Top 426 Quotes & Sayings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Page 3

Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.

Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, l honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness.

The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.

On Sunday 8 April 1945, he had just finished conducting a service of worship at Schoenberg, when two soldiers came took him away. As he left, he said to another prisoner, This is the end - but for me, the beginning - of life. He was hanged the next day, less than a week before the Allies reached the camp.

A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.

The Christian must treat his enemy as a brother, and requite his hostility with love. His behavior must be determined not by the way others treat him, but by the treatment he himself receives from Jesus; it has only one source, and that is the will of Jesus.

Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected.... Hoarding is idolatry.

I believe that nothing that happens to me is meaningless and that it is good for us all that it should be so, even if it runs counter to our own wishes. As I see it, I'm here for some purpose, and I only hope I may fulfill it.

What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straghtforward men.

A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.

Why do Christians sing when they are together? The reason is, quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because here they can unite in the Word.

A person who loves community tends to destroy it. But a person who loves people creates community wherever he goes.

Ultimate seriousness in not without a dose of humor.

The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come.

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them.

The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God's word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth.

Only he who gives thanks for the little things receives the big things.

Because I am a Christian, therefore, every day in which I do not penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God's Word in Holy Scripture is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the firm ground of the Word of God. And, as a Christian, I learn to know the Holy Scriptures in no other way than by hearing the Word preached and by prayerful meditation.

Discipleship never consists in this or that specific action: it is always a decision, either for or against Jesus Christ.

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.

A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom.

If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things to govern your soul and your senses . . . only through discipline may a man learn to be free.

One's task is not to turn the world upside down, but to do what is necessary at the given place and with a due consideration of reality.

The first call which every Christian experiences is the call to abandon the attachments of this world.

A righteous person is one who lives for the next generation.

Pain is a holy angel who shows us treasures that would otherwise remain forever hidden; through him men and women have become greater than through all the joys of the world. It must be so and I tell myself this in my present situation over and over again. The pain of suffering and of longing, which can often be felt even physically, must be there, and we cannot and need not talk it away. But it needs to be overcome every time, and thus there is an even holier angel than the one of pain; that is, the one of joy in God.

Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try to find anything.....It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; he does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain.

Loving God means rejoicing in God, being eager to think of and pray to God. It means being glad to be in God's presence and to be with God alone. It means not grieving God, but rejoicing in God simply because it is God who is involved, and because we are permitted to know and have God, and to speak with and live with God.

If you reject God's commanding word, you will not receive God's gracious word.

Who am I? this or the other? Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army fleeing in disorder from a victory already achieved? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.

Fruit is always the miraculous, the created; it is never the result of willing, but always a growth. The fruit of the Spirit is a gift of God, and only He can produce it. They who bear it know as little about it as the tree knows of its fruit. They know only the power of Him on whom their life depends

Thus the call to follow Christ always means a call to share the work of forgiving men their sins. Forgiveness is the Christlike suffering which it is the Christian's duty to bear.

It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. … So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.

Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters.

All are called to be what in the reality of God they are already.

It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God.

As brother stands by brother in distress, binding up his wounds and soothing his pain, so let us show our love towards our enemy. There is no deeper distress to be found in the world, no pain more bitter than our enemy's. Nowhere is service more necessary or more blessed than when we serve our enemies.

It seems to me more important actually to share someones distress than to use smooth words about it.

In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things the figure of Him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. The world will allow itself to be subdued only by success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds. Success alone justifies wrongs done With a frankness and off-handedness which no other earthly power could permit itself, history appeals in its own cause to the dictum that the end justifies the means The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.

The church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.

A Christian is someone who shares the sufferings of God in the world.

The disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out... The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity... out of the realm of the finite...into the realm of infinite possibilities.

I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.

You can only learn what obedience is by obeying

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic.

It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.

The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.

There are only two places where the powerful and great in this world lose their courage, tremble in the depths of their souls, and become truly afraid. These are the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ....No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle of Bethlehem. And yet, all Christian theology finds its beginnings in the miracle of miracles, that God became human.

There remains an experience of incomparable value . . . to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled ---- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer . . . to look with new eyes on matters great and small.

The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves.

Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we absolutely refuse to allow them to be expressed in words.

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

A home is a kingdom of it's own in the midst of the world, a stronghold amid life's storms and stresses, a refuge, even a sanctuary.

Telling the truth ... is not solely a matter of moral character; it is also a matter of correct appreciation of real situations and of serious reflection upon them.

The Lord confers great honor on his servants when he brings them suffering.

If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray. The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.

Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.