Sublime

Your home will be a pastor’s home. From it, light and strength will have to go out into many other homes. The pastor undertakes a life of special discipline. The husband must bear alone much that belongs to his ministry, since the ministry is his and must, for the sake of God, be a silent one. So his love

The basic principles of his way of life cut straight through to the despair of his fellows and found it groundless. By inference he says, “You must abandon your fear of each other and fear only God. You must not indulge in any deception and dishonesty, even to save your lives. Your words must be Yea—Nay; anything else is evil. Hatred is destructive

In the film Chariots of Fire, Olympic runner Eric Liddell says, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” Later he says, “To give up running would be to hold him in contempt.

Only in Jesus Christ are we one; only through him are we bound together. He remains the one and only mediator throughout eternity.

E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful

They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth. They need other Christians as bearers and proclaimers of the divine word of salvation. They need them solely for the sake of Jesus Christ.

In both works Bonhoeffer contended that communities of faith in Christ must assume concrete form in the world in order to radiate the presence of God credibly and effectively, and to live in service to those in need.

Bonhoeffer insisted that Christian communities could not allow God’s will to be merely an abstract idea or smothered in institutional, dogmatic, or biblical reductionism. His spiritual classics Discipleship and Life Together were thus given a realistic embodiment in their most tangible form, the Christian community.