GRACE-DEFINED
Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him
to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a
self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature
and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity
the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast,
and bring into favor those who were before under just
disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us
and make us sit together in heavenly places to
demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s
kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
A.W. Tozer
Grace is the very opposite of merit... Grace is not
only undeserved favor, but it is favor shown to the
one who has deserved the very opposite.
Harry Ironside
Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth
of God by giving sinners the right and power to
delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.
John Piper
Grace is not simply leniency
when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God
not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.
John Piper
God's grace is His unmerited favor toward the
wicked, unworthy sinners, by which He delivers them
from condemnation and death.
John MacArthur
Titus, Moody, 1996, p. 107.
In efficacious grace we are not merely passive, nor
yet does God do some and we do the rest. But God does
all, and we do all. God produces all, we act all. For
that is what produces, viz. our own acts. God is the
only proper author and fountain; we only are the
proper actors. We are in different respects, wholly
passive and wholly active.
Jonathan Edwards
Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace
perfected.
Jonathan Edwards
Grace…expresses two complementary thoughts: God’s
unmerited favor to us through Christ, and God’s divine
assistance to us through the Holy Spirit.
Jerry Bridges
The Practice of Godliness, NavPress, 1996, p.
98-99. Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com,
All rights reserved.
Grace is God’s free and unmerited favor
shown to guilty sinners who deserve only
judgment. It is the love of God shown to the
unlovely. It is God reaching downward to people who
are in rebellion against Him.
Jerry Bridges
Transforming Grace, NavPress, 1991, p. 21-22. Used
by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com.
All rights reserved.
The first and possibly most fundamental
characteristic of divine grace is that it presupposes
sin and guilt. Grace has meaning only when
men are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and
liable to eternal wrath… Grace does not contemplate
sinners merely as undeserving but as ill-deserving…
It is not simply that we do not deserve grace; we do
deserve hell.
C. Samuel Storms
The Grandeur of God, Baker, 1984, p. 124.
Anything this side of hell is pure grace.
Author Unknown
Grace is God giving us what we do not deserve and
mercy is God not giving us what we do deserve.
Author Unknown
[Grace is] free sovereign favor to the
ill-deserving.
B.B. Warfield
[Grace is] the free and benevolent influence of a
Holy God operating sovereignly in the lives of
undeserved sinners.
Phil Johnson
Grace is the free, undeserved goodness and favor of
God to mankind.
Matthew Henry
The noun (mercy) and its derivatives always deal
with what we see of pain, misery, and distress, these
results of sin; and grace always with the sin and the
guilt itself. The one extends relief, the other
pardon; the one cures, heals, helps, the other
cleanses and reinstates. With God (grace) is
always first and (mercy) is second.
R.C.H. Lenski
Interpretation of Saint Matthews Gospel by Richard
C. Lenski copyright © 1932 Augsburg Publishing
House, p.191.
Grace…means the full and free forgiveness of every
sin, without God demanding or expecting anything from
the one so forgiven.
J.N. Darby