31st May 2009

Speaker: Jonathan Webster

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. ... all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of that sin. Both processes begin before death. The good man's past begins to change so that forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, " and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.'

C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

No inhabitants of that blessed world will ever be grieved with the thought that they are slighted by those that they love, or that their love is not fully and fondly returned...There shall be no such thing as flattery or insincerity in heaven, but there perfect sincerity shall reign through all in all. Everyone will be just what he seems to be, and will really have all the love that he seems to have. It will not be as in this world, where comparatively few things are what they seem to be, and where professions are often made lightly and without meaning. But there, every expression of love shall come from the bottom of the heart, and all that is professed shall be really and truly felt.

Jonathan Edwards

...our daily encounters with bank tellers, post office clerks, and gas station attendants are, each one, elements of sin and grace. All of these people and each of these encounters is a significant detail in the life of faith. But we are not aware of it. Most of the time we are not living in a crisis in which we are conscious of our need of God, yet everything we do is critical, to our faith, and God is critically involved in it. All day long we are doing eternally important things without knowing it. All through the day we inadvertently speak words that enter people's lives and change them in minor or major ways, and we never know it.

Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder

The fifth part in our series: Choice Not Chance: Heaven and Hell & Why We Need Them

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