Hi Church!
It’s good just to have occasional check-ins with our focus for 2025: unity in the church. As a reminder, these are our focus verses:
Ephesians 4:1-6, “I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.“
Unity is not a convenient add-on to the Christian life, it’s essential to our health. All of us who trust in the Lord are united in a real cosmic bond with Christ, secured by our faith in the gospel – that Christ gave his life for sinners. We are the “body of Christ,” and some of us are toes and some of us are arms, but we all need in each other and we need to stay centered around the crucial truths of the gospel. We will always have far more in common with one another in Christ than we will have things that separate us – and those unifying bonds are the most important truths the world has ever known. We aren’t stuck together with duct tape – we’re instead, to use a chemistry term – a covalent bond (go look it up, I had to). This is what John Stott says about our bond:
“The unity of the church is not a matter of creating something new, but of living out the unity that God has already established in Christ by the Spirit.”
Think of what Paul says in Ephesians: be at peace, be humble and gentle. The practical applications of that are these: think the best of one another, remember your already established bond in Christ, seek to help one another, encourage one another, and truly love one another.
I’m still somewhat the new guy here, having just arrived in August 2024. But things are going well – and we’re only going up from here – so I ask this of you too – I’m going to be here, Lord willing, for a long time, so be on board with what we’re doing. I won’t let you fall into calamity (it just won’t happen), we won’t fall into apostasy, and I will with wisdom challenge you for your spiritual benefit.
I want to direct your attention to another part of Paul’s writing in the New Testament – 1 Corinthians 9. Paul is speaking of the freedom we have in Christ, that to the Jews he was a Jew, to the Gentile one not under the law, etc. And he says this famously:
“I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.”
Now, we have to discuss here in context what Paul is not saying. He’s not saying that he’s being slick, that he’s tricking people into thinking he’s something he’s not so that they will like him, and this is often how we read this verse. But he also would never compromise biblical truth – ever, so he can’t be saying, we’ll relax some biblical principle so that it’s more appetizing to one people group over another. He wouldn’t do that either. So what is he saying? Paul is saying that he’s always willing to give up something – to give up personal preferences for the sake of the gospel. There are probably things that churches were doing in Ephesus and Thessalonica that he’s like, ‘oh my, that’s not how I would do it.’ But when he corrects the churches in his letters, it’s always because of false beliefs, syncretistic tendencies in pluralistic cultures, false beliefs about Jesus, or moral atrocities that violate God’s law. But Paul is certainly a veteran of giving up preferences – he must. The church in Jerusalem and the church in Macedonia looked very differently, and yet, they were called to help each other and to walk in unity.
So let’s keep at it, and promote our unity as much as we can!
Pastor Mark