Dietrich Bonhoeffer - God Quotes

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It was the error of Israel to put the law in God's place, to make the law their God and their God a law.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty.

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
Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God's question and call.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God's cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be unsuccessful ; and yet be on the right road. But this is where we find out whether we have begun in faith or in a burst of enthusiasm.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
To everyone God is the kind of God he believes in.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It matters little what form of prayer we adopt or how many words we use. What matters is the faith which lays hold on God, knowing that He knows our needs before we even ask Him. That is what gives Christian prayer its boundless confidence and its joyous certainty.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.
Costly grace is the sanctuary of God; it has to be protected from the world, and not thrown to the dogs. It is therefore the living word, the Word of God, which he speaks as it pleases him. Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God honors some with great suffering and grants them the grace of martyrdom, while other are not tempted beyond their strength. But in every case it is one cross.
It is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering that everyone has to experience is the call which summons us away from our attachments to this world. It is the death of the old self in the encounter with Jesus Christ. Those who enter into discipleship enter into Jesus' death.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Possessions are not God's blessing and goodness, but the opportunities of service which he entrusts to us.

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
Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer