Status Updates From Future Grace

“I do not know where I would turn … if I did not believe that almighty God is taking every setback and every discouragement and every controversy and every pressure and every pain, and stripping it of its destructive power and making it work for the enlargement of my joy in God.”

“Grace would not be grace if it were a response to resources in us. Grace is grace because it highlights God’s own overflowing resources of kindness. Grace is eternal because it will take that long for God to expend inexhaustible stores of goodness on us (!!!!!). Grace is free because God would not be the infinite, self-sufficient God he is if he were constrained by anything outside himself.”

gosh, what a book so far

“The grace for endurance - even glad boasting in weakness - is not primarily looking back to bygone grace. It is looking forward to the next moment’s and next month’s arrival of the power of Christ to do for us what we absolutely despair of doing ourselves.”

“The idea (many christians) have of grace is this: that their conversion and pardon are God’s work, but that now, in gratitude to God, it is their work to live as christians and follow Jesus… No, wandering one, as it was Jesus who drew thee when He spoke ‘Come,’ so it is Jesus who keeps thee when He says ‘Abide.’ The grace to come and the grace to abide are alike from Him alone.”

“If gratitude is twisted into a sense of debt, it gives birth to the debtor’s ethic - and the effect is to nullify grace.”

a slow read for me but challenging indeed