Quotes from Eric Metaxas

Newton didn't tell him what he had expected—that to follow God he would have to leave politics. On the contrary, Newton encouraged Wilberforce to stay where he was, saying that God could use him there.

if it be a work of grace, it cannot fail.

Death tends to change people's focus and priorities—at least for a time. After the war deaths of several Bonhoeffer cousins, the younger members of the family would often lie in bed at night and talk about death and eternity. Do you spend much time thinking about eternity? Should a person concentrate on life after death, or is it better to keep one's focus solely on this life and what can be accomplished now?

Every once in a great while, the hand of God is easy to see, and for a brief moment, fairy tales and history are the same thing. This story is about one of those times.

Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open. Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who also was and is his God. In him we know our brothers and in him is the biding fellowship of those who have overcome and those who still await their hour. God be praised for our dead brother and be merciful to us all at our end.

Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.

There was one activity that Bonhoeffer would enjoy in Barcelona, but could never enjoy in Berlin. That was the arte taurina (bull fighting). Though an aesthete and an intellectual, Bonhoeffer was neither effete nor squeamish. His brother Klaus arrived for a visit on Easter Saturday, and on Easter afternoon—Bonhoeffer preached that morning—they were "dragged" by a German teacher, presumably Thumm, to the "great Easter corrida."

First of all, a sermon can never grasp the center, but can only itself be grasped by it, by Christ. And then Christ becomes flesh as much in the word of the pietists as in that of the clerics or of the religious socialists, and these empirical connections actually pose difficulties for preaching that are absolute, not merely relative.

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.

Bonhoeffer's theology had always leaned toward the incarnational view that did not eschew "the world," but that saw it as God's good creation to be enjoyed and celebrated, not merely transcended.

Surely this sabbath, of all others, calls forth these feelings in a supreme degree; a frame of united love and triumph well becomes it, and holy confidence and unrestrained affection.

May God make his Word find a hearing in all the world.