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Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, renowned Christian minister, professor, and author of The Cost of Discipleship recounts his unique fellowship in an underground seminary during the Nazi years in Germany. Giving practical advice

(19 total)

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer (19)

“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Service, Fellowship, Listening, Love of God

“The Christian, however, must bear the burden of a brother. He must suffer and endure the brother. It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated. The burden of men was so heavy for God Himself that He had to endure the Cross. God ver…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Christian, Brother, Jesus Christ, Shepherd, Lost Lamb

“The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Early Morning, Risen Christ, Church, Sin, Salvation

“I want to be my own law, I have a right to myself, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God. Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. It…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Law, Hatred, Flesh, Mind, Conression

“Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it ea…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Confession, God, Brothher, forgiveness, sins

“There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation,…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Listening, Confession, Word of God, Christians, Obligation

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: God, Interrupted by God

“Christian community is like the Christian's sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feel…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Christian Community, God, thankful, Fellowship

“A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in inte…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: christian fellowship, Brotherhood in Christ, Sinner, forgiven

“It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Christians, Sinners, Fellowship, Devout, Pious

“God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: God, emotions, Truth

“If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all....How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: sinfulness, Humility

“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Community, Love, Dreamers

“Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Cruelty, Leniency, Sin, Compassion, Christian

“I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Condemn, Hatred, Brotherhood, prayer

“The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what dis…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Psychologist, Christian, Christ, Insight, Experience

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Big Things, Small Things, prayer, gifts

“Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end, all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered li…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Jesus Christ, The Cross, Evildoers, Mockers, Emeies of God

“Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ's sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force.…”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, amazon.com

Tagged: Human Love