Unity

Today we speak of unity – the perfect topic as we head into election season. At no other time in America are adults allowed to bully each other with such awful insults and insinuations as we do in our election season. As a nation, we just watch and cheer for our side, and the unfortunate result is that is pulls us further apart from those who don’t belong to the same party as we do.

Even if we didn’t have a major presidential election right around the corner, any reading of the news over the past few months proves that our nation is deeply, deeply divided – sometimes even within a single political party.

Blue Lives and Black Lives; “Free Palestine,” and “I Stand with Israel”; Public Schools and Home Schooling; Pro-Life and Reproductive Rights; Trans Rights and Women’s Sports; Red Tractors and Green Tractors; Kendrick Lamar and Drake. (OK, so I’m not even in that last divide, but the kids tell me it’s a big deal.)

Seriously, though, we live in a pluralistic society. We live in a country that tries to embrace diverse people, backgrounds, faiths, beliefs, values, and political powers. So whereas Vladimir Putin will accept NO direct opposition, in our country, Joe Biden was recently photographed with a guy wearing a Make America Great Again hat! And the Secret Service did not swiftly remove the guy to his doom.

Because of the structure of our nation – our value on freedom and the right to free speech – we have ALWAYS been a nation of various divides. Remember, at one point we even literally had a war in our country between the North and the South! However, in the moments when a common enemy arises, like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the attack on the World Trade Centers, for a brief moment our nation comes together, unites, and demonstrates its immense might! We prove that when we operate as ONE Nation, all together, we can do a lot more than when we’re are so divided we can’t even pass the Farm Bill for multiple years in a row.

But enough lamenting about the state of our nation. I simply wanted to paint the picture of WHY unity is so hard for a large group to accomplish. We all come to the table with such diverse opinions and experiences, it seems nearly impossible to ever get everyone on the same page.

While uniting a large, diverse group of people may seem like a nearly impossible task, at least it’s much easier when only two people are involved – right? That’s why marriage is SO EASY – right?

The Bible tells us that a man should leave his mother and father and be united to his wife, the two becoming ONE flesh. However, if you’ve been married for more than 20 minutes, you realize how much harder it is to be ONE with your spouse than you imagined it would be. Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus; and to make matters worse, you know what they say about opposites attracting!

When you say, “I Do,” you are supposed to somehow become ONE with a person of a different gender, different wiring, and likely opposite to you in a variety of ways.

How to Become One

Before Michelle and I were married, we did premarital counseling with a trained counselor who explained a model to me that I’ll never forget. He told us to imagine a line with me on one end and Michelle on the other. Most people would think that for us to grow in unity we have to learn, together, to each come to the middle, and find oneness in the middle ground.

Then the counselor introduced God into the illustration, and our single line became a triangle. As Christians, he taught us, our job isn’t to grow to be more like each other, but to grow to be more like Jesus, God in the flesh. As each of us grows to be more like Jesus, as we move up the triangle, we also grow closer to each other. It’s a natural byproduct of both of us becoming more like our Savior, Jesus.

After 18 years of marriage, I can say this illustration has proven to be completely true! Michelle and I don’t just try to align with each other, but we both try to align ourselves with Jesus; and as we join with Jesus, we find we are on the same page with each other.

Jesus’s Prayer for Unity

Today we look at a Profound Prayer Jesus prayed. (It is the Biblical basis for the triangle illustration.) We’ll see how it applies to all of us and our relationships with one another, and not just marriages.

Please open you Bibles to John chapter 17. Here we join Jesus at His last meal with His disciples before His arrest and crucifixion. Knowing He is about to be betrayed and murdered, we can imagine that Jesus is being selective about what He is saying. His teaching and His prayer are about only the things that are most important to Him. This isn’t the time to be talking about the warmer weather or how much they hate the emperor. This is deathbed conversation time.

Here in John 17 we have the longest recorded prayer by Jesus, often referred to as THE HIGH PRIESTLY PRAYER, Here Jesus prays first for Himself, then for His disciples, and then for all of us. We’ll concentrate on the final part of His prayer, where He prays for every person through all time who puts their faith in Him.

