Quotes About Sacrifice

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.*

This vindicates my last decision ... when I unhesitatingly orphaned my own children in order to carry out my physician's duty to the end, as Abraham did not hesitate at God's demand to sacrifice his only son.

We all know that the big explosion is going to happen. Your concern, the two of you, is to make sure that you die intellectually correct. But my problem is more primitive. I only want to make sure that when it comes and my boys are dying that I am there to ease their last pain with morphine.

The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.

Some of us try desperately to hold on to ourselves, to live for ourselves. We look so bedraggled and pathetic doing it, hanging on to the dead branch of a bank account for dear life, afraid to risk ourselves on the untried wings of giving. We don't think we can live generously because we have never tried. But the sooner we start the better, for we are going to have to give up our lives finally, and the longer we wait the less time we have for the soaring and swooping life of grace.

When people realize it is the living God you are presenting and not some idol that makes them feel good, they are going to turn on you, even people in your own family. There is a great irony here: proclaiming so much love, experiencing so much hate! But don't quit.

If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.

Living together means seeing the oil flow over the head, down the face, through the beard, onto the shoulders of the other—and when I see that I know that my brother, my sister, is my priest.

To live no tight, neat role is truly sacrificial, it is also truly creative because it leaves us open and free (dare we say) like God himself.

The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation.

What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for? "If any of you are embarrassed over me and the way I'm leading you when you get around your fickle and unfocused friends, know that you'll be an even greater embarrassment to the Son of Man when he arrives in all the splendor of God, his Father, with an army of the holy angels.

Premature praise is false praise. Praise is our end but not our beginning. We begin our lives crying, not smiling and cooing and thanking our parents for bringing us into this lovely world full of dry diapers and sweet milk and warm flesh. We kick and flail. We yell and weep. We have the popularization of a kind of religion that, instead of training people to the sacrificial life after the pattern of our Lord, seduces them into having fun on weekends.

Anyone signing up for the kingdom of God has to go through plenty of hard times.

God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life.

I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.—Galatians 2:20

What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?

relinquishment is prerequisite to fulfillment

The gospel offers a different view of suffering: in suffering we enter the depths; we are at the heart of things; we are near to where Christ was on the cross.

The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His."5

Desire Under the Elms

Não nos é apenas dito que Jesus é o Filho de Deus; não apenas nos tornamos beneficiários da sua redenção; somos convidados a morrer a sua morte e a viver a Sua Vida com a liberdade e a dignidade de participantes. E aqui está o aspecto mais maravilhoso: nós entramos na história sem nos tornarmos o centro da história.

You must always think first of your family, your father, and put your own thoughts and desires last.

Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity

I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.