GRACE-DEFINED

Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under just disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

A.W. Tozer

Grace is the very opposite of merit... Grace is not only undeserved favor, but it is favor shown to the one who has deserved the very opposite.

Harry Ironside

Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.

John Piper

Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.

John Piper

God's grace is His unmerited favor toward the wicked, unworthy sinners, by which He delivers them from condemnation and death.

John MacArthur

Titus, Moody, 1996, p. 107.

In efficacious grace we are not merely passive, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest. But God does all, and we do all. God produces all, we act all. For that is what produces, viz. our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are in different respects, wholly passive and wholly active.

Jonathan Edwards

Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.

Jonathan Edwards

Grace…expresses two complementary thoughts: God’s unmerited favor to us through Christ, and God’s divine assistance to us through the Holy Spirit.

Jerry Bridges

Grace is God’s free and unmerited favor shown to guilty sinners who deserve only judgment. It is the love of God shown to the unlovely. It is God reaching downward to people who are in rebellion against Him.

Jerry Bridges

The first and possibly most fundamental characteristic of divine grace is that it presupposes sin and guilt. Grace has meaning only when men are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and liable to eternal wrath… Grace does not contemplate sinners merely as undeserving but as ill-deserving… It is not simply that we do not deserve grace; we do deserve hell.

C. Samuel Storms

The Grandeur of God, Baker, 1984, p. 124.

Anything this side of hell is pure grace.

Author Unknown

Grace is God giving us what we do not deserve and mercy is God not giving us what we do deserve.

Author Unknown

[Grace is] free sovereign favor to the ill-deserving.

B.B. Warfield

[Grace is] the free and benevolent influence of a Holy God operating sovereignly in the lives of undeserved sinners.

Phil Johnson

Grace is the free, undeserved goodness and favor of God to mankind.

Matthew Henry

The noun (mercy) and its derivatives always deal with what we see of pain, misery, and distress, these results of sin; and grace always with the sin and the guilt itself. The one extends relief, the other pardon; the one cures, heals, helps, the other cleanses and reinstates. With God (grace) is always first and (mercy) is second.

R.C.H. Lenski
Interpretation of Saint Matthews Gospel by Richard C. Lenski copyright © 1932 Augsburg Publishing House, p.191.

Grace…means the full and free forgiveness of every sin, without God demanding or expecting anything from the one so forgiven.

J.N. Darby

Distinguish grace from mercy:
Grace-God’s solution to man’s sin.

Mercy-God’s solution to man’s misery.

Grace-Covers the sin.
Mercy-Removes the pain.

Grace-Gives us what we do not deserve.
Mercy-Does not give us what we do deserve

Grace-Unearned favor which saves us.
Mercy-Undeserved favor which forgives us.

Grace-Deals with the cause of sin.
Mercy-Deals with the symptoms of sin.

Grace-Offers pardon for the crime.
Mercy-Offers relief from the punishment.

Grace-Cures or heals the “disease.”
Mercy-Eliminates the pain of the “disease.”

Grace-Regarding salvation it says, “Heaven.”
Mercy-Regarding salvation it says, “No Hell.”

Grace-Says, “I pardon you.”
Mercy-Says, “I pity you”

Author Unknown

http://www.preceptaustin.org/matthew_57.htm