Quotes about Deliverance

Being saved' doesn't just mean, as it does for many today, 'going to heaven when they die'. It means 'knowing God's rescuing power, the power revealed in Jesus, which anticipates, in the present, God's final great act of deliverance'.

Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action

Redemption," as we saw, is an Exodus term.

Now the thing about Passover — one of the things about Passover! — is that when Israel was enslaved in Egypt nobody ever said it was as a result of their sin.

God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own character. Paul was not conscious of himself. He was recklessly abandoned, totally surrendered, and separated by God for one purpose--to proclaim the gospel of God.

God nowhere holds a person responsible for having the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realize that Jesus Christ came to deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. "This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light" (John 3:19).

The typical view of the Christian life is that it means being delivered from all adversity. But it actually means being delivered in adversity, which is something very different.

Since sin means that you are a bigger danger to you than anything else in your life and since it is impossible for you to run from you, there is only one hope for you. It is that someone with power, wisdom, and mercy will invade your life, forgive your sins, and progressively deliver you from the hold that sin has had on you. That mercy comes to you in a person, the Lord Jesus Christ, and his mercy is always fresh, uniquely fashioned for the sin struggles of this new day.

We need more than acceptance or practical strategies for change. We need the forgiveness, deliverance, and empowerment that only God's grace can give.

Often we make the mistake of thinking we have a heart for the Lord, when really we're just thankful for him because at that moment he seems to be delivering to us what we have truly set our hearts on. Often we reduce God to just the deliverer of good fits, rather than recognizing him as the ultimate heart-satisfying gift.

For sin, forgiveness; for weakness, strength; for foolishness, wisdom; for bondage, deliverance—such is the way of the grace of Jesus.

I've already written in this book, rules don't have the power to deliver your children from this condition, but the powerful, transforming grace of God does.