Quotes About Unity

United worship here and now, rather than disunited church life in the present and a distant "heaven" after death, was always, as far as Paul was concerned, the divinely intended goal of the Messiah's death.

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology. I

Learning how to think as the Messiah had thought, Paul insisted, was the only way to radical unity in the church, and it was also the secret of how to live as "pure and spotless children of God in the middle of a twisted and depraved generation

And if anyone tries to say that the good news is not about all these things—about freeing slaves, about helping the poor, about reconciling warring factions, ethnic groupings, and whole nations, about looking after the blessed world we live on and in—but instead is only about coming to faith in the present and going to heaven in the future, then we must reply that something has gone very, very wrong in their thinking.

And all this "works" because Jesus is Israel's Messiah, representing his people, so that what is true of him is true of them.

There, again and again, we find the New Testament writers emphasizing instead love, agap?, as the highest activity, the one that binds everything else together-

It is individualism and collectivism that cancel each other out; properly understood, the corporate and the personal reinforce one another.4

The divine intention, as Paul saw it unveiled in the messianic events concerning Jesus, was to create a single worldwide family; and therefore any practices that functioned as symbols dividing different ethnic groups could not be maintained as absolutes within this single family.

So for Jesus "going to heaven" isn't a matter of disappearing into the far distance. Jesus is like somebody who has two homes. The homes are right next door to each other, and there is a connecting door. One day the partition wall will be knocked down and there will be one, glorious, heaven-and-earth mixture.

My third note is that when we therefore use scripture in little bits, cut off from their proper context and made to dance to our tunes instead, all sorts of doubts can creep in, like weeds among the wheat.

There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no 'male and female'; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.

He does not here ask the different groups to give up their practices; merely not to judge one another where differences exist. As Paul well knew (though we sometimes forget), this is actually just as large a step, if not larger, than a change in practice itself. The move from regarding something as mandatory to regarding it as optional is vast, just as vast in fact as the move from regarding something as forbidden to regarding it as available.

There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no 'male and female'; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus."15 Paul wrote those words at least fifteen years later. But the truth they express was already contained within Ananias's opening greeting.

Heaven and earth are not to be split apart; they are to be brought together; and the spirit is the sign and means in the present by which that future becomes real in advance. The spirit is the powerful breath of that new creation, bringing signs and foretastes of the heaven-and-earth reality to birth here and now.

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology.

Black lives really does matter, and god bless America, and George Floyd will never be forgotten."

Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world.

Nothing is better than music... it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.

It's not a class struggle for blacks, it's a race struggle. The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist.

Jerusalem has been our capital for 3,000 years. Beit El and Hebron have been our land for 3,600-3,700 years. Any Jew or Christian or Muslim can open a Bible and read it. You have it there.

People are fed up with the various camps, they want to unite.

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.

We fit, you and I," he whispered looking into that haunting gaze. "Two broken pieces making a whole.

She was his and he was hers. They had under-the-skin privileges.