Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Over the last 5 years I have become an avid book reader (seminary will do that to you). However, because of the insermountable number of books I was tasks with reading during seminary, the moment I finished my degree program I decided that I would take some time to read a few books that I have wanted to read for awhile. One of them being, Eric Metaxas biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy) For more information on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life click HERE.

As I am still processing all of the great transforming wisdom found in the life of Bonhoeffer, here are a few of the things I've learned while reading this book...

"If the state is not creating an atmosphere of law and order, as Scripture says it must, then it is the job of the church to draw the states attention to this failing."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw how the German Government was mistreating a people group (the Jews) and instead of just sitting around and watching it happen, he acted in a mighty way. We must do the same as we are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)

"One should aim to live in the way Jesus commanded his followers to live in the sermon on the mount...The church will start being the church when this happens..."
-What better way to become mature in Christ (Col 1:27-29) and transformed to the image of God's son (Gal 4:19) than to meditate on Matthew 5-7 regularly?

"God was interested not in success, but in obedience. If one obeyed God and was willing to suffer defeat and whatever else came ones way, God would show a kind of success that the world couldn’t imagine. But this was the narrow path and few would take it."

-True success is in obedience to God, even in the midst of suffering! 

"It is not your LOVE that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your LOVE.

-Bonhoeffer, in this statement is trying to express the fact that marriage is more than our love for one another, for it is God's holy ordinance through which he wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. Marriage is also our way of "pointing" to God's unconditional covenant with his people.

"No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking joyfully to being released from bodily existence...Death is the last station on the road to freedom...Death is grace, the greatest fit of grace that God gives to people who believe in him...Death is not the end of life, but the beginning of life and freedom."

-As beautiful as LIFE on earth can be, it does not even begin to compare to TRUE LIFE which comes to believers in eternity.