Quotes about Purpose

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.

Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ's sake.

it is not our will but God's will alone that matters.

It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is not from human beings but for them.

God does not exercise an alien domination of the world but a liberating lordship that sets creation free; God's rule lets family, culture, government, and church fulfill their created purposes, both distinct from and related to one another, and without any usurped heteronomy of one over the other.

From it came the constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, love of suffering humanity and of truth, justice and goodness. But it was not enough for him to seek justice, truth, honesty and goodness for their own sake and patiently to suffer for them. No, according to Bonhoeffer, we have to do so in loyal obedience to Him who is the source and spring of all goodness, justice and truth and on whom he felt absolutely dependent.

Human beings have freedom toward death and the right to death, in the sense of sacrifice, but only when the good sought through sacrifice, and not the destruction of one's own life, is the reason for risking one's life.

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks…When we do that we pass by the visible sign of the Cross, raised athwart our path to show us, not our way, but God's way must be done.

To be conformed to the one who has become human—that is what being really human means.

Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ.

WHO AM I?2 Who am I? They often tell me I stepped from my cell's confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a Squire from his country house.

What may appear weak and insignificant to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature.