Dietrich Bonhoeffer - God Quotes

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God's truth judges created things out of love, and Satan's truth judges them out of envy and hatred.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God has reserved to Himself the right to determine the end of life, because He alone knows the goal to which it is His will to lead it. It is for Him alone to justify a life or to cast it away.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The gift of Christ is not the Christian religion, but the grace and love of God which culminate in the cross.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is God's earth out of which man is taken. From it he has his body. His body belongs to his essential being. Man's body is not his prison, his shell his exterior, but man himself. Man does not "have" a body; he does not "have" a soul; rather he "is" body and soul. Man in the beginning is really his body. He is one. He is his body, as Christ is completely his body, as the Church is the body of Christ

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We have grown so accustomed to the idea of divine love...that we no longer sense the awe that God's coming should awaken in us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Lord stands above the new day, for God has made it. All restlessness, all worry, and anxiety flee before him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
May God in His mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may He lead us to Himself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin.... We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God — the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The call to the cloister demanded of Luther the complete surrender of his life. But God shattered all his hopes. He showed him through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distinction. Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the "religious."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If you want my goodness to stay with you then serve your neighbor, for that is where God comes to you.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bless them that persecute you.' If our enemy cannot put up with us any longer and takes to cursing us, our immediate reaction must be to lift up our hands and bless him. Our enemies are the blessed of the Lord. Their curse can do us no harm. May their poverty be enriched with all the riches of God, with the blessing of Him whom they seek to oppose in vain. We are ready to endure their curses so long as they redound to their blessing.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We ought not to be in too much of a hurry here to speak piously of God's will and guidance. It is obvious, and it should not be ignored, that it is your own very human wills that are at work here, celebrating their triumph; the course that you are taking at the outset is one that you have chosen for yourselves.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If Christ has been given us, if we are called to his discipleship we are given all things, literally _all_ things. He will see to it that they are added unto us. If we follow Jesus and look only to His righteousness, we are in his hands and under the protection of Him and His Father. And if we are in communion with the Father, nought can harm us. God will help us in the hour of need, and He knows our needs.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Certainly one must try everything, but only to become more certain what God's way is.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Each morning is a new beginning of our life. Each day is a finished whole. The present day marks the boundary of our cares and concerns. It is long enough to find God or lose Him, to keep faith or fall into disgrace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Wherever it pleases God to put man in this world, the Christian must be ready for martyrdom and death. It is only in this way that man learns faith.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, in God's Son Jesus Christ, than to discover what God intends for us today. The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I will die. And the fact that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, will be raised on the day of judgment.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin in God, but the man who has become like God has forgotten how he was at his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer