Holiness by Grace Quotes

“The inevitable consequence of obedience without delight is the erosion of holiness.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“We do not proclaim grace so that anyone will make light of sin or of our duty to resist it. We herald God’s amazing mercy in order to join with the Spirit in stirring up in his people such a love for God that, when the day of evil comes, they will gladly put on the full armor he provides. Then, despite the hardships and the pain God’s people may face in the battle, they will stand strong in the power of his might.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“…The identity I tried to establish by obedience to the Law is dead, the life Jesus lived to fulfill the Law is mine.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“All that we require for growing in godliness, our God provides. In themselves our works provide no basis for boasting, no foundation for comparison to others, and no claim on heaven’s blessing. Though it flows through us, the righteousness that sanctifies us before God originates in him. We strive in the strength that he generates, reach for him with the love that he instills, and trust him with the faith that he provides. We are engaged in the battle against sin and Satan, but the victory is the Lord’s.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

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― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Very few healthy things in the Christian life happen in secret. If you cannot or will not tell your spouse, your peers, or your superiors about something, then accountability falters. Our immersion in and integrity with these patterns of Christian association and accountability are ordinary means by which we grow in godliness.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“There is a danger in preaching a kind of grace that is only a reaction against legalism and gives no thought to licentiousness. Grace protects from both errors by keeping us from the despair of believing that we must merit God’s love, and from the danger of thinking that God has given us no guidance for how to love him and one another.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“The Spirit enables each member of the church family to reflect the features of his image that minimize our respective differences and heighten our mutual love.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“God’s actions in our behalf free us from human limitations in satisfying his law, and from obligations to human legislation. Our acceptance with God does not hinge on our meeting legal standards of any sort, divine or human. We naturally wonder, does this unconditional acceptance mean that God has no concern for standards? Are we free from all divine law? The apostle Paul answers by saying that, though God rejects the law of merit, he affirms the law of love.12 In this understanding, Paul echoes Jesus’ words: “If you love me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15).”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Faith in the love that paid the penalty for our sin also provides powerful motivation to flee temptation. Were God merely a frowning tyrant—if all I feel when I face him is guilt and defeat—then I will never have the joy of my salvation that is spiritual strength. Yet because he has provided a way of escape from my guilt, I have reason to go to him in prayer to ask his forgiveness and to seek his aid. Gazing upon the cross, not fearing or fleeing from “the ogre in the sky,” destroys the power of temptation. Its allures lose their power over me when I am resting in the arms of a Savior who makes me eternally secure in his love.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Paul writes to Christians who have fallen into the world’s snares and proclaims, “There is a way out!” God promises to enable us to overcome our besetting sins and shaming weaknesses. We access God’s grace by acknowledging what he tells us about the persuasiveness and power of the temptation we face, and then by resisting it through confidence in the resources he provides.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“The evidence of complete repentance is not the stereotypical gritted teeth and grinding resolve, or even groaning and groveling. The reverberations of repentance sound more like singing. Yes, God can lead us through a dark night of the soul to enable us to see and to grieve for sin. And as we wrestle against our pride and rebellion to find rest in the mercy of God, we may know great pain. But when we have understood, trusted, and received the freeing grace of repentance, rejoicing fills our hearts. Without this joy that is our strength, the new obedience that should be the fruit of true repentance is impossible. Like the rich young man we, too, go away sad and unwilling to follow Jesus. By contrast, biblical repentance renews in us thanksgiving and gratitude for God’s mercy. Knowing his pardon, we delight to serve him with a childlike love and a willing mind. Repentance renews our joy.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Repentance confesses to God, “God, forgive me. The allure of this temptation was more real to me than the beauties of your promises and presence.” Repentance implores God, “Please graciously restore the reality of your care into my heart and life, so that your love will be so precious that I cannot further exist with my betrayal of you. Help me to meditate more upon the character of your love revealed by Christ’s sacrifice than upon the circumstances of my life that make me doubt you.” Repentance petitions, “God, I want to seek you the way simple people do when they say that they know you are near by the way that your Word has become alive in their souls.” None but the biblically repentant heart seeks after God with such unashamed love.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“True repentance, though certainly not desiring to face those consequences, willingly accepts them if they move us closer to fellowship with and understanding of our God. This is so because biblical repentance is primarily concerned with the renewal of our fellowship with him.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Remorse for our sin makes us repentant; but it should also make us so aware of the inability of our hearts adequately to register what God requires, that we do not trust our sorrow to make us right with God. Similarly, while our gratitude for God’s pardon should make us “endeavor after new obedience,” the very source of our gratitude—awareness of the awful shortcoming of all our actions—keeps us from trusting in our obedience to make us deserving of God’s forgiveness.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“New obedience follows true repentance, but we put no hope for pardon in what we do. Repentance is not real if we have no intention of correcting our ways, but the correction is not a condition of our forgiveness.