John 17:20-23 (NIV) – 20”My prayer is not for them alone [the 12 disciples]. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one – 23I in them and you in me – so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Isn’t it amazing that the first thing Jesus prays for all His followers is that we be ONE? He doesn’t ask for us to be protected or happy or healthy or effective, but that we are ONE.

Immediately after praying for our unity, He describes what He means when He says, “JUST AS YOU ARE IN ME AND I AM IN YOU.” As I read those word his week, I was reminded of the triangle illustration I was taught so many years ago.

Think about it. Jesus, the Son of God, lived His entire life exactly as God wanted. Jesus says He did EVERYTHING His Father commanded Him. How He loved, what He pursued, the actions He took – these were all in perfect alignment with the very heart of God; and that’s why Jesus could say He was in God and God was in Him.

Then Jesus continues. ‘MAY THEY ALSO BE IN US . . . THAT THEY MAY BE ONE AS WE ARE ONE.” We’ve already covered how hard it for a husband and a wife to find unity and become one. Now, all the people in this room – old and young, male and female, preschool teachers and farmers, Democrats and Republicans, Iowans and imports – are all supposed to somehow be united with one another? How on earth can that be? It’s hard enough for two to become one; but for millions to be ONE seems impossible! Or is it?

Let’s go back to my triangle illustration and turn that two-dimensional triangle into a 3D shape in which all of us are scattered all over the map with our differences spreading us far from one another. Now, let’s put God on a different plane, high above us, leading us to what He originally created us to be.

And now, rather than all of us trying to find a way to come together and find what will unite us, let’s all, instead, focus on moving toward God. Let’s take up His values, His purposes for our lives, His love for our neighbors, and His Spirit in our hearts. Then, as each one of us moves toward Him, notice how – just like in marriage – we all end up moving closer to one another.

Ultimately, Jesus’s prayer isn’t just for us to be closer, but to be brought to complete unity. He prays for all of us to be in Christ and to be fully one, just as Jesus and God are one. Does that mean we need to create a dress code and write all sorts of extra rules and beliefs for us to follow so we can do a better job of unity?

Forty years ago, that was the approach. Each church tried to increase UNIFORMITY, and called people out when they didn’t look like they fit in or act like they belonged. Men wore suits and ties; women wore dresses. No smoking, no drinking, no gambling, no dancing – and we got really narrow on who we would be ONE with.

But the watching world watched as more and more denominations formed and we ended up with 22 churches in Lucas County, four of which are Baptist! Yet none of us looks very much like the others. In an attempt to be ONE, we created a lot of splits and failed to produce the unity Jesus desired.

On that important night described in John 17, Jesus wasn’t praying for all of humanity across all cultures and all time to join in UNIFORMITY, but in UNITY.

Jesus didn’t expect all Christians to look and talk the same way. He didn’t want Africans to feel they had to wear suits to church to honor God. That came from our attempt at uniformity as we sent missionaries from America to Africa in the late 1800s. No, as Jesus said so often in the Gospels, it’s not what’s on the outside that defines us, but what’s on the inside.

Outward things like age, gender, nationality or political association are not what define a follower of Jesus. No, as Jesus says so often in the Gospels, we are defined by what’s on the inside – how we love, what we value, what gives us a sense of purpose. These are the inward pieces that should all become aligned when we become followers of Jesus. Regardless of who you are or what you look like, we can all have values and purpose that align our values and purpose with what Jesus taught us.

We capture our first true glimpse of this oneness in diversity working itself out when the Gentiles (those outside the ethnic Jews) joined with the Jewish followers of Jesus. For some, this was a big issue! How could a godly Jew ever be ONE with a despised Gentile? We must remember, however: being a Jew or a Gentile is an outward marker that has nothing to do with the heart. That’s why we can read:

Ephesians 2:14-15 (NIV) – 14For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility 15by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two.

