Sermon quotes on sacrifice
Henry Ward Beecher
In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
John Bunyan
Pray often, for prayer is a shield to the soul, a sacrifice to God. and a scourge for Satan.
John Burroughs
For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.
Winston Churchill
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
Charles Dickens
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
A Tale of Two Cities
Frederick Lewis Donaldson
The Seven Social Sins are:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
Ernest Hemingway (attributed)
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
Commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway. We tracked it down to The New York Times Biographical Service, Volume 16 (a 1985 microfilm). It may be quoting a letter by Hemingway or a columnist writing about Hemingway.
Napoleon Hill
Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.
Martin Luther King Jr.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
C.S. Lewis
When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.
David Livingstone
People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege.
David Livingstone
If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?
Erwin Lutzer
Those who give much without sacrifice are reckoned as having given little.
George Macdonald
It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.
C.F.D. Moule
The sacrifice of Christ, complete and perfect, is nevertheless the historical focus of a continual obedience; the obedience of Christ which must be in all suffering accepted in his name and in all praise and worship and self-dedication whatever.
Andrew Murray
Prayer is reaching out after the unseen; fasting is letting go of all that is seen and temporal. Fasting helps express, deepen, confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, even ourselves to attain what we seek for the kingdom of God.
Eugene Peterson
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Frederick W. Robertson
In God’s world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.
John Selden
The happiness of married life depends upon making small sacrifices with readiness and cheerfulness.
John Stott
A person’s life is his most precious possession. Consequently, to rob him of it is the greatest sin we can commit against him, while to give one’s own life on his behalf is the greatest possible expression of love for him. This, then, is the ultimate contrast: Cain’s hatred issued in murder, Christ’s love (issued) in self-sacrifice.
David Foster Wallace
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.
Rudyard Kipling
The tumult and the shouting dies,
The Captains and the Kings depart.
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice
A humble and a contrite heart.
P.T. Forsyth
Christianity is not the sacrifice we make, but the sacrifice we trust.
C.F.D. Moule
The sacrifice of Christ, complete and perfect, is nevertheless the historical focus of a continual obedience; the obedience of Christ which must be in all suffering accepted in his name and in all praise and worship and self-dedication whatever.
Soren Kierkegaard
Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.
Fear and Trembling
John Stott
Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.
C.S. Lewis
When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.
Brennan Manning
Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguish gift of yourself, a love that forgives seven times seven, that keeps no record of wrong. This is the criterion, sole norm, the standard of discipleship.
Elizabeth of the Trinity
Let us ask God to make us true in our love, to make us sacrificial beings, for it seems to me that sacrifice is only love put into action.
Source Unknown
Martin Luther King Jr.
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’
J.H. Kurtz
The question that needed to be answered through the sacrificial system was not how could man attain fellowship with God, but how can sinful man, who has severed all fellowship with God attain fellowship again with Him. (Kurtz, p. 66-67)
Offering, Sacrifices and Worship in the OT, p. 66.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Love is extravagant in the price it is willing to pay, the time it is willing to give, the hardships it is willing to endure, and the strength it is willing to spend.
Jacob Milgrom
[Describing the system of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament]
In essence, the system of sacrifice provided a metaphor, a method, for the Israelites to reach God, responding to the deep psychological, emotional, and religious needs of the people. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Hebrew word for “sacrifice”; it comes from a verb meaning “to bring near.” Thus a sacrifice is that kind of an offering that enables us to approach God.
Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 17.
Thomas Aquinas
Man in offering sacrifices avowed that God was the first principle of the world’s creation and the last end to whom all must be related.
Quoted in Eugene Masure, The Christian Sacrifice (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1943), 56.
David Bentley Hart
Christ’s sacrifice is a miraculous reconciliation between God, who is the wellspring of all life, and his people, who are dead in sin. Sacrifice, in this sense, means a marvelous reparation of a shattered covenant, and an act wherein is accomplished again and again, that divine indwelling, within the body of his people, that is God’s purpose in shaping for himself a people to bear his glory.
‘Thine Own of Thine Own’: Eucharistic Sacrifice in Orthodox Tradition,” in Rediscovering the Eucharist: Ecumenical Conversations , ed. Roch A. Kereszty (New York: Paulist Press, 2003), 143.
Jim Elliot
He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.
P.T. Forsyth
Christianity is not the sacrifice we make, but the sacrifice we trust.
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