Quotes About Sacrifice

The only person who wants the soldier to live more than the soldier himself is the soldier's mother. Kate

Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.

When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.

But the question to precede all others, which finally determines the course of our lives is What do I really want? Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises? Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?

Freedom begins way back. It begins not with doing what you want but with doing what you ought - that is, with discipline.

The principles of gain through loss, of joy through sorrow, of getting by giving, of fulfillment by laying down, of life out of death is what the Bible teaches, and the people who have believed it enough to live it out in simple, humble, day-by-day practice are people who have found the gain, the joy, the getting, the fulfillment, the life.

You can never lose what you have offered to Christ.

If God gave it to me, we say it's mine. I can do what I want with it. No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of - if we want to find our true selves, if we want real Life, if our hearts are set on glory.

God's command 'Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature' was the categorical imperative. The question of personal safety was wholly irrelevant.

Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first?

Jesus loved the will of His Father. He embraced the limitations, the necessities, the conditions, the very chains of His humanity as He walked and worked here on earth, fulfilling moment by moment His divine commission and the stern demands of His incarnation. Never was there a word or even a look of complaint.

The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. 'If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,' Jesus said, 'he will find his true self.

The willingness to sacrifice that springs from a loving heart rather than the desire for spiritual distinction is surely acceptable to God. But, as in the case of Abraham's offering of his son Isaac, the sacrifice itself is not always finally required. What is required is obedience.

The women of the Band were learning that if the Lord of Glory took a towel and knelt on the floor to wash the dusty feet of His disciples, then no work, even the relentless and often messy routine of caring for squalling babies, is demeaning. To offer it up to the Lord of Glory transforms it into a holy task.

Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son. He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.

If she had been born a hundred years later, she would very likely have been encouraged to be angry, told she had a right to express her anger and her sorrow and her bewilderment and her rage, and generally to disintegrate. These were not the expectations of her friends and family. Nothing could have been further from her expectations of herself. Instead, she threw herself into serving others.

It's only in the cross that we can begin to harmonize this seeming contradiction between suffering and love.

But little deaths have to be died just as great ones do. Every reminder that aroused a longing had to be offered up.

You yourself will be given light in exchange for pouring yourself out for the hungry; you yourself will get guidance, the satisfaction of your longings, and strength, when you pour yourself out, when you make the satisfaction of somebody else's desire your own concern;

I have found, to depression as well. You yourself will be given light in exchange for pouring yourself out for the hungry; you yourself will get guidance, the satisfaction of your longings, and strength, when you "pour yourself out," when you make the satisfaction of somebody else's desire your own concern; you yourself will be a source of refreshment, a builder, a leader into healing and rest at a time when things around you seem to have crumbled.

When the will of God crosses the will of man, somebody has to die.

To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the cross. And the cross always entails loss. The great symbol of Christianity means sacrifice and no one calls himself a Christian can evade this stark fact.

All the Scriptural metaphors about the death of the seed that falls into the ground, about losing one's life, about becoming the least in the kingdom, about the world's passing away—all these go on to something unspeakably better and more glorious. Loss and death are only the preludes to gain and life. It was a temptation to foreshorten the promises, to look for some prompt fulfillment of the loss-gain principle….

Young people sometimes say to me, I'll just die if the Lord calls me to be a missionary, or words to that effect. Wonderful! I say. That's the best possible way to start. You won't be of much use on the mission field unless you 'die' first. The conditions for discipleship begin with 'dying', and if you take the first step, very likely you will find that you have indeed been 'called'.