189 Quotes About Salvation

Christ is the very epitome of innocence, and without the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary, God's plan of salvation would not have been fulfilled.

What can I give back to God for the blessings he's poured out on me? I'll lift high the cup of salvation - a toast to God!

No one can be saved - in virtue of what he can do. Everyone can be saved - in virtue of what God can do.

If thou sin, the word of God is thy adversary. It is the adversary of thy will till it become the author of thy salvation.

Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.

There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. not merely that we know God, but that He knows us.

Christ is much more powerful to save, than Adam was to destroy.

Salvation is a helmet, not a nightcap.

The cross stands for definite realities which embody and express the leading characteristics of Christ's agony.

Thousands are deceived into supposing that they have "accepted Christ" as their "personal Savior", who have not first received Him as their LORD.

For God to forgive sinners without the full penalty being paid would contradict His justice and make Him our partner in evil. Christ fully paid that penalty for our sins--but the pardon must be willingly and gladly received. God will not force anyone into heaven.

See that you buy the field where the Pearl is; sell all, and make a purchase of salvation. Think it not easy: for it is a steep ascent to eternal glory: many are lying dead by the way, slain with security.

One of two things you must do; you must either receive Him or reject Him. You receive Him here and He will receive you there; you reject Him here and He will reject you there.

Our salvation is not in some father or human instruments. It is sad to see people so blinded, worshiping the creature more than the Creator.

The love of a wife to her husband may begin from the supply of her necessities, but afterwards she may love him also for the sweetness of his person; so the soul first loves Christ for salvation but when she is brought to Him and finds what sweetness there is in Him then she loves Him for Himself.

Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving.

A church has no right to make anything a condition of membership which Christ has not made a condition of salvation.

To every toiling, heavy-laden sinner, Jesus says, Come to me and rest. But there are many toiling, heavy-laden believers, too. For them this same invitation is meant. Note well the words of Jesus, if you are heavy-laden with your service, and do not mistake it. It is not, Go, labor on, as perhaps you imagine. On the contrary, it is stop, turn back, Come to me and rest. Never, never did Christ send a heavy laden one to work; never, never did He send a hungry one, a weary one, a sick or sorrowing one, away on any service. For such the Bible only says, Come, come, come.

If turning from your sins means to stop sinning, then people can only be saved if they stop sinning. And it is unlikely that anyone has ever been saved, since we don't know anyone who has ever stopped sinning.

Why God should choose the meanest, basest, most unworthy individuals with absolutely nothing to commend them at all to God, except their miserable, lost condition, and then exalt them to become the sons of God, members of the divine family, and use them for His glory, is beyond all reason and human understanding. Yet that is grace.

The conversion of a soul is the miracle of a moment, but the manufacture of a saint is the task of a lifetime.

I remember one who spoke on the missionary question one day saying, "The great question is not, 'Will not the heathen be saved if we do not send them the gospel?' but 'Are we saved ourselves if we do not send them the gospel?'

Christ's voice sounds now for each of us in loving invitation; and dead in sin and hardness of heart though we be, we can listen and live. Christ Himself, my brother, sows the seed now. Do you take care that it falls not on, but in, your souls.

Human salvation demands the divine disclosure of truths surpassing reason.

Jesus Christ did not say, 'Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right.'

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

If there is anything excellent, it is salvation; if there be anything necessary, it is working out salvation; if there be any tool to work with, tis holy fear.

As soon as a man has found Christ, he begins to find others.

I must assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body.

The mightiest man that ever lived could not deliver himself from his sins. If a man could have saved himself, Christ would never have come into the world.

I came all this way for a reason. Today is the day of salvation. Trust Jesus to save you. Then be sincere as God knows a pretender.

If there be ground for you to trust in your own righteousness, then, all that Christ did to purchase salvation and all that God did to prepare the way for it is in vain.

Just because God worketh in him, as the evidence and triumph of it, the true child of God works out his own salvation--works it out having really received it--not as a light thing, a superfluous labor, but with fear and trembling as a reasonable and indispensable service.

Because the Scriptures say that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him, we need not conclude that a murderer cannot be saved. He can be if he will come to Christ and receive Him as Savior.

