Quotes about Forgiveness

Lewis Smedes points out, "The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness. . . . When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.

God's grace is not a grandfatherly display of "niceness," for it cost the exorbitant price of Calvary.

Sadly, Jesus' followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy people feel unwelcome: "We don't want that kind of person in our church." Either way we fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all.

God shattered the inexorable law of sin and retribution by invading earth, absorbing the worst we had to offer, crucifixion, and then fashioning from that cruel deed the remedy for the human condition. Calvary broke up the logjam between justice and forgiveness. By accepting onto his innocent self all the severe demands of justice, Jesus broke forever the chain of ungrace.

a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.

God took a great risk by announcing forgiveness in advance, and the scandal of grace involves a transfer of that risk to us.

God does some of God's best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

Dr. Paul Tournier expresses this pattern in the language of psychiatry: "God blots out conscious guilt, but He brings to consciousness repressed guilt.

On the one hand God passionately loved the people he had made; on the other hand, God had a terrible urge to destroy the evil that enslaved them. On the cross, God resolved that inner conflict, for there God's Son absorbed the destructive force and transformed it into love.

grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.

Apart from forgiveness, the monstrous past may awake at any time from hibernation to devour the present. And also the future.