Status Updates From The Story of Grace: An Exhi...

“Abel finds the stream of free love pouring itself along this crimson channel, and he pitches his tent upon its banks. He asks no other dwelling save that, beside which this ‘river of God’ is flowing.”

“Nothing but free love in God could lead Him still to acknowledge man as a worshipper, and to accept his worship…For, simply to be recognised as one who, though a sinner, is yet at liberty to come to God and commune with Him on any spot of earth, however far from Eden, is as distinct an assurance of grace as could be given.”

“‘But my sins! They are crimson. They rise mountain high.’ Yes, it is even so. They are ten thousand times worse than you imagine them. But shall this bar your entrance? For whom was that mercy-seat erected? For those who could plead fewest sins—sins less dark than others? No. That you will not say.”

“The truth is, that if we will but look at things in the light in which God places them before us, we shall find that it is not man who has been defiled by his contact with matter, but that it is matter which has been defiled by its contact with man.”

“A lost Eden, but a saved sinner; these two conjoined, were the daily preachers of grace.”

“Oh! How great the difference between submitting ourselves to a complex of rules, and casting ourselves upon a beating heart—between accepting a system and cleaving to a person!”

“[The tidings of grace] arrested [Adam] in his flight from God, for they told him how much he had mistaken the character of the God he was fleeing from, and they made him feel that his safety lay not in escaping from God, but in returning to Him. They made his fig leaves fall from off him, for they told him of a far better clothing, a covering made by the hands of God

“To remove all such thoughts, God Himself comes down [in Genesis 3:15]. He speaks in person, not through the voice of another. He will leave man without excuse, by letting him hear the story of grace from His own lips. He becomes His own witness, that He may give to man the fullest possible assurance that all this story of grace is really true, and that in His purpose of grace He is entirely sincere.”

“Grace does not stand upon the distant mountain top and call on the sinner to climb up the steep heights, that he may obtain its treasures; it comes down into the valley in quest of him; nay, it stretches down its hand into the very lowest depths of the horrible pit, to pluck him thence out of the miry clay.”

“No, the language [of grace] is widely different. It is, ‘I see you are guilty, wretched, worthless, with nothing in you or about you of what is good; but these are just the very things that I fix upon: they unfit you for everything else, but they do not unfit you for grace.’”

This is a book written to move the soul and release the tears. How hard the human heart must be to not be broken by the goodness of God opened in this book.

“[Man] can unfasten the link that binds earth to heaven, but he cannot reknit it. He can cast himself out of heaven, but he cannot raise himself up to that lost heaven again. It is not needful that God should consume him or bind him in chains of darkness, that he may be prevented from re-entering God’s presence. It is enough that he be left to himself.”

Speaking of the moments after Adam’s fall, “The verdure faded, the leaf grew sere, the weed sprang up, the flower drooped, the creatures looked fiercely on each other, hoarse sounds went and came, and the harmony of earth was dissolved. The world seemed to be putting on sackcloth, as if bewailing some unspeakable calamity that had smitten it.”

Started reading this over breakfast. My breakfast got cold.