Quotes about Sacrifice

Christ had died for this man too: how could he pretend with his pride and lust and cowardice to be any more worthy of that death than the half-caste

we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we'd stay. But we were liberals and we didn't want a bad conscience.

The question that wins the world is not, how can we get our "morally superior" way enforced in the world? The question that wins the world, and the question that must define the individual and collective life of kingdom-of-God citizens is, how do we take up the cross for the world? How do we best communicate to others their unsurpassable worth before God? How do we serve and wash the feet of the oppressed and despised?

The love demonstrated on Calvary is the center of the gospel, for it reveals the beauty of God himself.

Our call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end. Our call is to manifest the beauty of a Savior who loves indiscriminately while revolting against all hatred and violence. This is the humble mustard seed revolution that will in the end transform the world.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like. It looks like humility. It looks like grace. It looks like service. It looks like Jesus.

We are to engage in this behavior not out of duty to an abstract ethic, but because the life of the one who came under all humanity on Calvary is pumping kingdom life through our veins. We are part of the growing revolutionary kingdom he began and is continuing to grow. It is a kingdom that looks like him, a kingdom in which the greatest is the one who serves others (Matt. 20:26; Luke 22:26—27).

The crucified Christ, in short, gives us the "Magic Eye" to discern him in the depths of even the most horrifically violent portraits of God.

Love must always start free—but its goal is to become unfree. To be unable not to love is the highest form of freedom in love.

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community.

I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels which I have sown, others to eat the bread which I have earned. A common case.

I have the greatest respect for single parents who struggle and sacrifice, trying against almost superhuman odds to hold the family together. They should be honored and helped in their heroic efforts. But any mother's or father's task is much easier where there are two functioning parents in the home.