The Cross Quotes

“We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Just as Christian came up to the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, fell from off his back, and began to tumble down the hill, and so it continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre. There it fell in, and I saw it no more!”
― John Bunyan

“God did not make this person as I would have made him. He did not give him to me as a brother for me to dominate and control, but in order that I might find above him the Creator. Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction. God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God's image should appear in others. That image always manifests a completely new and unique form that comes solely from God's free and sovereign creation. To me the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every man in the likeness of His Son, the Crucified. After all, even that image certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grasped it.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“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 verily bore the burden of men in the body of Jesus Christ. But He bore them as a mother carries her child, as a shepherd enfolds the lost lamb that has been found. God took men upon Himself and they weighted Him to the ground, but God remained with them and they with God. In bearing with men God maintained fellowship with them. It was the law of Christ that was fulfilled in the Cross. And Christians must share in this law.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“In confession occurs the breakthrough of the Cross. The root of all sin is pride, superbia. I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, 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 hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride...In the deep mental and physical pain of humiliation before a brother - which means, before God - we experience the Cross of Jesus as our rescue and salvation. The old man dies, but it is God who has conquered him. Now we share in the resurrection of Christ and eternal life.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“Ah, how many Marahs have been sweetened by a simple, satisfying glimpse of the Tree and the Love which underwent its worst confict there. Yes, the Cross is the tree that sweetens the waters. 'Love never faileth.”
― Jim Elliot

“To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“The personal desolation Christ is experiencing on the cross is what you and I should be experiencing--but instead, Jesus is bearing it, and bearing it all alone.
Why alone?
He's alone so that we might never be alone.”
― C.J. Mahaney, Living the Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel the Main Thing

“The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. 'Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock....Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.' The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death.”
― James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

“The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity, God's remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“She had never set store enough by the gift she had got when God granted her so many children. And the worst was that understood it she had in a fashion. But she had thought more on the troubles, the pangs, the fears and struggles – though she had learned over and over again, through what she missed each time a fresh one lay upon her bosom – that the joy was unspeakably greater than the labour and the pain…
A woman must be held young, she deemed, so long as she had little children sleeping in her arms at night, playing about their mother in the day-time, and needing her care day and night. When her little ones have grown too great for this, a mother is an old woman.” - p. 288”
― Sigrid Undset

“Indeed, it is amazing that a religion was founded on the experience of utter shame, of a god that dies the death of a condemned criminal.”
― Vitor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use And Abuse of the Cross

“I have heard people covering their sins by saying they are not religious, but I tell you this; it is better to love God Almighty and live a healed and protected long life that knows and honours God Almighty instead of groaning in pain and living hopelessly troubled lives because of incurable diseases. Be humble and open your heart to Jesus Christ and find mercy, stability, peace and salvation for you and your children. Do not live a lost life in this day and age where disasters, terminal, rare and chronic illnesses are devouring people's lives. Be wise and seek the Lord God Almighty for healing, cleansing and divine protection.Row your boat of life in Christ and move to the top”
― Stellah Mupanduki, Jesus...Author of My Life: Hope For Teminal Illness

“If we remove the cross, we are in danger of promoting a very cheap grace. Perhaps it should make us uncomfortable.”
― Shane Claiborne

“What I finally came to as I walked and prayed for you is the old, old story of getting the gospel clear in your own hearts and minds, making it clear to others, and doing it with only one motive — the glory of Christ. Getting the glory of Christ before your eyes and keeping it there — is the greatest work of the Spirit that I can imagine. And there is no greater peace, especially in the times of treadmill-like activity, than doing it all for the glory of the Lord Jesus. Think much of the Savior's suffering for you on that dreadful cross, think much of your sin that provoked such suffering, and then enter by faith into the love that took away your sin and guilt, and then give your work your best. Give it your heart out of gratitude for a tender, seeking, and patient Savior. Then every event becomes a shiny glory moment to be cherished — whether you drink tea or try to get the verb forms of the new language.”
― C. John Miller, The Heart of a Servant Leader: Letters from Jack Miller

“I'll tell you what God did do. He sent Jesus to die on the cross so you could be saved. To forgive your sins. That doesn't sound like condemnation; that sounds like hope.”
― J.E.B. Spredemann, A Secret Encounter

“Jesus Christ could die instead of man because He was sinless. As a man without sin, He was not under the judgment and condemnation of God. If Jesus had also committed sin and broken God's law, then He Himself would have needed to die according to God's righteousness judgment. He would not have been able to die for man's sin. But because He was without sin, He could die on behalf of sinful man. This is called 'vicarious death' for man.”
― Henry Hon, ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House

“[The cross] is a way of life that we live out. It is a practice that involves risk. It is a story that, if truly told, courts danger but moves also into hopeful solidarity, the solidarity of those who are moved by the pain of God in the midst of this world, or by the pain of the world in the midst of God.”
― Vitor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross

“The Lord was exposed with naked body: He was not deemed worthy even of covering; and, in order that He might not be seen, the luminaries turned away, and the day became darkened, because they slew God, who hung naked on a tree.”
― Melitos of Sardis

“[The particularity of the cross] fragments our attempt to hold it as an integral whole, administer and control it at our whim. This is what scandal means; it disrupts an expected fulfillment and enclosure of meaning.”
― Vitor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross

“... the death of Jesus took place in a space where God was thought to be absent. It was a space in which God's revelation would not occur, a place that could not witness to divine glory; it was an anti-epiphanic space, for it was the place of the skull.”
― Vitor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross

“... a marginal man condemned to death on the cross is Lord ...”
― Vitor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross

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― Stellah Mupanduki, Little One Be Healed In The Blood: Healed In The Body

“As children of God, we rely on him upon everything in our lives. We put him first and we always seek for his guidance and protection.

For Sacred Writing…Sacred Healing.”
― Stellah Mupanduki, In Times Of Financial Troubles: Biblical Verses 2

“He imposes the cross. He also gives the strength”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The cross wasn't just an act of lofty compassion, it is also a deliberate model for social justice.”
― Andrena Sawyer

“The power of prayer, the power of His Word and the power of the Cross will carry you through the storms even when at times you feel powerless.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Prayer: An Antidote for the Inner Man

“We must deny ourselves as Christ asks of us, for when our world is filled with plenty, our eyes fail to see the humbleness of the cross.”
― Allene vanOirschot

“We fool ourselves into believing that pausing to share opinions about loving our neighbor as ourselves is the same thing as courageously emptying ourselves to do it. We signal virtue where love demands we sacrifice for it.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace