Life & Wisdom Quote by Edwin Louis Cole

Cole’s line turns a familiar religious victory lap into a rebuke. “Delivered from sin” is the language of escape: you were trapped, you got out, case closed. He interrupts that neat narrative with a second, harder movement: “delivered to righteousness.” The preposition swap does the heavy lifting. From is relief; to is assignment. It’s not a jailbreak, it’s a relocation.

The intent is pastoral but confrontational. Cole, writing from an evangelical tradition that prized conversion testimony, aims at a common loophole: treating salvation as a wiped record rather than a reshaped life. The subtext is impatience with cheap grace, the spiritual version of “I’m sorry” that never becomes “I changed.” In that framework, sin isn’t just a list of prohibited acts; it’s a gravitational pull, a default setting. Getting “delivered” only matters if you’re delivered into a new orientation with new habits, loyalties, and public consequences.

Rhetorically, the sentence is built like a corrective slogan: short, symmetrical, easy to remember, hard to wriggle out of. The repetition of “delivered” suggests the same agent does both works: God doesn’t merely pardon, God re-aims. That matters in a late-20th-century American Christian context where “born again” identity could be worn as a badge while leaving masculinity, money, marriage, and power largely untouched. Cole’s emphasis lands as a warning: if your faith produces only moral amnesty, you’ve mistaken the doorway for the destination.