Julian of Norwich, “The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”

God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am. Because of this I don’t need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him.

But I could count on one hand the number that were a simple proclamation of the gospel of Christ.

My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky caught the shock and scandal of the gospel of grace when he wrote: At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, “Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!” And he will say to us: “Vile beings, you who are in the image of the beast and bear his mark, but come all the same, you as well.” And the wise

Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.

Psalm 123, “Just as the eyes of slave are on their masters’ hand, or the eyes of a slave-girl on the hand of her mistress,”

Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works—but our lives refute our faith. By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived. Too many Christians are living in the house of fear and not in the

Morton Kelsey wrote, “The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.”