Nick Cady > Nick's Quotes

“Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks' wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?...

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

“Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
― C. S. Lewis

“Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Time-Tested Methods for Conquering Worry

“Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.”
― William Carey

“Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.”
― John Calvin

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”
― John A. Shedd

“You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.”
― Amy Carmichael

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“we are to ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’. For what is the use of confessing and lamenting our sin, of acknowledging the truth about ourselves to both God and men, if we leave it there? Confession of sin must lead to hunger for righteousness.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

“The noun eleos (mercy)… always deals with what we see of pain, misery and distress, these results of sin; and charis (grace) always deals with the sin and guilt itself. The one extends relief, the other pardon; the one cures, heals, helps, the other cleanses and reinstates.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

“we cannot receive the mercy and forgiveness of God unless we repent, and we cannot claim to have repented of our sins if we are unmerciful towards the sins of others”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

“the fatal tendency to divide Christians into two groups-the religious and the laity, exceptional Christians and ordinary Christians, the one who makes a vocation of the Christian life and the man who is engaged in secular affairs. That tendency is not only utterly and completely unscriptural; it is destructive ultimately of true piety, and is in many ways a negation of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no such distinction in the Bible.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount

“The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

“A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow him.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

“Whenever Christians are conscientious citizens, they are acting like salt in the community. As Sir Frederick Catherwood put it in his contribution to the symposium Is revolution change? ‘To try to improve society is not worldliness but love. To wash your hands of society is not love but worldliness.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

“The Old Testament is the Gospel in the bud, the New Testament is the Gospel in full flower. The Old Testament is the Gospel in the blade; the New Testament is the Gospel in full ear.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

“The Church is the pilgrim people of God. It is on the move—hastening to the ends of the earth to beseech all men to be reconciled to God, and hastening to the end of time to meet its Lord who will gather all into one.… It cannot be understood rightly except in a perspective which is at once missionary and eschatological. ”
― John R.W. Stott, The Message of Acts

“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”
― Rick Warren

“Unless we preach Jesus rather than a set of “morals of the story” or timeless principles or good advice, people will never truly understand, love, or obey the Word of God.”
― Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism

“For Paul, however, there is always one topic: Jesus. Wherever we go in the Bible, Jesus is the main subject. And even the breakdown of our topic is not completely left up to us—we are to lay out the topics and points about Jesus that the biblical text itself gives us. We must “confine ourselves” to Jesus. Yet I can speak from forty years of experience as a preacher to tell you that the story of this one individual never needs to become repetitious—it contains the whole history of the universe and of humankind alike and is the only resolution of the plotlines of every one of our lives.”
― Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism

“All he had left was his alcohol and his resentment, the emotion that, Jean Améry would write, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.”
― laura hillendbrand

“Each genre and part of the Old Testament looks toward Christ and informs us about who he is in some way that the others do not.”
― Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism

“All the seemingly loose threads and contradictory claims of the rest of the Bible come together in Jesus.”
― Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism

“The flaming sword guarding the way to the presence of God came down on Jesus, and now the way is open (Genesis 3:24; Hebrews 10:19–22).”
― Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism

“The orator stirs men to [action], the preacher invites them to be redeemed.”
― Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism