The Quotable Susan

On Grace:

“I do not nullify the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died in vain.” Galatians 2:21

 

“Eschatology is not graduate level work for Christians. Graduate level work for Christians is grace. When it comes to extending it to others: do we really get it or not?”

-Susan Siami

“If you are not preaching grace so profoundly that you are accused of preaching cheap grace, then you are not preaching it profoundly enough.”

-Susan Siami

“Grace is not cheap; it’s free.  –To us it is offered freely but it is not cheap. It cost Christ everything.”

-John Michael

 

“When we come to God, we are coming to the throne of grace, not the throne of merit.”

-Mark Janke

“Suffering may call for mercy but sin does not call for grace. This proves that grace is free.”

-Mark Janke

“Run John run! The law commands, but gives us neither feet nor hands.

Far greater news the gospel brings. It bids us fly and gives us wings.”

-John Bunyan

 

A Cheery Countenance

When my youngest child, Ty, was in kindergarten, I attended a picnic with his class. A woman I did not know came up to me and asked as she pointed to Ty, “Are you that little boy’s mother?”

When I answered in the affirmative, she continued, “Well, I saw him come up to you and thought if you were his mom, I wanted to tell you something funny he did.”

The woman went on to explain that she had chaperoned a kindergarten field trip to a hospital a couple of weeks earlier. The children were given a tour that included several brief stops along the way where hospital personnel explained things to them. In one of the rooms, they were told to sit on the floor while a doctor spoke to them about the importance of doctor visits. In this room there was an examining table with a manikin laying on it for the doctor to demonstrate on. One of the things he explained and demonstrated was how a doctor listens to a patient’s heart with a stethoscope. As he spoke, he stretched out his stethoscope and placed it on the chest of the manikin. And when he did, Ty’s hand shot up immediately!

The lady said she knew right away what Ty was thinking. She knew that he was bothered by the fact that the manikin did not have a real heart so the doctor would not be able to hear anything through the stethoscope. But the Dr. never acknowledged Ty’s uplifted hand–which Ty began to wave in an eager hope of being recognized.

Very soon this part of the instruction was over and the children were supposed to move onto the next room. Ty looked to be quite frustrated by the lack of recognition of his uplifted hand. So in an effort to console him, she approached him and tried to gently coax him to move along with the rest of the group. She stood by him and said, “Come on honey, let’s go into the other room with the rest of the group.” To this Ty got up to go but then looked at her and shaking his head in exasperation (and presumably referring to the fact that the Dr had tried to listen to a manikin’s heartbeat) he said, “I am surrounded by idiots!!”