But the Jews will also be believers, so you can say that all the saints, both gentiles and Jews, will go into the millennial kingdom and populate the earth.

They believe the doctrine of election, but they have not the faith of God's elect. They swear by final perseverance, but persevere in unbelief. They confess all the five points of Calvinism, but they have not come to the one most needful point of looking unto Jesus, that they may be saved.

My memory is nearly gone; but I remember two things; That I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Savior.

If the thing happened, it was the central event in the history of the earth.

If you receive Him it will be well; if you reject Him and are lost it will be terrible.

A child of five, if properly instructed, can as truly believe and be regenerated as an adult.

Christ died for us, the least we can do is live for Him.

Christ's dying on the cross for our sins led to a 'No Charge' debt.

To attempt to pay for salvation with church membership, prayers, or good deeds is an insult to Christ, who paid the full price--and is a rejection of the gift of God's grace.

A man who has not realized what the blood has done for him has not the token of salvation. It is told of Julian, the apostate, that while he was fighting he received an arrow in his side. He pulled it out, and, taking a handful of blood threw it into the air and cried, "Galilean, Galilean, thou hast conquered."

Except a mineral be born "from above"--from the Kingdom just ABOVE it--it cannot enter the Kingdom just above it. And except a man be born "from above," by the same law, he cannot enter the Kingdom just above him.

Let your tears fall because of sin; but, at the same time, let the eye of faith steadily behold the Son of man lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that those who are bitten by the old serpent may look unto Jesus and live. Our sinnership is that emptiness into which the Lord pours his mercy.

Adoption is a greater mercy than Adam had in paradise.

I have taken much pains to know everything that is esteemed worth knowing amongst men; but with all my reading, nothing now remains to comfort me at the close of this life but this passage of St. Paul: "It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." To this I cleave, and herein do I find rest.

The gospel is called a burden and a yoke, lest we presume; yet light and easy, lest we despair.

Salvation is God's way of making us real people.

We are not saved in order to be a blessing to other people--you will be that inevitably--but primarily we are saved in order to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus Christ, God's Son.

If you try to add to God's salvation you subtract. If you try to add to God's salvation you subtract. If you try to merit God's salvation you haven't believed at all, even if you try to do a little bit.

If ever a monk could get to heaven through monastic discipline, I was that monk. And yet my conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, 'You didn't do that right. You weren't contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.' The more I tried to remedy an uncertain, weak, and troubled conscience with human traditions, the more I daily found it more uncertain, weaker, and more troubled.

If He hides the sin, or lesseneth it, He is faulty; if He leaves it still upon us, we die. He must then take our iniquity to Himself, make it His own, and so deliver us; for thus having taken the sin upon Himself, as lawfully He may, and lovingly He doth, it followeth that we live if He lives; and who can desire more?

Jesus, as He was going up the hill, fell beneath the load. Loss of blood, breaking of heart, weary in body, blind from his own blood that came from a crown of thorns. And Jesus said "I can't make it any further." Yet He climbed on up to Calvary and stretched out his arms as he hung on the cross, and said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." He went on when He couldn't go on. He finished it when He couldn't, but He did.

Poor souls are apt to think that all those whom they read of or hear of to be gone to heaven, went thither because they were so good and so holy. Yet not one of them, not any man that is now in heaven (Jesus Christ alone accepted), did ever come thither any other way but by forgiveness of sins. And that will also bring us higher, though we come short of many of them in holiness and grace.

Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.

Look at Him at Gethsemane, sweating as it were great drops of blood; look at Him on the cross, crucified between two thieves; hear that piercing cry, "Father, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." And as you look into that face, as you look into those wounds on His feet or His hands, will you say He has not the power to save you? Will you say He has not the power so redeem you?

Let this be to you the mark of true Gospel preaching - where Christ is everything, and the creature is nothing; where it is salvation all of grace, through the work of the Holy Spirit applying to the soul the precious blood of Jesus.

There are two great truths which from this platform I have proclaimed for many years. The first is that salvation is free to every man who will have it; the second is that God gives salvation to a people whom He has chosen; and these truths are not in conflict with each other in the least degree.

Forgiveness is the remission of sins. For it is by this that what has been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again.

