But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. Proverbs 4:18.
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another:
Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By
this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love
for one another. John 13:34-35.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the
members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with
Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one
body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and all were made to drink of one
Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of
many. If the foot should say, Because I am not a hand, I do not
belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the
body. I Corinthians 12:12-15.
If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is
honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and
individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church
first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then
gifts of healing, helping administrating, and various kinds of
tongues. 1 Corinthians 12:26-28.
As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the
sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are
being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer
spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:4-5.
Related Quaker Quotes
Live in love, as Christian brethren, ready to be helpful to one
another. Rejoice together in the blessings of life; sympathize
with each other in its trials. Know one another as fellow-workers
in the things that endure. Watch over one another for good;
praying that each may be a living member of the Church of Christ, and
may grow in the knowledge of the love of God. Advice 14, OYM Book of Discipline.
See how these Christians love one another might well have been
a spontaneous exclamation in the days of the apostles. The Holy
Fellowship, the Blessed Community has always astonished those who stood
without it. The sharing of physical goods in the primitive church
is only an outcropping of a profoundly deeper sharing of a Life, the
base and center of which is obscured, to those who are still oriented
about self, rather than about God. To others, tragic to say, the
very existence of such a Fellowship within a common Life and Love is
unknown and unguessed. In its place, psychological and humanistic
views of the essential sociality and gregariousness of man seek to
provide a social theory of church membership. From these views
spring church programs of mere sociability and social contacts.
The precious word Fellowship becomes identified with a purely
horizontal relation of man to man, not with that horizontal-vertical
relationship of man to man in God. Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly.
Friends did not use the terms freedom and order as two
contending principles in the free association of people in community
but these principles apply to churches and Friends meetings just as
they do in secular associations and communities. In theory,
however, Friends believed if they followed what George Fox called
Gospel Order, they would be fulfilling their Christian
responsibilities and at the same time be brought into a common sense of
unity. For Friends to be reconciled to one another meant seeking
the Light of Christ together until they could corporately discern the
mind of Christ, and thereby the will of God. Growing up Plain, by Wilmer Cooper, p. 36.