Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from What's So Amazing About Grace?:
“God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.”
“Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.”
“Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.”
“I would far rather convey grace than explain it.”
“Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.”
“[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?”
“We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.”
“C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.”
“At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.”
“I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.”
“Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.”
“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more... And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less... Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”
“Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self. You become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?”
“That, at least, is the vision of the church in the New Testament: a colony of heaven in a hostile world. Dwight L. Moody said, “Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian.”
“Jesus declared that we should have one distinguishing mark: not political correctness or moral superiority, but love.”
“As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.”
“Grace is shockingly personal. As Henri Nouwen points out, 'God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.”
“By striving to prove how much they deserve God’s love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don’t deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.”
“grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at the table in God’s family.”
“All of us in the church need “grace-healed eyes” to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us.”
“Perhaps the reason politics has proved such a snare for the church is that power rarely coexists with love. People in power draw up lists of friends and enemies, then reward their friends and punish their enemies. Christians are commanded to love even their enemies.”
“The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.”
“Today, each time an election rolls around Christians debate whether this or that candidate is “God’s man” for the White House. Projecting myself back into Jesus’ time, I had difficulty imagining him pondering whether Tiberius, Octavius, or Julius Caesar was “God’s man” for the empire.”
“Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.”
“We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate choice of their own mothers.”
“Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.”
“Jesus’ story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day’s wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.”
“A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.”
“Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping that somehow, sometime, somewhere, that person will be cured.”
“Like everyone else, evangelicals have a right to present arguments on all the issues, but the moment we present them as part of some “Christian” platform we abandon our moral high ground.”