Before an individual can be saved, he must first learn that he cannot save himself.

From the Word of God I gather that damnation is all of man, from top to bottom, and salvation is all of grace, from first to last. He that perishes chooses to perish; but he that is saved is saved because God has chosen to save him.

If thou wouldst be justified, acknowledge thine injustice. He that confesses his sin, begins his journey toward salvation. He that is sorry for it, mends his pace. He that forsakes it, is at his journey's end.

God's salvation does not come in response to a changed life. A changed life comes in response to the salvation, offered as a free gift.

In Christ alone, and His payment of the penalty for our sins upon the Cross, we find reconciliation to God and ultimate meaning and purpose.

Perhaps the most difficult task for us to perform is to rely on God's grace and God's grace alone for our salvation. It is difficult for our pride to rest on grace. Grace is for other people - for beggars. We don't want to live by a heavenly welfare system. We want to earn our own way and atone for our own sins. We like to think that we will go to heaven because we deserve to be there.

The protestant martyrs and their monuments testify to the fact that they died, not on account of ecclesial differences, but because the issue was the way of salvation.

I would sooner pluck one single brand from the burning than explain all mysteries.

Each man, in the silence of his own soul, must work out this salvation for himself with fear and trembling--with fear, realizing the momentous issues of his task; with trembling, lest, before the tardy work be done, the voice of Death should summon him to stop.

What is salvation? It is none other than God saving man out of himself into Himself. Salvation has two facets: a cutting off and a uniting with. What is cut off is self; the uniting is with God.

A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

Saving faith and real converting grace will always produce some conformity to the image of Jesus.

The gospel is the proclamation of free love; the revelation of the boundless charity of God. Nothing less than this will suit our world; nothing else is so likely to touch the heart, to go down to the lowest depths of depraved humanity, as the assurance that the sinner has been loved - loved by God, loved with a righteous love, loved with a free love that makes no bargain as to merit, or fitness, or goodness.

It is never on account of its formal nature as a psychic act that faith is conceived in Scripture to be saving. It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or nature of faith, but in the object of faith.

Because the Lord Jesus died on the Cross, I have received forgiveness of sins; because the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, I have received new life; because the Lord Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of the Father, I have received the outpoured Spirit. All is because of Him; nothing is because of me.

Our God of love came to earth as a child to offer us redemption.

I am ready to meet God face to face tonight and look into those eyes of infinite holiness, for all my sins are covered by the atoning blood.

When you get saved, you get saved not because you deserve it, but because you simply let God save you and because you confess your own poor sinful state and your inability to save yourself.

It won't save your soul if your wife is a Christian. You have got to be something more than a brother-in-law to the Church.

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him.

That is what it means to be saved. You declare that you belong to another system of things. People point to you and say, "Oh, yes, that is a Christian family; they belong to the Lord!" That is the salvation which the Lord desires for you, that by your public testimony you declare before God, "My world has gone; I am entering into another.

Yes,' said Queen Lucy. 'In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'

When Christ was on the earth there was a woman in the temple who was bowed almost to the ground with sin. Satan had bound her for eighteen years; but after all these years of bondage Christ delivered her. He spoke one word and she was free. She got up and walked home. How astonished those at home must have been to see her walking in.

We need a quickening of faith; faith in the power of the God of Pentecost to convict and convert three thousand in a day. Faith, not in a process of culture by which we hope to train children into a state of salvation, but faith in the mighty God who can quicken a dead soul into life in a moment; faith in moral and spiritual revolution rather than evolution.

The Apostle put to those at Corinth this question: "Do you not know that God's Spirit dwells in you?" (1 Cor. 3:16). Paul seemed to be surprised at their ignorance of such a sure fact. He viewed the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as the foremost consequence of salvation, so how could they miss it?

God made you to love him supremely, but he lost you. He returned to get you back, but it took the cross to do it. He absorbed your darkness so that one day you can finally and dazzlingly become your true self and take your seat at his eternal feast.

The conversion of a soul is the miracle of a moment, but the manufacture of a saint is the task of a lifetime.

But when you take the Bible literally, for what it says, you have to come back to the fact that there is only one way of salvation; there's only one Savior.

