Eric Metaxas Quotes & Sayings

But how can we tally what an achievement it was to endure what Jackie Robinson endured those first few years? It was an incalculable and heroic sacrifice that can never be reckoned or understood by any conventional standards. Robinson did what he agreed to do when he met that day with Branch Rickey, and he changed the game forever. It was a singular feat of such great moral strength that all athletic strength must pale in comparison. With God's help, one man lifted up a whole people and pulled a whole nation into the future. — Eric Metaxas

the Golden Triangle of Freedom is, when reduced to its most basic form, that freedom requires virtue; virtue requires faith; and faith requires freedom. — Eric Metaxas

herding cats and shoveling smoke. — Eric Metaxas

He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one's whole life in obedience to God's call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God's call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny. It was not a cramped, compromised, circumspect life, but a life lived in a kind of wild, joyful, full-throated freedom - that was what it was to obey God. — Eric Metaxas

Describing Bonhoeffer's demeanor on returning to danger in Germany rather than safety in America, with with a strong and joyful firmness such as only arises out of realized freedom. — Eric Metaxas

Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death. - DIETRICH BONHOEFFER — Eric Metaxas

while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust." He — Eric Metaxas

It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God's freedom. — Eric Metaxas

Belief in God is an act of faith. But so is believing our existence is simply the result of chance. — Eric Metaxas

So what is "heart"? It's courage, but courage to do what? The courage to do the right thing when all else tells you not to do it. The courage to rise above your surroundings and circumstances. The courage to be God's idea of a real man and to give of yourself for others when it costs you to do so and when everything tells you to look out for yourself first. — Eric Metaxas

Accomplishments should be on the lips of all — Eric Metaxas

By the time Whitefield died in 1770, an inconceivable 80 percent of the population of the American colonies had heard him preach at least once. — Eric Metaxas

Anyway, what do happiness and unhappiness mean? They depend so little on circumstances and so much more on what goes on inside us. I — Eric Metaxas

However thankful we may be for all our personal pleasures, we mustn't for a moment lose sight of the great things that we're living for, and they must shed light rather than gloom on your joy. — Eric Metaxas

Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties. Whether — Eric Metaxas

We can pray only in Jesus Christ, with whom we shall also be heard. — Eric Metaxas

Faith is either something that informs one at all times or it isn't anything at all, really. When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They've substituted a toothless "freedom of worship" for "freedom of religion". — Eric Metaxas

Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe. It was shocking news and made international headlines. Flew came to believe that the extraordinarily complex genetic code in DNA simply could not be accounted for naturalistically. It didn't make logical sense to him that it had happened merely by chance, via random mutations. It is a remarkable thing that Flew had the humility and intellectual honesty to do a public about-face on all he had stood for and taught for five decades. — Eric Metaxas

Adams understood that the secret to self-government is that the people must themselves be self-governing, which is to say they must be motivated by something beyond the law. — Eric Metaxas

It is sufficient for us that we witness their humiliation," he said. "Posterity will huzza for us."32 — Eric Metaxas

A state which which includes within itself a terrorized Church has lost its most faithful servant. — Eric Metaxas

The Gospel of Christ was the most powerful sociological leveler in history, — Eric Metaxas

One day we shall know and see what today we believe; one day we shall hold a service together in eternity. — Eric Metaxas

democracy without real patriotism moves toward the destruction of the ordered liberty bequeathed to us by the founders. — Eric Metaxas

When someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction. — Eric Metaxas

But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others. Anyone who truly understands how God's grace comes to us will have a changed life. That's the gospel, not salvation by law, or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither — Eric Metaxas

Glory, glory, said the Bee, Hallelujah, said the Flea. Praise the Lord, remarked the Wren. At springtime all is born-again. — Eric Metaxas

The battle for our culture must be waged at the level of the imagination. — Eric Metaxas

The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties. — Eric Metaxas

Atheism tells him what he isn't, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is. — Eric Metaxas

So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that - who knows how - claims the right to call itself "Christian." And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation." ~Bonhoeffer — Eric Metaxas

It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity. — Eric Metaxas

Separation of church and state does not result in the church continuing to apply itself to its own task; it is no guarantee against secularization. Nowhere is the church more secularized than where it is separated in principle as it is here. This very separation can create an opposition, so that the church engages much more strongly in political and secular things. — Eric Metaxas

Second-baseman Eddie Stanky spoke for the whole team when he shouted at the opposing dugout: "Listen, you yellow-bellied cowards, why don't you yell at somebody who can answer back? — Eric Metaxas

If we are talking about a loving God, we are talking about a God who asks us to trust him, whether we get what we ask for or don't. But he will never force us to trust him. That is entirely up to us. We have free will and we can accept his love or reject it, or claim it doesn't exist at all. We can trust him or distrust him as we like. But if he really and truly is the God of the Bible, who loves me with an unchanging and self-sacrificial love (agape), then I really and truly can trust him in all circumstances, which is tremendously freeing. In fact, I can go one step further than trusting him. To use a biblical phrase, I can rejoice in him. But is only possible if we really do know that God has our best interests at heart at all times. Of course, we have to decide on our own whether we believe that. But if we come to see that, that is true and do allow ourselves to believe it, we are precisely where he created us to be: in his loving hands. — Eric Metaxas

We must be able to speak about our faith so that hands will be stretched out toward us faster than we can fill them. — Eric Metaxas

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God's word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Eric Metaxas

The more science learns, the clearer it is that although we are here, we shouldn't be. Once we begin considering the details of it all, the towering odds against our existence begin to become a bit unsettling. When we come to see the superlatively extreme precariousness of our existence, and begin to understand how by any accounting, we ought not to exist, what are we to think or feel? Our existence seems to be not merely a virtually impossible miracle but the most outrageous miracle conceivable, one that makes previously amazing miracles seem like almost nothing. — Eric Metaxas

We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority. — Eric Metaxas

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. Though — Eric Metaxas

Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) — Eric Metaxas

Some problems cannot be cured through legislation. But they must be attended to nonetheless. And here's the problem: The less the culture attends to these things, the more the government will attend to them and the less freedom there will be. — Eric Metaxas

May he at the last bind us to his triumphal carriage so that, although in bonds oppressed, we may participate in his victory! — Eric Metaxas

the brilliant balance of the gospel that Luther so persistently expounded - "We are saved by faith alone, but not by faith which is alone. — Eric Metaxas

Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself. — Eric Metaxas

The Nazis were anti-Christian, but they would pretend to be Christians as long as it served their purposes of getting theologically ignorant Germans on their side against the Jews. — Eric Metaxas

Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom. — Eric Metaxas

Bonhoeffer's rule never to speak about a brother in his absence. Bonhoeffer knew that living according to what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount was not "natural" for anyone. — Eric Metaxas

How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether in our human fear and anguish, we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.9 — Eric Metaxas

Such people neither steal, nor murder, nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. But . . . they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest. They will either be destroyed by this unrest, or they will become the most hypocritical of all Pharisees. — Eric Metaxas

In those days," Ruth-Alice recalled, "the Nazis were always marching and saying, 'The future belongs to us! We are the future!' And we young ones who were against Hitler and the Nazis would hear this and we wondered, 'Where is our future?' But there in Finkenwalde, when I heard this man preaching, who had been captured by God, I thought: 'Here. Here is our future. — Eric Metaxas

England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum. — Eric Metaxas

He did not hope that God heard his prayers; he knew it. — Eric Metaxas

The 'success' of the sermon is utterly dependent on the God who breaks through and 'grasps' us, or we cannot be 'grasped. — Eric Metaxas

it's not the role of the government to solve all of our problems through legislation. Some problems cannot be cured through legislation. But they must be attended to nonetheless. And here's the problem: The less the culture attends to these things, the more the government will attend to them and the less freedom there will be. The greater the role the government plays, the more it crowds out the culture's role, the role of the people - and the true freedom of the people. The — Eric Metaxas

And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others. Anyone who truly understands how God's grace comes to us will have a changed life. That's the gospel, not salvation by law, or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that. — Eric Metaxas

Praying to God involves both us and God. God wants us to participate in what he is doing, and for sure one of the main ways we participate in what he is doing is by prayer. We can also participate in what he is doing by feeding the hungry and helping the poor and caring for the sick and giving of our resources to those who have little. God wants us to partner with him. So there is a paradox at work, and a mystery. On the one hand, the Bible says that apart from God we can do nothing. And yet, on the other hand, God invites us to do some things with him. This is at the heart of the mystery of prayer. God wants us to use our faith and to pray. But we can focus so much on the importance of our faith and our prayers that we forget about God and think it is our faith and our prayers that perform the miracle, rather than the God to whom we pray and in whom we have faith as we pray. — Eric Metaxas

