GOD'S MERCY

'He is so merciful. We aren't. We are perfectionist and unmerciful. We refuse to accept ourselves.

He says, "I accept you. In Christ. He has paid for all your sin. He is the perfection you lack. And he is yours. You are in him,"'

Julian Hardyman, Idols, p.75.

UNION WITH CHRIST

'...God didn't simply offer you legal forgiveness. Praise him that he did that. But he offered you something much more profound. He offered you himself. He knew that your need was so great that it wouldn't be enough to simply forgive you. He literally needed to unzip you and get inside you, or you would never be what you were supposed to be and do what you were supposed to do.'

Paul David Tripp, Whiter than snow: meditations on sin and mercy, p.103.

UNION WITH CHRIST

'Christ lives in the personality of the man who believes in him, and brings with him the hope of "glory" to come. No other religion dares to say such a thing about the person whom men worship as God. God has always been external, the power to be obeyed. Now at last the wonder which we would never had the impertinence to claim, is seen to have come true in Christ. Not only has God become man and lived life on human terms; not only has God reconciled himself by a personal act; not only has God proved that death is conquered by an unforgettable demonstration of power, but God lives in the man whose personality is open to him. Life is a matter not of conforming to external rules but of being transformed from within.'

JB Phillips, Ring of Truth: A Translator's Testimony, p.30.