glory of a believer when we can stand and take affliction quietly

To say what we should be or do and not link it with a clear exposition of what God has done about our failure to be or do perfectly as He wills is to reject the grace of God and to lead people to lust after self-help and self-improvemen t in a way that, to call a spade a spade, is godless.

When once our grace we have forgot, Nothing goes right.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

We hold that man is never so near grace as when he begins to feel he can do nothing at all.

When our troubles are many we are often by grace made courageous in serving our God; we feel that we have nothing to live for in this world, and we are driven, by hope of the world to come, to exhibit zeal, self-denial, and industry.

In proportion to the size of the vessel of faith, brought by us to the Lord, is the measure we draw out of His overflowing grace.

But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.

We have a tendency to want the other person to be a finished product while we give ourselves the grace to evolve.

As far as the search for truth is concerned, 98% of our thinking is rubbish. The remaining 2% is garbage. Throw it all out and be empty! Truth cannot be caught by intellect alone - grace is needed.