I… began to feel for nations what I already felt for sinners deformed and scarred by the work of the devil and sin. No matter how bad and ugly people look, I always believed that because Jesus paid the price, salvation was always an option for them. I now realize that the same precious blood that paid the price for sinners has also paid it for nations, and that nothing is beyond His reach. Understanding and embracing the commission to disciple nations is an issue of the heart.
Transformation
Bianca Olthoff
Mercy gave the Samaritan woman a second chance, Grace made her a preacher.
Ed Silvoso
Transformation is a process. Like the feeble light at the crack of dawn, it is meant to grow brighter and brighter. But the “dawn” does not happen, and the path remains untraveled, until one begins taking steps of obedience in the right direction.
Frederick Buechner
It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did … for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.
Henri J. M. Nouwen
The appearance of Jesus in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.
Ray C. Stedman
To see lonely, selfish, empty individuals transformed slowly but surely into warm, loving, wholesome, and happy people is to become aware of why Paul describes Christ as “unsearchable riches.”
Edward McKendree (E. M.) Bounds
Walking with God down the avenue of prayer we acquire something of His likeness, and unconsciously we become witnesses to others of His beauty and His grace.
Sam Storms
Grace does not demonize our desires nor destroy them nor lead us to deny them. Grace is the work of the Holy Spirit in transforming our desires so that knowing Jesus becomes sweeter than illicit sex, sweeter than money and what it can buy, sweeter than every fruitless joy. Grace is God satisfying our souls with His Son so that we’re ruined for anything else!
Mother Teresa
Prayer makes the heart large enough until it can contain God’s gift of Himself.
Isidore of Seville
Teaching unsupported by grace may enter our ears, but it never reaches the heart. When God’s grace does touch our innermost minds to bring understanding, then his word, which is received by the ear, can sink deep into the heart.