Reforming Students

April 9 is my birthday. April 9, 2009 is the 64th anniversary of Deitrich Bonhoeffer being hanged. My birth on the anniversary of his death makes me pray that God would use me in a lasting and profound way as he did with Bonhoeffer.

Wikipedia’s article on Bonhoeffer offers this description:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer IPA: [ˈdiːtrɪç ˈboːnhøfɐ] (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his execution. Bonhoeffer was arrested in March 1943, imprisoned, and eventually executed by hanging shortly before the war’s end.

John Piper reminds us of one of Bonhoeffer’s most notable quotes:

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call. (The Cost of Discipleship, 99)

Oh that I might live and die in Jesus Christ, for His glory, and the symphonic proclimation of His glorious grace that the nations of the world would enjoy and be glad in Him!