The line between courageous faith and foolish idealism is, almost by definition, one angstrom wide. — Eric Metaxas

If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn't matter. It was all God. It is God and God's grace that heals, not our prayers and not our "faith." Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish. DO — Eric Metaxas

The author of the hymn 'Amazing Grace', John Newton, who once was a slave ship captain, and who became a Christian preacher and an enemy of the slave trade, once said: 'I have reason to praise [God] for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.' The author of The Gulag Archipelago , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: 'Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.' This does not mean that Newton would have chosen to go through his trials, or that Solzhenitsyn in any way enjoyed the terrible suffering of his imprisonment. But it means that in retrospect they can see that God used those difficulties to bless them in the long run. — Eric Metaxas

Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world. — Eric Metaxas

Moujiks. Right. What's a moujik?" the Tsar asked.
"Peasants, your majesty."
"Pheasants?"
"No! Peasants. — Eric Metaxas

The message of grace," he said, ". . . pronounces upon the death of people and nations its eternal: I have loved you from eternity; stay with me, and you will live. — Eric Metaxas

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness. — Eric Metaxas

[Boenhoeffer] had an extraordinarily even temperament, capable of ignoring anger, anxiety and discouragement. He seemed unable to despise anyone. — Eric Metaxas

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself. — Eric Metaxas

Here was the rub: one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin. One must sacrifice oneself utterly to God's purposes, even to the point of possibly making moral mistakes. One's obedience to God must be forward-oriented and zealous and free, and to be a mere moralist or pietist would make such a life impossible. — Eric Metaxas

Ahoy there, Lord Pegleg!" cried the Fool. "Why are you hopping on one foot?"
"And what would you have do on one foot?" the man asked. "Pirouette? Besides, if I were to untie my other foot I would move too fast for anyone to see me. Why, I would trip over the equator in one stride."
"That's pretty quick," the Fool said.
"If you think that's quick," the man replied, "you should have seen me before the old arthritis set in. — Eric Metaxas

(Bonhoeffer's) change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before. — Eric Metaxas

A major theme for Bonhoeffer was that every Christian must be "fully human" by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some "spiritual" realm. To be an ethereal figure who merely talked about God, but somehow refused to get his hands dirty in the real world in which God had placed him, was bad theology. Through Christ, God had shown that he meant us to be in this world and to obey him with our actions in his word. So Bonhoeffer would get his hands dirty, not because he had grown impatient, but because God was speaking to him about further steps of obedience. — Eric Metaxas

In 1933, one student said, Among the public, there spread the expectation that the salvation of the German people would now come from Hitler. But in the lectures we were told that salvation comes only from Jesus Christ. — Eric Metaxas

The Scriptures were plain and could not be gainsaid on this most basic point: all that was his - his wealth, his talents, his time - was not really his. It all belonged to God and had been given to him to use for God's purposes and according to God's will. God had blessed him so that he, in turn, might bless others, especially those less fortunate than himself. — Eric Metaxas

The only fight which is lost is that which we give up. — Eric Metaxas

Things you might want to talk about in such a group? — Eric Metaxas

In any case, he had long felt that Gandhi could provide some clues for him. Gandhi was not a Christian, but he lived in a community that endeavored to live by the teachings set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer wanted Christians to live that way. So he would travel to India to see it practiced by non-Christians. — Eric Metaxas

The cost of caring for the "incurables" was prohibitive. They must "give their lives" for the greater cause just as everyone else, and just as the parents of soldiers must "make the ultimate sacrifice" of — Eric Metaxas

Jesus was and is the enemy of dead religion. — Eric Metaxas

The religion of Christ," he said, "is not a tidbit after one's bread; on the contrary, it is the bread or it is nothing. People should at least understand and concede this if they call themselves Christian. — Eric Metaxas

She firmly believes feminism to be anti-woman because it pressures women to become more like men. Everyone — Eric Metaxas

