grace

The question is not whether or not change and challenge are going to happen. They are. The question is, when they do happen, how are we going to choose to look at them, contextualize them, and navigate them?

We have another chance to navigate, perhaps in a slightly different way than we did yesterday. We cannot go back. But we can learn.

We are no longer under the 'Law', but rather the Grace of God in Christ."~R. Alan Woods [2013]

Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

Grace not only embraces you at your most shameful, it's the most effective antidote to sin.

0 true and heavenly grace, without which our own merits are nothing, and our natural gifts of no account! Neither arts nor riches, beauty nor strength, genius nor eloquence have any value in Your eyes, Lord, unless allied to grace. For the gifts of nature are common to good men and bad alike, but grace or love are Your especial gift to those whom You choose, and those who are sealed with this are counted worthy of life everlasting.

Cheer up! You're a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you're more loved than you ever dared hope.

So," she says, "What's got you so busy?""What?" he says, "Oh, um, I was trying to perfect my telepathy." Grace gasps and bulges her eyes out very wide. "Are_you okay?" he asks, finally, after she shows no signs of stopping."I'm pushing a thought towards you, obviously.""Oh," Kellan says, "Well I guess I'm not a telepath after all.

I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.

The bridge of grace will bear your weight, brother. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge, yea, tens of thousands have gone over it. Some have been the chief of sinners and some have come at the very last of their days but the arch has never yielded beneath their weight. I will go with them trusting to the same support. It will bear me over as it has for them.

Grace is not a doctrine or a religion. It is a person, Jesus Christ.

One of these days you who are now a 'babe' in Christ shall be a 'father' in the church. Hope for this great thing; but hope for it as a gift of grace, and not as the wages of work, or as the product of your own energy.

I want to wake up ev­ery day I have left to the warmth of your lips on mine, the sound of your voice singing next to me, the feel of your fin­gers on my skin and your heart beat­ing mu­sic with mine.

God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd all turned out to have other things more important to do than come live it up with him, goes out into the skid rows and soup kitchens and charity wards and brings home a freak show. The man with no legs who sells shoelaces at the corner. The old woman in the moth-eaten fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint in a brown paper bag. The pusher, the whore, the village idiot who stands at the blinker light waving his hand as the cars go by. They are seated at the damask-laid table in the great hall. The candles are all lit and the champagne glasses filled. At a sign from the host, the musicians in their gallery strike up "Amazing Grace.

We have created a culture of leadership "development" in the Church at the expense of ignore the ministry of the Church to making disciples.

Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.

Grace (the Gospel) is under attack today simply because it reveals the GOODNESS of God. Nothing reveals the GOODNESS of God more than grace.

Only unconditional grace can transform a hardened heart into a grateful heart. Only a free gift can demolish any notion of quid pro quo. Only an utterly merciful act of love can fashion a new creation capable of love. As theologian Karl Barth puts it, 'As the beloved of God, we have no alternative but to love him in return.