Quotes about Grace

To mix Law and Gospel not only clouds the knowledge of grace, it cuts out Christ altogether.

Christ doesn't want sinners who refuse to admit that they're sinners.

God's approval isn't based on what a person does. Rather, he accepts what a person does because he already approves of the person. The person hasn't earned God's approval through the good that he or she does. Because

So we must guard against real sins. But it's also to real sinners that the gospel reaches out.

This is exactly how those who rely on their own efforts to be justified still act today. They concentrate on the good that they do, which they hope will please God. They don't trust in God's mercy and his grace. They aren't hoping that God will forgive their sins through Christ. This

God created us just in order to redeem us.. . .

And this is the pure and unalloyed meaning of the First Commandment: We should deem ourselves to be nothing as regards our merit, but to have, receive, and find power to do everything only by His mercy and love, to His glory — mercy which He first promises by His Word and then also confirms afterward by a work which He does through us, as by a sign, just as here He cites the Exodus from Egypt and the destruction of the Canaanites.

We teach that all men are naturally depraved. We condemn man's free will, his strength, wisdom, and righteousness. We say that we obtain grace by the free mercy of God alone for Christ's sake.

Trying to merit grace by preceding works, therefore, is trying to placate God with sins, which is nothing but heaping sins upon sins, making fun of God, and provoking His wrath.

For more than twenty years I was a pious monk, read Mass daily, and so weakened myself with fasting and praying that I would not have been long for this life had I continued. Yet all this taken together cannot help me in even one little crisis to be able to say before God: 'All this I have done, now please consider it, and be gracious to me.' What else did I achieve with this than to plague myself uselessly, impair my health, and waste my time?

Satan, the god of all dissension stirs up daily new sects. And last of all which of all others I should have foreseen or once suspected. He has raised up a sect such as teach that men should not be terrified by the Law but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ.

Therefore the first care of every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and strengthen his faith alone more and more, and by it grow in the knowledge, not of works, but of Christ Jesus