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“True repentance is not so much asking, “What honor do I get from my faith?” but rather, “How may I give myself in humility to God?” The heart that is most spiritually sensitive and committed is simultaneously most aware of its need of grace.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Because true repentance makes us sense the depth and awfulness of sin, it naturally leads to the next element of repentance that is missing in the rich young ruler’s responses. If our sin is truly abhorrent to us, then we want to be rid of it. We long for a cure to the disease of sin. At least two attitudes characterize this longing: a desire to offer confession, and a desire to receive grace.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“The understanding that we should desire repentance because it removes contaminants from our relationship with God and with others helps distinguish false from true repentance. False repentance is less concerned with the spiritual contamination of sin than it is with the personal consequences of sin. True repentance is chiefly concerned with the wrong we have done to our Savior and to others. Repentance of the first kind is self-preoccupied; true repentance is a selfless seeking of spiritual fellowship and renewal. False repentance flees correction; true repentance seeks it.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“True repentance must include awareness of the magnitude of our spiritual destitution; therefore real repentance must begin with recognition of God’s incomparable and unachievable holiness. When we do not apprehend the true nature of our wrongdoing, we do not hate it sufficiently to seek its expulsion. True repentance requires grief and remorse that cries out, “How could I have done such a thing? Please, God, take the guilt and presence of this evil from my”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“The enabling union God provides in Christ is the ultimate antidote for the despair of believing that we must find within ourselves the resources to earn God’s love.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Sin as a reigning power is defeated in the life of a believer, but it will never surrender. It will continue to harass us and seek to sabotage our Christian lives as long as we live.”24 We are prone to capitulate to these attacks if we are not convinced that the reign of sin is over. Our hearts have been released from its rule, and faith in the reality of our emancipation grants us power to repulse renewed campaigns of temptation and entrapment from our enemy.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Faith in our union with Christ provides the “double cure,” ridding us of sin’s “guilt and power.”23 Because God has regenerated us as new creatures, we can actually breathe the air that God provides to enable us to run the race of holiness in this life. Faith in our ability to do so is what allows us to run with confidence, perseverance, and power (cf. Heb. 12:1-2).”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“As new creatures in Christ, the condemnation and dominion of sin are removed from our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin, but progressively have the power to resist the wrong that the Spirit reveals to us.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Awareness that we can be energized and strengthened by our union with Christ takes us to the second aspect of the confidence we find in the life of faith. Not only does faith in Christ give us confidence that our status does not change, it also gives us confidence that our ability does change. Paul says that he “lives by faith” in the Son of God who loved him and gave himself for him (Gal. 2:20). These statements assure us of Christ’s continuing influence in our lives. We not only have Christ’s righteousness by virtue of our union with him, but we also have his power. This point is emphasized by Paul’s saying that though we are dead, Christ lives in us. His life substitutes for ours in supplying our ability to please God, as well as supplying the righteousness that God accepts.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“But what if God’s love were not seen as a well, remote and accessed only by endless striving, but rather as the very air around us? Then we would not perceive the means of grace as measures we take to produce God’s love for us, but simply as means for using more fully the provision that already surrounds us. We would then see the Christian disciplines as means of opening our mouths to breathe in all the loving resources God has already provided. Opening my mouth in prayer and praise does not manufacture more of God’s love for me, any more than opening my mouth makes more air. The means of grace simply allow me to experience the fullness of the love that God has already fully and completely provided.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Because Christ is the only life in me, what I do in the flesh does not change my status with God. By my striving to do what God requires, and by God’s disciplining me, more of my old, dead “husk” identity is being stripped away and more of the living Christ in me is being revealed (the old me is decreasing that he might increase). Still, because Jesus loved me and gave himself for me that he might be my identity, God already loves me completely. That privileged status does not change, even though my progressive sanctification will not be complete until I am with him in glory.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“Thus Paul makes it clear not only that Christ loves us apart from our personally qualifying for his affection, but also that Christ’s love for us is complete and that his atoning work in our behalf is complete. His regard for us and the way that this regard is secured are both fixed.15 The beauty of this lies in understanding that my performance does not affect Christ’s love for me. While God is not pleased with my sin and may discipline me in order to turn me from destructive paths and practices, his love for me does not diminish in any degree. He gave himself for my sins in their entirety, so that I might have his love in its entirety.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“We are enabled to grow in godliness by the resources of our union with Christ—our sanctification springs from the justification that is by faith. How does this work? How does faith in my justification lead to my sanctification; i.e., how does faith in my union with Christ promote godliness? The answer is that our union with Christ allows us to have two confidences that are the empowering mechanisms for godliness in the Christian life: 1) confidence that our status does not change; and, 2) confidence that our ability does change.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength

“There are two consequences of basing our justification on how sanctified we have made our lives. First, we jeopardize our faith in our justification—since our lives are never as truly holy as God requires. Second, we unplug our sanctification from its power source, which is faith in our union with Christ rather than confidence in our works.”
― Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength