Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together” is one of my favorite reads this year. While it’s a modest 122 pages, Bonhoeffer gives plenty to remember from a man whose life is hard to forget.
For a book titled “Life Together,” I found the most hope in the chapter on the believer’s private life. I felt confronted with my selfishness and unbelief, yet I felt hopeful and moved at the picture of true gospel community. “Life Together” is an absolute 5/5 and I plan on reading it again very soon.
Here is my favorite excerpt on pg. 84: “It is, therefore, not good for us to take seriously the many untoward experiences we have with ourselves in meditation. It is here that our old vanity and our illicit claims upon God may creep in by a pious detour, as if it were our right to have nothing but elevating and fruitful experiences, and as if the discovery of our own inner poverty were quite below our dignity… We must center our attention on the Word alone and leave consequences to its action. For may it not be that God Himself sends us these hours of reproof and dryness that we may be brought again to expect everything from His Word? “Seek God, not happiness”—this is the fundamental rule of all meditation. If you seek God alone, you will gain happiness: that is its promise.”
