REFLECTION QUOTES

“The grace of God is love freely shown towards guilty sinners, contrary to their merit and indeed in defiance of their demerit. It is God showing goodness to persons who deserve only severity and had no reason to expect anything but severity…. [G]race means so little to some… because they do not share the beliefs about God and man which it presupposes.”

“Grace is free in that it of self-originated, and of proceeding from One who was free not to be gracious.”
~J.I. Packer (1926-2020), English-born theologian

“[I]f God were not angry at injustice…and did not make the final end to violence, God would not be worthy of our worship…. My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West…. [But] I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose…villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.”
~Miroslav Volf, Croatian-born theologian, professor at Yale

“The people who heard Jesus’ disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw [Christian love in action] as by what they heard…. Conventional love is evoked by lovable qualities in the beloved, but the love people encountered from Christ embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies. It gave, not prudentially in order to receive, but because giving was its nature.”
~Huston Smith (1919-2016), former chair of the Philosophy Department at MIT

“The generous will prosper;
those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed.”
~Proverbs 11:25 (NLT)

“We deserved death, wrath, and hell forever. Jesus took our liability…. Jesus drank our hell.”
~Conrad Mbewe, Zambian pastor