Now if Jesus can bring peace and unity to THOSE groups of people, surely, as we seek to be more like Jesus, He can bring unity to all of us.

Sure, we may have our differences. We have different worship song preferences and different ideas about how to refresh this sanctuary. We may even disagree on secondary theological issues like the validity of speaking in tongues or whether a person can lose their salvation; but really, all of those are external, secondary issues. If we seek to grow closer to Jesus – to hear His heart, to have His purpose be our purpose, to love others with the extravagant love He put inside us, then most, if not all of these differences become minor issues we can easily bridge.

At the end of this passage, Jesus explains why it’s so important for us to find this oneness, this unity: “THEN THE WORLD WILL KNOW. . . .” Our unity as followers of Jesus isn’t just a nice way to live so we enjoy our time at church more. NO. It’s the symbol to the world that we are different. In a world full of disagreement and hatred, it’s shocking to find a large, diverse group of people who come from different backgrounds, are from different age groups, and may even vote differently, and yet who all still care for one another. Jesus said this would be a sign to the watching world that there is something different about us. Something intriguing. Something outsiders would want for themselves.

How to Experience Oneness

Jesus wants oneness for us. That’s why He prays for us to be ONE. He wants us to be so close to Him and to the Father that we are in them and they are in us and we are ONE with each other; but for us to experience that oneness, we must do two things:

(1) Seek to be Closer to God
Just like that counselor taught me years back (that to experience closeness with my wife I had to make closeness with Jesus my goal), the same is true for each of us. If we as a church want to experience unity, we can’t make unity our goal. Instead, we make oneness with God our goal, and the by-product of our movement toward Jesus is that we grow in unity.

Moving toward Jesus takes action. We can’t just wish that we experienced greater unity, and we can’t complain when it feels like we are far apart from someone else who attends this church. Instead, we must focus on ourselves and take a step toward our Savior and pray that others are also listing to the same Spirit who is speaking to us.

(2) Be in Community with Others
Secondly, you can’t become one with others if you aren’t surrounded by others. Implied in Jesus’s prayer is that you are in a relationship with other followers of Jesus. He never imagined people saying they were His disciples but living totally isolated from other disciples! No, His plan for our development, for us to become more like Him, is that we live in relationship with others who can challenge us, hold us accountable, and sometimes test us and try our patience.

It’s in these relationships that our rough edges are exposed and worn down. It’s where our selfishness is most clearly exposed, where our misguided beliefs are challenged, and where we see the blessed results of becoming one with others (unity) without needing to find uniformity.

I’ll just tell you, when you aren’t in community with others, you are more likely to be orbiting around God, aligned to your own selfish desires. You are much more likely, at some point to become angry at something that happens at the church.

Maintain Unity, Even in Conflict

While we can all seek to be united in Christ, the fact that we are made unique and different means we will come into conflict at times. We saw that in the early church within years of Jesus’s ascension into Heaven, and it still remains today.

We aren’t called to be conflict-free. We are called to maintain unity even in conflict. This is what the apostle Paul encourages.

Ephesians 4:2-6 – 2Be completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Even when you have disagreements, maybe even big ones that cause you to consider finding a new church family, you can still maintain a level of unity and not firebomb the other side.

Conclusion

It’s impossible for us to try to manufacture authentic unity with many different people unless we have a shared vision for what is best for all of us. I’m thankful that at this church we don’t have to rely on a “board” to determine that shared vision for all of us. We see it clearly in the life of Jesus, shown on the pages of scripture. He should be the One we shape our lives after. He is the One we should seek to move toward.

As each of us moves a step closer to our Savior, we will all collectively move closer to full unity – the unity Jesus asked the Father for on our behalf nearly 2000 years ago.

I look forward to seeing that unity grow. I want to see what God will do at First Baptist in the coming years. I want to see how He will lead and guide us through various changes that some churches struggle to stay united through. With a focus on Jesus, we can walk through the changes together so that ultimately God will receive the glory for the witness of this church to the watching world.