The last prophet of the old time who was to precede the coming Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit when He was still unborn. His father and mother too became filled with the Holy Spirit for Him. Mary received the Spirit before Jesus’ life began. In this same way the apostolic Church, which from the beginning of its way followed Jesus, was full of the Holy Spirit. “When they had prayed, the place where they were gathered was shaken, and all were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke God’s Word with joyful courage.”

- Eberhard Arnold

Let us enter these days of Christmas and with all our hearts ask God to move us with his thoughts: that we may think along big lines, not only in continents, not only in planets, but in the largest constellations; that we may think not only in cycles of years, but in decades, centuries, and millennia, in the dimensions of God’s thoughts, in God’s great sweeping curves.

- Eberhard Arnold, Advent 1934

While on earth, Jesus expected God’s kingdom to break in. His expectation was that light must break in upon this darkened earth. He saw that death had heaped up a barrier so that light could not come into life on earth. Therefore he sacrificed his life so that in the area of death an opening might be made; so that there might be a rift in the layer of fog around the earth through which the light of God could come in. If a house has even only one window where the sun shines in, it can no longer be dark inside the house.

- Eberhard Arnold