29 Quotes About One-blood

We are all brothers and sisters. We are all of one blood (Acts 17:22-31).

The psalms of lament were meant to be tools in the community worship experience to bring the worshipers into the presence of our God. The lament is His gift to us, His church. They urge us to come and be healed together.

The psalmists came to God with pure, raw emotion...He wants us to empty our hearts of this heaviness...I know that without his Spirit moving on all of our hearts, nothing will happen for good.

We've been looking in all of the wrong places for help in fighting this battle for reconciliation. We've sought help from social service agencies and government programs. But this is something that requires divine power.

In our Western world we don't do well with grief and suffering. Our rugged individualism has trumped the call to shared grief. And many of us believe that it shows a lack of faith to lament. We want to move too quickly to our claims of victory in Jesus. We neglect the need within our souls to cry out.

When you live a lie it destroys everyone involved. For the slave master, his conscience was seared as the love of money, and economic gain overruled his concern for his fellow man. And for the slave, his sense of dignity and personhood was assaulted without recourse.

Jesus intentionally brought together disciples who were very different - fishermen, tax collectors - not people who would naturally love one another. But he did this to show us what love looks like in practice. We have the privilege of putting this same kind of love on display as we love those in the body of Christ who don't look like us.

William Pannell said in one of his sermons that the ugliest four-letter word in the English vocabulary is "them". It's a word that separates and divides. It's important that we know their names. It's really hard to dislike someone you pray for regularly. One of the most important things we can do to move the cause of reconciliation forward is to pray for the brothers and sisters who we have been separate from.

It seems to me that we do not need to be taught how to lament. What we need is simply the assurance that we can lament. We all carry deep within ourselves a pressurized reservoir of tears. It takes only the right key at the right time to unlock them...in God's perfect time, through lament, when these tears are released, they can form a vast healing flood. - Michael Card