That they may be one as we are one John 17:22. Jesus prayed this prayer for us and today we have Paul urging us to Keep yourselves united in the Holy Spirit and bind yourselves together with peace. So what has happened that the church is not one? That we see so many pieces of the puzzle lying on their own waiting to be joined together to make that perfect picture God wants to see. I think Pauls words to us today might show us where we are going wrong and how we might work towards remedying the problem so that we might create that perfect picture. Paul is in prison once again and this got me to thinking about what it meant to be imprisoned. Paul would have been stripped of all his rights, and any man made identity he may have had, as far as Roman society was concerned, was now gone and yet he still worked tirelessly for Christ from his prison cell. Why? Because Paul s identity in Christ had not and could not be stripped away from him. Paul was not only living in Christ but living for Christ and therefore the I, me, myself in Paul was no longer there. This reminded me about a remark from a new Christian who had been reading through the Gospels. After she finished, she told a friend she wanted to read a book on church history. When her friend asked why, the woman replied, "I'm curious. I've been wondering when Christians started to become so unlike Christ." If we look around us we can understand why she was perplexed because there is a great disparity between the life of Christ and the lives of many who bear His name. God has chosen us to be Christ s representatives on earth and we are challenged to live lives worthy of this calling. We have the awesome privilege of being called Christ s very own. Although a privilege it can be quite daunting to realise we are being watched and judged as Christ s representatives and that the world should be able to see his qualities in us. Aristides, a second-century apologist for the Christian faith, wrote this to the Roman emperor Hadrian about believers in his day: Unity Eph 4:1-6 July 2012 Page 1
They love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something, they give freely to the man who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take him home, and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don t consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit, in God. I am sure this is what the New Christian was looking for and didn t see. All she could see were people going to church on a Sunday but during the week they would be no different from the people in the world around them. She would also have seen all the different divisions in the churches around her because of different man-made doctrines and theologies. So how do we come together as one body with Christ as the head? Well as usual God has blessed us with a built in list of unifiers which can keep us working together with a oneness of Spirit which Paul lists here for us: 1. One Body we are a single externally visible family united for one purpose. Salvation through Christ. With all the different denominations proclaiming varying doctrines we hardly present a single visible family. Can you imagine what a powerful body we would be in this sad world if we all worked together putting our differences aside and became the Body Christ died for! 2. One Spirit We all have the Holy Spirit as our inner power source Let us tap into and use that source in our daily lives and become the powerful people we were designed to be. 3. One Hope We all look forward to the same future. The Holy Spirit is the pledge of a unified community at the end of time the redemption of God s own people. We have a wonderful future to look forward to! 4. One Lord We all trust and pledge obedience to the one master. There is only one God for all people. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves to we serve only one God? 5. One faith We all trust Jesus sacrifice for our salvation. Jesus is the cornerstone to distinguish from false doctrines with all members subscribing to his teachings. We need to study God s word more so that we can distinguish the Truth from false doctrines. Unity Eph 4:1-6 July 2012 Page 2
6. One Baptism We all have a single identity with a common initiation to the family. The outward ceremony using the living waters which bind us together and show the world that we are one. 7. One God and Father we all share the same source of our existence. Without our God and Father we wouldn t have this beautiful world we live in nor would we exist and we certainly wouldn t have had His Son bringing us his saving Grace. How much do we have to be thankful for? Let us start living lives of worship, acknowledging our awesome God and continually giving thanks to Him! From this list of unifiers we can see that as believers in Jesus Christ, whatever our differences denominations, preferences, worship styles we are one spiritual body that acknowledges the same heavenly Father (Ephesians 4:4, 5, 6). So instead of looking at our differences maybe we should be looking at the things which unify us and start working on a unified Body which reflects Christ. So how do we do this, well Paul urges us to: Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Let us look at what some of these words and phrases mean to us: To be humble is an unselfishness that manifests itself in sacrificial love for others, as illustrated with the utterly selfless love of Christ in becoming human and going to the cross for us. Too often in this world we are so keen on looking after number one, ourselves, that we don t give that sacrificial love to others. We don t necessarily have to die for others it might just be giving up some of your precious time to help or just listen to someone. To be gentle or in some translations meek, involves a radical submission to God and modesty in dealings with other people. When we are gentle we put other people first, we are instinctively courteous. Unity Eph 4:1-6 July 2012 Page 3
Patient or longsuffering suggests a long-burning fuse that ultimately fails to ignite. What an asset that would be on many an occasion! Love - this is Agape Love which is a head love and not a heart love in other words we are challenged to persistently act in the genuine welfare of others. Unity of the Spirit one of the important roles of the Holy Spirit is to build unity. He leads, but we have to be willing to be led to do our part to keep the peace. Are we allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us in our lives? Bond of peace this is a metaphor for that which brings various entities into a united relationship. This is a bit like a rope with many strands that are woven together to make one, or going back to the human body metaphor like ligaments keeping the body together. If you are anything like me having heard all this you will feel like throwing up your hands and saying where or how do I start. Well it doesn t happen over night. Our faith grows as we start exercising it and like life it has various stages. In our Christian infancy we embrace the faith of our family and/or our church and can be rather dogmatic and perhaps even arrogant about it insisting that it is the faith that is believed everywhere, always, and by everyone and we can be very vocal and dogmatic about what we believe. However, as we start maturing in our faith we come to a stage when we begin to question our religious beliefs and practices and go through a period of re-evaluation. This often can be triggered by a life experience, especially a crisis or just a maturing where we do start questioning the faith of our family and have to make a decision to own our own faith. This can be a difficult process, and the results are by no means assured, but if we can hold on to faith we will come out of the dark night of the soul with a stronger and more vibrant faith. Unity Eph 4:1-6 July 2012 Page 4
We might think that we have arrived at this stage but unfortunately there are many more stages to go through one of them being a stage where we learn to take all things religious less seriously, if for no other reason than that they are of human origin. At this stage, the idea of different views about God doesn t pose such a threat, perhaps because we become more interested in an authentic relationship with God. We can affirm our own beliefs, while at the same time allowing that the reality of God is big enough to encompass other, perhaps even seemingly contradictory, views of God. It looks like we are now maturing beautifully because surely when we reach this stage we are more tolerant with each other, more patient, kind and gentle and can live lives worthy of our calling and bring about that unity of the Spirit, which is exactly what Paul is urging us to do. But no there seems to be one final stage of maturity, the one when we reach that full measure of the stature of Christ. The stage when we take on the identity of Christ, as did Paul and numerous of the saints, such as Mother Teresa, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The stage, where the very centre of our being shifts from self to God. When this happens, those of us who reach this stage are able to go out and serve the world with little or no thought to the outcomes for ourselves. At this stage we can see all people as children of God, and therefore are concerned not just for the salvation of our own nation or fellow believers, but for the salvation of the world. I am sure this is what Paul was talking about and what he wants us to work towards. But we have to be realistic. We are a family and just as in any family we are at varying stages in our faith. And with that we are trying to lead lives worthy of our calling. Just as in Jesus day we saw the disciples grappling with Jesus teachings and the whole point of his life to make his people one. So as we Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace let us go back to the jigsaw puzzle and remember that we are each an individual piece of that puzzle and that if we join together in humility, gentleness, patience and love, the world around us will see that we are united in the Spirit and God s love for all will be seen. Unity Eph 4:1-6 July 2012 Page 5