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Book: Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace
Quotes of Book: Free of Charge: Giving and
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  1. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    Some theologians claim that all God's desires culminate in a single desire: to assert and to maintain God's own glory. On its own, the idea of a glory-seeking God seems to say that God, far from being only a giver, is the ultimate receiver. As the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth disapprovingly put it, such a God would be "in holy self-seeking . . . preoccupied with Himself"10. In creating and redeeming, such a God would give, but only in order to get glory; the whole creation would be a means to this end. In Luther's terms, here we would have a God demonstrating human rather than divine love.
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  2. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    Notice that, in making ourselves available, we are not doing God any favors. We give ourselves for God's use to benefit creation, not to benefit God.
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  3. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    God's gifts aim at making us into generous givers, not just fortunate receivers. God gives so that we, in human measure, can be givers too.
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  4. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    To live in sync with who we truly are means to recognize that we are dependent on God for our very breath and are graced with many good things; it means to be grateful to the giver and attentive to the purpose for which the gifts are given.
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  5. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    Slowly and imperceptibly, the one true God begins acquiring the features of the gods of this world. For instance, our God simply gratifies our desires rather than reshaping them in accordance with the beauty of God's own character. Our God then kills enemies rather than dying on their behalf as God did in Jesus Christ.
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  6. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    When we forget that, we unwittingly reduce God's ways to our ways and God's thoughts to our thoughts. Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and desires.
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  7. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    This is a book about worshiping the true God and letting the true God act in us. It tells us as plainly as possible that the true God is a God who cannot stop giving and forgiving, and that our knowledge of this true God is utterly bound up with our willingness to receive from the hand of God the liberty to give and forgive.
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  8. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    God doesn't give in order to acquire. God loves without self-seeking; that's at the heart of who God is. God gives for the benefit of others.
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  9. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    Two false images of God are particularly irresistible to many of us – mostly unconsciously. The first I'll designate as God the negotiator and the other, God the Santa Claus. Though we have fashioned both to serve our interests, they are each other's opposites. With one, we want to make advantageous deals. From the other, we want to get warm smiles and bagfuls of goodies. We run from one to the other. Some of their features are reminiscent of the God of Jesus Christ. But we've drawn these images of God mostly from two currents of the culture in which we swim – the current of hard and unforgiving economic realities, in which we exchange goods to maximize benefits, and the current of soft, even infantile, desires, in which we long to be showered with gifts simply because we exist.
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  10. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    Here is what we do as worshipers of a Santa Claus God: We embrace the conviction that God is an infinitely generous source of all good, but conveniently forget that we were created in God's image to be in some significant sense like God – not like God in God's divinity, for we are human and not divine, but like God "in true righteous ness and holiness" {Ephesians 4:24}, like God in loving enemies {Matthew 5:44}. To live well as a human being is to live in sync with who God is and how God acts.
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  11. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    She loved him for his own sake, and therefore she would rather have suffered his absence if he flourished than to have enjoyed his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing would overshadow her delight in his presence. For a lover, it is more blessed to give than to receive, even when giving pierces the lover's heart.
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  12. Miroslav Volf _ Free of Charge: Giving and

    We know it is good to receive, and we have been blessed by receiving not only as children, but also as adults. Yet Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive {Acts 20:35}, and part of growing up is learning the art of giving. If we fail to learn this art, we will live unfulfilled lives, and in the end, chains of bondage will replace the bonds that keep our communities together. If we just keep taking or even trading, we will squander ourselves. If we give, we will regain ourselves as fulfilled individuals and flourishing communities.
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