Grace: Quotes From History

December 19, 2011 briank Grace

What have Christian preachers and authors said about the grace of our Lord Jesus throughout history?

Here is some of what I’ve found. On one hand, grace seems to be a hot-button for Christians, a “watershed that divides Catholicism from Protestantism, Calvinism from Arminianism, modern liberalism from conservatism.” (Ryrie, Charles C. The Grace of God. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1963), pp. 10-11.; source). Much has been said about the grace of God and its role in a Christian’s life (source). And unfortunately, much of what has been said about grace has not been gracious, but divisive. I cannot believe even for a second that God intended his grace to be so complicated, so divisive and so harsh that it gets trampled on by well-intended sinners.

I am putting aside the “noise” raised by those who would use grace to divide or as a tool to justify their theology. As I wrote earlier, I’m not interested in finding a definition and then searching Scripture. I am interested in finding out what Scripture says about grace and then developing an understanding, and then perhaps a definition. I also really believe that even a child should be able to understand the grace of God.

The quotes below point to the centrality of grace in Christian life and the supremacy of grace as something to be learned. I believe they are helpful (rather than divisive) as I begin this journey.

“A man can no more take in a supply of grace for the future than he can eat enough today to last him for the next 6 months, nor can he inhale sufficient air into his lungs with one breath to sustain life for a week to come. We are permitted to draw upon God’s store of grace from day to day as we need it.”
D. L. Moody See: Deut 33:25; Psa 46:1; Heb 4:16
http://www.tentmaker.org/Quotes/grace_quotes.html

“Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.”
Jonathan Edwards
http://dailychristianquote.com/dcqgrace.html

“Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under just disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”
A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)
http://dailychristianquote.com/dcqgrace.html

“One of the greatest evidences of God’s love to those that love him is, to send them afflictions, with grace to bear them.”
John Wesley
http://morechristlike.com/quotes-from-john-wesley/

“The difference between mercy and grace? Mercy gave the prodigal son a second chance. Grace gave him a feast.”
Max Lucado, Upwords
http://dailychristianquote.com/dcqgrace.html

“In the New Testament, ‘grace’ is a word of central importance – the keyword, in fact, of Christianity. The thought of grace is the key that unlocks the New Testament; and it is the only key that does so. However well we may know the New Testament, we cannot get inside its meaning till we know something of what grace is.”
J.I.Packer
http://www.fbccs.org/resources/papers/grace.asp

“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.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
http://dailychristianquote.com/dcqgrace.html