Real faith is never something that can be forced by the state. It's something that either be encouraged and smiled upon or discouraged and frowned-upon. Or, simply crushed — Eric Metaxas

Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering. — Eric Metaxas

Great men like Wilberforce and Wesley had the humility and the wisdom to know that whatever strengths they had - and they had many - they could not win without a total reliance on God. At its core, every battle worth fighting is a spiritual battle. Those men were able to succeed only because they humbled themselves and entrusted the battle to God. — Eric Metaxas

That's the point of miracles - to point us beyond our world to another world. They are clues that that other world is not in our imaginations but is actually out there, wherever "out there" actually is. Peggy Noonan once wrote that she thought miracles existed "in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see." If miracles exist at all, they exist not for their own sake but for us, to point us toward something beyond. To someone beyond. — Eric Metaxas

It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it. — Eric Metaxas

This is quite characteristic of most of the churches I saw. So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that - who knows how - claims the right to call itself "Christian." And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation. Anyone — Eric Metaxas

At its core, every battle worth fighting is a spiritual battle. Those men were able to succeed only because they humbled themselves and entrusted the battle to God. But — Eric Metaxas

The word Tocqueville used was "mores" - meaning those habits "of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group." He wrote: "I considered mores to be one of the great general causes responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic." And then he said that by the term "mores" he meant "habits of the heart." In the same book Tocqueville put it as bluntly as Franklin or Adams had, writing: "Liberty cannot be established without morality." This — Eric Metaxas

You can talk about right and wrong and good and bad all day long, but ultimately people need to see it. Seeing and studying the actual lives of people is simply the best way to communicate ideas about how to behave and how not to behave. We need heroes and role models. — Eric Metaxas

If our suffering has a purpose, it is infinitely easier to bear than if our suffering has no purpose and no larger meaning. When a mother endures childbirth, she knows that it is leading to something life changing and glorious. — Eric Metaxas

Actions must follow what one believed, else one could not claim to believe it. — Eric Metaxas

No one in the history of the world had ever conceived of the idea that there could be a rebellion against a leader that would end not in a new leader but in a new kind of leadership altogether - a leadership that was accountable to those whom it led. — Eric Metaxas

There hardly ever seem to be "encounters" in this great country, in which the one can always avoid the other. But where there is no encounter, where liberty is the only unifying factor, one naturally knows nothing of the community which is created through encounter. The whole life together is completely different as a result. Community in our sense, whether cultural or ecclesiastical, cannot develop there. Is — Eric Metaxas

The family trees of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer are everywhere so laden with figures of accomplishment that one might expect future generations to be burdened by it all. But the welter of wonderfulness that was their heritage seemed to have been a boon, one that buoyed them up so that each child seems not only to have stood on the shoulders of giants but also to have danced on them. — Eric Metaxas

He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose
indeed, he called it his butterfly mind. — Eric Metaxas

we build him a temple, but we live in our own houses." Religion — Eric Metaxas

God's standard of truth entailed more than merely "not lying." In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "You have heard it said ... but I say unto you." Jesus took the Old Testament laws to a deeper level of meaning and obedience, from the "letter of the Law" to the "Spirit of the Law." Following the letter of the law was the dead "religion" of which Barth, among others, had written. It was man's attempt to deceive God into thinking one was being obedient, which was a far greater deception. God always required something deeper than religious legalism. — Eric Metaxas

They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong. — Eric Metaxas

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." He — Eric Metaxas

The rich world of his ancestors set the standards for Dietrich Bonhoeffer's own life. It gave him a certainty of judgment and manner that cannot be acquired in a single generation. — Eric Metaxas

It's an interesting thing that we have not copyrighted our ideas about liberty or tried to charge others to use them, or even to credit us when they do so. We've given these ideas away freely. To what end? We have not calculated the benefit to ourselves much. Some have said that we do what we do for purely selfish or mercenary reasons, that we fought in Iraq, for example, because of our oil interests. Such views are not only deeply cynical but also fail to account for much else that we do. Are we being self-serving in what we've done in Africa to combat AIDS? Are we being self-serving in sending ships and supplies to disaster areas around the world? Unless we are hopelessly bound by cynicism, we have to acknowledge that the United States has been remarkably and consistently generous in sharing what it has, whether material things or ideas. — Eric Metaxas