Not that our salvation should be the effect of our work, but our work should be the evidence of our salvation.

In addition to saying that the believer has everlasting life the moment he believes, Jesus adds the promise that he shall not come into condemnation; that is, the sentence of sin will never be put on the believer again.

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

There is but one Church in which men find salvation, just as outside the ark of Noah it was not possible for anyone to be saved.

From time immemorial men have quenched their thirst with water without knowing anything about its chemical constituents. In like manner we do not need to be instructed in all the mysteries of doctrine, but we do need to receive the Living Water which Jesus Christ will give us and which alone can satisfy our souls.

It is not faith in Christ that saves you (though faith is the instrument) - it is Christ's blood and merits.

The Gospel that represents Jesus Christ, not as a system of truth to be received, into the mind, as I should receive a system of philosophy, or astronomy, but it represents Him as a real, living, mighty Savior, able to save me now.

The gospel of Satan announces salvation by character, which reverses the order of God's Word--character by, as the fruit of, salvation.

It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.

Do you believe that He would send those men out to preach the gospel to every creature unless he wanted every creature to be saved? Do you believe He would tell them to preach it to people without giving people the power to accept it? Do you believe the God of heaven is mocking men by offering them his gospel and not giving them the power to take hold of it? Do you believe He will not give men power to accept this salvation as a gift? Man might do that, but God never mocks men. And when he says "Preach the gospel to every creature," every creature can be saved if he will.

Believing is accepting as a fact and making a commitment of your own future to the promises of God to save you -- simply by believing in Christ.

Since this life is God's and cannot die, it follows that everyone born anew into possessing this life is said to have eternal life.

God has set us in His Son, hidden us in Him. As Moses was put into the cleft of the rock, so God has put us into Christ.

When a man is saved by divine grace, he is not wholly cleansed from the corruption of his heart. When we believe in Jesus Christ all our sins are pardoned; yet the power of sin, albeit that it is weakened and kept under by the dominion of the new-born nature which God doth infuse into our souls, doth not cease, but still tarrieth in us, and will do so to our dying day.

Christ's voice sounds now for each of us in loving invitation; and dead in sin and hardness of heart though we be, we can listen and live. Christ Himself, my brother, sows the seed now. Do you take care that it falls not on, but in, your souls.

What could God give us to enjoy that would prove Him most loving? There is only one possible answer: Himself! If He withholds Himself from our contemplation and companionship, no matter what else He gives us, He is not loving.

It is always the case that when the Christian looks back, he is looking at the forgiveness of sins.

Christ is the very epitome of innocence, and without the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary, God's plan of salvation would not have been fulfilled.

People shall never enter the kingdom of God through our encouragement, persuasion, argument, inducement, excitement, or attraction; entrance can be gained only by new birth, by nothing less than the resurrection of the spirit.

Salvation is a definite process. If a man refuse to submit himself to that process, clearly he cannot have the benefits of it. "As many as received Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God." He does not avail himself of this power. It may be mere carelessness or apathy. Nevertheless the neglect is fatal. He cannot escape because he will not.

Genuine faith that saves the soul has for its main element - trust - absolute rest of the whole soul - on the Lord Jesus Christ to save me, whether He died in particular or in special to save me or not, and relying, as I am, wholly and alone on Him, I am saved.

What a sinner needs is life, not some sublime thought. A believer needs whatever can nourish his spiritual life, not mere Bible knowledge. If all we communicate are excellent sermonic divisions, wonderful parables, transcendent abstractions, clever words, or logical arguments, we are but supplying additional thoughts to the people's minds, arousing their emotions once again, or activating their will to make one more decision. A sinner needs to have his spirit resurrected, not to be able to argue better, shed profuse tears, or make a firmer resolve.

The inner change, justification, is effected at the moment of salvation. The outer change in the believer's daily walk, sanctification, continues throughout life. But the progressive work of sanctification is only fully effective when the radical, inner transformation of justification is realized and appropriated by faith.

It is imperative that man receive God's life. The way of salvation cannot be in human reform, for "death" is irreparable. Sin must be judged before there can be rescue out of death. Exactly this is what has been provided by the salvation of the Lord Jesus.

If it were Christ's intention to save all men, how deplorably He has been disappointed!

