Quotes about Purpose

God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.

Our exceptionalness is not for us but for others. That is the paradox at the heart of who we are. So what makes us different has nothing to do with jingoism and nationalistic chest beating. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have been good. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have longed to help make others great too. That earnest humility and generosity must be attended to.

The Scriptures were plain and could not be gainsaid on this most basic point: all that was his—his wealth, his talents, his time—was not really his. It all belonged to God and had been given to him to use for God's purposes and according to God's will. God had blessed him so that he, in turn, might bless others, especially those less fortunate than himself.

What we desperately do want to avoid is not merely suffering but suffering without meaning.

To some extent a life of celibacy is a picture of how all of us are to live, containing our passions for God's purposes.

Every Christian must be "fully human" by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some "spiritual" realm. To be an ethereal figure who merely talked about God, but somehow refused to get his hands dirty in the real world in which God had placed him, was bad theology. Through Christ, God had shown that he meant us to be in this world and to obey him with our actions in this world.

However thankful we may be for all our personal pleasures, we mustn't for a moment lose sight of the great things that we're living for, and they must shed light rather than gloom on your joy.

If our suffering has a purpose, it is infinitely easier to bear than if our suffering has no purpose and no larger meaning. When a mother endures childbirth, she knows that it is leading to something life changing and glorious.

At some point every person must hear from God, must know what God was calling him to do, apart from others.

Thinking about the deep call of Christ, which was not about winning, but about submission to God, wherever that might lead.

While Hildebrandt, Niemöller, and Jacobi were thinking about how to defeat Müller, Bonhoeffer was thinking about God's highest call, about the call of discipleship and its cost.

Wilberforce wrote some years later that it was as if he'd been all those years in a dream from which at last now he had been awakened.