Unity is Not Like Saturday Mornings
I love Saturday mornings. We can sleep in, drink our coffee slowly, enjoy relaxed quiet time, connect with family and friends, and I (Julie) can clean the house to my satisfaction! The feeling of resetting, of having everything clean and in its place gives me a sense of control. I like this feeling, when the things and relationships around me seem to be in balance and recalibrated. It makes life seem more orderly and at peace, doesn’t it?
We might imagine that Christian unity is simply enjoying a sense of order within the Body of Christ. There certainly is a sense of peace when God’s people who love one another are getting along together! But I wonder if—sometimes--we think of unity wrongly.
Unity is not always like a Saturday morning.
We can’t produce or control unity; unity was provided for us through the atoning death of Christ at the cross. The power to keep Christian unity was won at Christ’s Resurrection and poured out through the Holy Spirit’s infilling of believers at Pentecost.
In reality, preserving unity often requires more work than we’d like to admit. Seeking to understand another requires spending time together, communicating deep issues of the heart, even taking time to listen when we don’t agree. It requires prayerful, patient listening, asking questions about how the other person arrived at their conviction, rephrasing what we hear them saying with the goal of understanding, all the while checking our own hearts.
Sometimes it requires a long patience, holding our thoughts and perspectives to ourselves until the right moment when God says, “Now you may speak.” It certainly means asking the Lord to set a guard over our mouths. (Psalm 141:3) When working through disagreement, Christian unity is not always like Saturday mornings.
Correcting another believer continuing in a pattern of sin requires even more work. We must do the due diligence of searching the Scriptures to be sure we are following Jesus’ example of confronting another.* And we must be sure that we ourselves do not succumb to the same temptation. “Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.” (Galatians 6:1)
Again, we must continually check with the Holy Spirit to be sure our hearts are in the right place, that we truly seek the other person’s restoration and speak the truth in love. We must seek the Lord for His timing, His words, His way of correcting. We might even need to fast as we pray for humility! (Fasting and prayer in one accord has tremendous power to pull down strongholds!)
Beyond a sense of “rightness” in understanding the Scripture, we must allow the Holy Spirit to check our own attitude before we approach a fellow believer. This often carries the opposite effect of a peaceful Saturday morning. Instead, this process may produce anguish and distress in us and, for a time, in the one receiving the correction. In obedience to Jesus’s command, however, we trust that God’s kindness is at work for repentance.**
Finally, embodying a ministry of reconciliation to the world in the midst of so many dissonant and hostile voices means we get to carry His peaceable Spirit to broken places. As Joy Yoon, a Christian humanitarian worker to North Korea, says, “God does not call us to be ambassadors of reconciliation in places of peace and rest. God calls us to be ambassadors of reconciliation where there is conflict, strife, and brokenness. We get the privilege of extending Christ’s love, mercy, grace and forgiveness in this broken world.”
Lord, make us instruments of Your Peace—ambassadors who carry Your peace to broken places, to call people and relationships to reconciliation with You. We acknowledge that Your ways are higher than ours, and You are working to restore all things. We submit ourselves to Your heart and Your ways. By Your grace and power at work within us, we walk in obedience to Your commands. In Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.