Quotes About Sacrifice

The signature of Jesus, the Cross, is the ultimate expression of God's love for the world. The church is the church of the crucified, risen Christ only when it is stamped with his signature; only when it faces outward and moves with him along the way of the Cross. Turned inward upon itself in bickering and theological hairsplitting, the church loses its identity and its mission.

No one, it seems to me, who has fully grasped the Crucifixion can ever again take seriously any expression or instrument of worldly power, however venerable, glittering, or seemingly formidable. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

In his landmark work The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann says, "We have made the bitterness of the Cross tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a theological necessity for the process of salvation."3 Of course, theological necessities do not sweat blood in the night.

He said you're going to be identified as His disciples, not because of your church-going, Bible-toting, or song-singing. No, you'll be identified as His by one sign only: the deep and delicate respect for one another, the cordial love impregnated with reverence for the sacred dimension of the human personality because of the mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian.

Whatever past achievements might bring us honor, whatever past disgraces might make us blush, all have been crucified with Christ and exist no more except in the deep recesses of eternity, where "good is enhanced into glory and evil miraculously established as part of the greater good."2

He was not poor that we might be rich. He was not mocked that we might be honored. He was not laughed at so that we could be lauded.

In Love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve.

It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.

He had give this country his all, and in this land that used his bones for kindling, in this land that never once in the thirty years he lived and worked, never once said thank you, this young woman who could be his granddaughter had said the words with such honest gratitude, he was struck by how deeply these words touched him.

In a modern warfare, you will die like a dog for no good reason

You are killing me, fish...

When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, "Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Martyrs are the best possible advertisements for an unpopular cause.

Wherever battles are waged there are casualties, and death is a common occurrence. But what is closest to our hearts is the best interest of the people and the suffering of the vast majority, and when we die for the people, it is an honorable death. Nevertheless we should do our best to avoid unnecessary casualties. Mao Zedong, 1944

Vous avez reconnu l'autre jour que votre amour n'était pas d'une qualité bien fameuse, puisque vous préfériez votre bonheur au mien.

Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself.

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.

The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.

The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.

We want to live as people chosen, blessed, and broken, and thus become food for the world.

Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led into places where we would rather not go.

Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.

Jesus' first temptation was to be relevant: to turn stones into bread.