sermon quotes on unity
Thomas Aquinas
Hold firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church.
James H. Aughey
Jesus organized the church, which is His vineyard. He commands all to go into the vineyard and work. All who are united to Christ by faith, and are thus members of His mystical body, should be members of His visible church.
Augustine of Hippo (Attributed)
In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.
Gwendolyn Brooks
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
M. R. DeHaan
We need not all agree, but if we disagree, let us not be disagreeable in our disagreements.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
He who is different from me does not impoverish me – he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves – in Man… For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.
John Donne
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.
Ralph Douglas
There are walls that need to come down. You can pray unity but then you have to work unity by demonstrating what unity really looks like.
Charles Hodge
The Church is everywhere represented as one. It is one body, one family, one fold, one kingdom. It is one because pervaded by one Spirit. We are all baptized into one Spirit so as to become, says the apostle, one body.
“What is Presbyterianism?” (1855)
Jack Hyles
Nothing unites people as sharing the same affliction.
Helen Keller
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
C.S. Lewis
Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go… But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from “being in love” — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriage) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God… “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
Mere Christianity
Abraham Lincoln
Mother Teresa
I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.
Isaac Newton
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
Personal Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675.
John Stott
The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of its worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified. So the community of the cross is a community of celebration, a eucharistic community, ceaselessly offering to God through Christ the sacrifice of our praise and thanksgiving. The Christian life is an unending festival. And the festival we keep, now that our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us, is a joyful celebration of his sacrifice, together with a spiritual feasting upon it.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Believers are never told to become one; we already are one and are expected to act like it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.
Eboni Marshall Turman
It is in the uncomfortable dialogues that include all the voices, and in the transformative practices that employ all the bodies that the identity of Christ and the identity of Christ’s body converges.
Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 158.
A.T. Pierson
To a true child of God, the invisible bond that unites all believers to Christ is far more tender, and lasting, and precious; and, as we come to recognize and realize that we are all dwelling in one sphere of life in Him, we learn to look on every believer as our brother, in a sense that is infinitely higher than all human relationships. This is the one and only way to bring disciples permanently together. All other plans for promoting the unity of the Church have failed.
Michael A. Fahey
Just as in other parts of the Christian credo, the assertion of the church as one holy catholic and apostolic is meant to be understood eschatologically. By that is meant that these characteristics are associated with the church not to describe purely what visibly exists to the beholder; rather they are part of a prayer of longing and hope that the church may in fact become what it is called to be by reason of its lofty vocation.
“Church,” in Fiorenza and Galvin, eds., Systematic Theology , 2:42f.
Conrad Bergendoff
Ultimately we are not concerned only with the unity of the church. Christ is the unity of the world. Not only the middle wall of partition separating Jew and Gentile must be moved if Christ is to realize the unity of the Church, but all the walls of partition dividing peoples, classes, generations, from each other. The New Israel is the people made one with God in the atonement of Christ, and one with each other through the ministry of reconciliation. . . . Here is a unity without which the world falls apart into meaningless and antagonistic segments. It is a breath-taking vision, too daring for the faltering reason of [humans] to follow or comprehend. But it is the apostolic message of unity for which the Church is founded.
The One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church (Rock Island: Augustana Book Concern, 1954), 97–98.
Dorothy Sayers
The Power—the Spirit—is thus a social power, working to bring all minds into its own unity, sometimes by similarity and at other times by contrast. There is a diversity of gifts, but the same spirit.
The Mind of the Maker, Harper Collins 1941, 1987, 121.
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