Martin Luther Quotes

Conversion is not only changing the faith. Conversion is changing the heart and working over there is the grace of God. Then only comes the question of change of faith. Nobody can force you, not even the holy prophets.

God has the potential of touching people's hearts and changing them.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

God wills in man only that which is good, in the kingdom of his grace; where the free will yields itself up into the grace, there God wills that which is good in the will, through the grace.

Our job is not to change people; our job is to connect people to Jesus, and it's Jesus' job to change people.

You can't resist the will of God and receive the grace of God at the same time.

God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us.

When God designs to forgive us he changes our hearts and turns us to obedience by His Spirit.

Regeneration is God's disposing the heart to Himself; conversion is the actual turning of the heart to God.

My job is simply to proclaim the Gospel, and to let the Spirit of God apply in the individual hearts. When I give the invitation for people to receive Christ it will be so quiet you can hear a pin drop. And you will see people coming forward deliberately, quietly, reverently, thoughtfully, and many of their lives. . . . will have been transformed and changed in that moment.

All that God had to do to harden Pharaoh's heart, or to harden your heart, is to withhold His own grace.

Before the work of grace the heart is ‘stony.’ It can do no more than a stone can do to please God.

We should not think of conversion as the acceptance of a particular creed, but as a change of heart.

Faith is the avenue to salvation. Not intellectual understanding. Not money. Not your works. Just simple faith. How much faith? The faith of a mustard seed, so small you can hardly see it. But if you will put that little faith in the person of Jesus, your life will be changed. He will come with supernatural power into your heart. It can happen to you.

Fallen man is free to choose what he desires, but because his desires are only wicked he lacks the moral ability to come to Christ. As long as he remains in the flesh, unregenerate, he will never choose Christ. He cannot choose Christ precisely because he cannot act against his own will. His fall is so great that only the effectual grace of God working in his heart can bring him to faith.

Christianity is not a political theory. It is not even a cultural theory. It is, at its root, all about changing the heart of each man and woman, boy and girl, so that we begin to think God's thoughts and act in accordance with his character.

Folks need the Gospel. We need to have our hearts changed. We see people from a skewed point of view. We need to see people the way God sees them.

We may be sure that it is the love of God only that can make us come out of self. If His powerful hand did not sustain us, we should not know how to take the first step in that direction.

His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.

Many people need a new rewiring of their heart and mind.

To repent means to realize that the kind of life we are living is wrong and that we must adopt a completely new set of values. To that end, it involves two things. It involves sorrow for what we have been and it involves the resolve that by the grace of God we will be changed.

The Holy Spirit truly transforms us. With our cooperation, he also wants to transform the world we live in.

If God changes your heart, be willing to change your plans

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit...it is a revolution of character which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layer of their soul. External, social arrangements may be used to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means

It's not as if grace did one half of the work and free choice the other; each does the whole work, in its own peculiar contribution. Grace does the whole work, and so does free choice - with this one qualification: That whereas the whole is done in free choice, so is the whole done of grace.