There's a pardon for every sinner on the topside of the earth, but you have to call for it by faith before it becomes yours. In other words, you have to trust Christ as your Savior.

Christ is the Son of God who died for the redemption of sinners and resurrected after three days. This is the greatest truth in the universe. I die because of my belief in Christ.

A man is not saved against his will, but he is made willing by the operation of the Holy Ghost. A mighty grace which he does not wish to resist enters into the man, disarms him, makes a new creature of him, and he is saved.

Should you suffer your weary soul this day to sink into the arms of that Savior who rejoices to pardon and is mighty to save, the first entrance of such a word, and the first response of such a faith, would be the date of your better life and the commencement of your union to Christ. The graft has taken. At first the juncture may be very slight - a single thread or fiber - and it is not till you try to part them that you find that they are knit together; that their life is one, and that the force which plucks away the graft must also wound the vine. And your faith may yet be no more than a single filament. It may be only one point of attachment by which you are joined to the Lord Jesus. It may be only one solitary sentence, one isolated invitation or promise, of which you have undoubting hold. But hold it fast. If it be the word of Jesus, cling to it.

To achieve the divine purpose of becoming the Savior, the divine glory needed to be veiled. Christ voluntarily, moment by moment, submitted to human limitations apart from sin. The humiliation was temporary. The incarnation was everlasting.

The certainty of our salvation rests on the character of God.

Those children who are of sufficient years to sin and be saved by faith have to listen to the gospel and receive it by faith. And they can do this, God the Holy Spirit helping them. There is no doubt about it, because great numbers have done it. I will not say at what age children are first capable of receiving the knowledge of Christ, but it is much earlier than some fancy.

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.

Saving faith is not just believing that Jesus lived and died. Faith that saves is the confident, continuous confession of total dependence on, and trust in Jesus Christ to meet the requirements on your behalf to give you entrance into God's Eternal Kingdom. It's the surrender of your life in complete trust to Him to do what you cannot do.

Indeed, in conversion, a man must make a decision. We shy away from that term because in modern jargon a "decision" has come to be identified with an outward expression, such as raising the hand or going forward to the front. While such external acts have nothing to do with forgiveness of sins, the heart must make a decision to be saved.

If ever a man could be saved by monkery, that man was I.

The cup which my Savior giveth me, can it be anything but a cup of salvation?

How often God takes away our consolations, that we may only love Him for Himself; and reveals our sinfulness, that we may better appreciate the completeness of his salvation!

Have you no wish for others to be saved? Then you are not saved yourself. Be sure of that.

We say that Christ so died that He infallibly secured the salvation of a multitude that no man can number, who through Christ's death not only may be saved, but are saved, must be saved, and cannot by any possibility run the hazard of being anything but saved.

As our Lord asked the sick man whether he wished to be healed, so, without our consent, He will not save us; and sinners are without excuse for not consenting to the will of the Lord and their own salvation.

God makes greater haste to the sinner than the sinner does to God. God makes much of our first inclination.

If anyone should ask me what I mean by a Calvinist, I should reply, "He is one who says, Salvation is of the Lord." I cannot find in Scripture any other doctrine than this. It is the essence of the Bible.

"You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.

I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: If I was saved by my good works -- then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace -- at God's infinite cost -- then there's nothing he cannot ask of me.

The gospel comes to the sinner at once with nothing short of complete forgiveness as the starting-point of all his efforts to be holy. It does not say, "Go and sin no more, and I will not condemn thee." It says at once, "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more."

The cup which my Savior giveth me, can it be anything but a cup of salvation?

Becoming mature Christians will require the sovereign work of God. Only God can save and sanctify. Still, God uses men and means. Certainly we as parents must seek to bring our children to Jesus Christ for salvation. But salvation is not the end of the journey. It is only the beginning. The destination toward which we are headed with our children is nothing less than maturity in Christ.

In saving the world, therefore, He does not try to alter man's flesh; He instead gives man a new life in order to help put it to death. The flesh must die. This is salvation.

Whom should we love, if not Him who loved us, and gave himself for us?

I have had to make a cross of two logs, and lie down on it, to show the Indians what it means to crucify a man.

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save.