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Last month, I was assigned The Prodigal God in one of my classes. I had heard of the book, but had never read it.
A month later, I am SO excited about this book!
We are getting ready to use it for small groups at church, and during the months of April and May, I’ll be blogging about it in a series here on L.I.F.E. by Ashley Pichea {see more details at the end of this post}!!
{Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the series!}
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Today, I want to share a few of my favorite quotes from the book…
{#1} “God’s love and forgiveness can pardon and restore any and every kind of sin or wrongdoing. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done… There is no evil that the father’s love cannot pardon and over, there is no sin that is a match for his grace.”
{#2} “Religious people commonly live very moral lives, but their goal is to get leverage over God, to control him, to put him in a position where they think he owes them. Therefore, despite all their ethical fastidiousness and piety, they are actually rebelling against his authority.”
{#3} “Sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge… There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good.”
{#4} “If you think goodness and decency is the way to merit a good life from God, you will be eaten up with anger, since life never goes as we wish.”
{#5} “While most people do not arrive at these extreme places, each approach to life has the seeds of its own destruction in it, which draws its adherents toward the spiritual destinations [Jesus] describes so well.”
{#6} “We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness – the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our ultimate hope and trust in things other than God, and that in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of those things.”
{#7} “Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn’t mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness.”
{#8} “Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness.”
{#9} “Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting… We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.”
{#10} “People whose lives remained unchanged by God’s grace didn’t really understand its costliness, and therefore didn’t really understand the gospel. They had a general idea of God’s universal love, but not a real grasp of the seriousness of sin and the meaning of Christ’s work on our behalf.”
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And now for the fun details…
During the months of April and May, I will be blogging through The Prodigal God, and I want YOU to join me!
We’ll tackle one chapter each Wednesday, sharing our insights, a key quote or two that reached out to us, and how we’re applying what we’ve learned.
Are you in? Get a copy of The Prodigal God, grab the button, and link up your blog below.
I can’t wait to blog through this life-changing book together!
{P.S. Not a blogger? No problem! Just write your thoughts in the comments each week!}
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