Quotes about Redemption

We are not commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification—we are commissioned to lift up Jesus Christ (see John 12:32). It is an injustice to say that Jesus Christ labored in redemption to make me a saint. Jesus Christ labored in redemption to redeem the whole world and to place it perfectly whole and restored before the throne of God. The fact that we can experience redemption illustrates the power of its reality, but that experience is a by-product and not the goal of redemption.

My spiritual history must have as its underlying foundation a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ. To be born again means that I see Jesus.

Our Lord never lays down the conditions of discipleship as the conditions of salvation.

God does not hear us because we pray earnestly— He hears us solely on the basis of redemption. God is never impressed by our earnestness.

Our repentance is merely the result of our personal realization of the atonement by the Cross of Christ, which He has provided for us. "Christ Jesus . . . became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Once we realize that Christ has become all this for us, the limitless joy of God begins in us. And wherever the joy of God is not present, the death sentence is still in effect.

Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is small. Sanctification is simply the wonderful expression or evidence of the forgiveness of sins in a human life. But the thing that awakens the deepest fountain of gratitude in a human being is that God has forgiven his sin.

Are we prepared to pray with Murray McCheyne, "Lord, make me as holy as Thou canst make a sinner saved by grace"?

Substitution is always twofold—not only is Jesus Christ identified with my sin, but I am so identified with Him that the disposition which ruled Him is in me.

The Atonement of Jesus has to work out in practical, unobtrusive ways in my life. Every time I obey, absolute Deity is on my side, so that the grace of God and natural obedience coincide. Obedience means that I have banked everything on the Atonement, and my obedience is met immediately by the delight of the supernatural grace of God.

To say that "prayer changes things" is not as close to the truth as saying, "Prayer changes me and then I change things." God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things. Prayer is not a matter of changing things externally, but one of working miracles in a person's inner nature.

To identify with the death of Jesus Christ means that we must die to everything that was never a part of Him.

If I obey Jesus Christ, the redemption of God will flow through me to the lives of others, because behind the deed of obedience is the reality of Almighty God.