Help must come from the outside, and it has come and comes daily and answers in the Word of Jesus Christ...
Good Friday and Easter free us to think about other things far beyond our own personal fate, about the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and events; and we lay hold of a great hope.
The life of discipleship is not the hero-worship we would pay to a good master, but obedience to the Son of God.
No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy.
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Only those who obey can believe, and only those who believe can obey.
It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God.
You can only learn what obedience is by obeying.
The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.
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 is the “extraordinary”? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience.
God cannot endure that unfestive, mirthless attitude of ours in which we eat our bread in sorrow, with pretentious, busy haste, or even with shame. Through our daily meals He is calling us to rejoice, to keep holiday in the midst of our working day.
The first service that one owes to others consists in listening to them.
The consciousness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that goes back for centuries gives one a feeling of confidence and security in the face of all passing strains and stresses.
That fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than that fact that I will die.
The devil doesn’t fill us with hatred for God, but with forgetfulness of God.
Every word of Holy Scripture was a love letter from God directed very personally to us and he asked us whether we loved Jesus.
He who fears the face of God does not fear the face of man. He who fears the face of man does not fear the face of God.
God is not free from human beings but for them.