There is, by God's grace, an immeasurable distance between late and too late.
Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3. 32 p. m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.
If you want God's grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster. We come to God saying, "Look at all I've done," or maybe "Look at all I've suffered. " God, however, wants us to look to him - to just wash.
I love cats. I love their grace and their elegance. I love their independence and their arrogance, and the way they lie and look at you, summing you up, surely to your detriment, with that unnerving, unwinking, appraising stare.
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live regist'red upon our brazen tombs And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When, spite of cormorant devouring Time, Th' endeavor of this present breath may buy That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge And make us heirs of all eternity.
If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth, which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.
Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.
Sense of sin may be often great, and more felt than grace; yet not be more than grace. A man feels the ache of his finger more sensibly than the health of his whole body; yet he knows that the ache of a finger is nothing so much as the health of the whole body.
The solution to staying on the right side of the fine line between using and abusing grace is repentance. The road to repentance is godly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7:10). Godly sorrow is developed when we focus on the true nature of sin as an offense against God rather than something that makes us feel guilty.
A rigorous doctrine of imputation is not only limiting but ends up doing a disservice to the nature of grace and justification. It makes the transactions of the gospel basically juridical. In the Roman view, justification and sanctification are a seamless fabric. It is more than a question of God simply seeing us through a legal scrim of Christ's righteousness. Righteousness actually begins to transform us.
Grace makes you gracious. The Giver makes you give.
By one hour's intimate access to the throne of grace, where the Lord causes His glory to pass before the soul that seeks Him you may acquire more true spiritual knowledge and comfort than a day's or a week's converse with the best of men, or the most.
Without grace there is no hope, but with it there is no shortage.
It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally.
God works with power, and can make the unwilling willing; if He undertakes the conversion of a soul, it will be converted. All the pious workings of our heart towards God are the fruit and consequence of the powerful working of His grace in us.
The slightest cooperation with God's grace can provoke a massive spiritual change.
Charlie whistled "Amazing Grace" as he drove. It was all I could do not to whip my head around and snap, Are you kidding me? Couldn't he pick something more appropriate, like "Shout at the Devil" or "Don't fear the Reaper"? Some people had no sense of the proper music for a kidnapping.
True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.
O What A Freedom Is Thine! Freedom from Condemnation. Freedom to the Promises, Freedom to the Throne of Grace, and at last Freedom to Enter Heaven!
Pure chastity is beauty to our souls, grace to our bodies, and peace to our desires.