I read this book on both ends of a week-long vacation, which means that I don’t have a great feel for Yancey’s thread of thought, so I’ll just let him speak for himself.

Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.

Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

On Jesus’ parable about the workers who got paid the same no matter how long they worked: Significantly, many Christians … identify with the employees who put in a full day’s work, rather than the add-ons at the end of the day. We like to think of ourselves as responsible workers, and the employer’s strange behavior baffles us as it did the original hearers. We risk missing the story’s point: that God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God’s requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

When God looks upon my life graph, He sees not jagged swerves toward good and bad but rather a steady line of good: the goodness of God’s Son captured in a moment of time and applied for all eternity.

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. And there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.

The apostle Paul had much to say about the immorality of individual church members but little to say about the immorality of pagan Rome. He rarely railed against the abuses in Rome — slavery, idolatry, violent games, political oppression, greed — even though such abuses surely offended Christians of that day as much as our deteriorating society offends Christians today.

We creatures, we jolly beggars, give glory to God by our dependence. Our wounds and defects are the very fissures through which grace might pass. It is our human destiny on earth to be imperfect, incomplete, weak, and mortal, and only by accepting that destiny can we escape the force of gravity and receive grace. Only then can we grow close to God.

For a long time, C.S. Lewis reports, he could never understand the hairsplitting distinction between hating a person’s sin and hating the sinner. How could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? "But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There have never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things." Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sin in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping that somehow, sometime, somewhere, that person will be cured.