Tuesday, January 31, 2023
We’re in This Together
Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. (Ephesians 4:3 NLT)
When you put your faith in Jesus Christ, you become part of the church. You are a part of the body of Christ. And because we’re all together in this new family, we should do nothing to unnecessarily disrupt it.
In Ephesians 4 the apostle Paul used the human body to illustrate the church. He wrote, “For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all” (verses 4–6 NLT).
Paul was saying that we need to keep unity in the church. For instance, all the parts of your body need to work together. Your brain sends signals to your hands, and your hands do thus and so, working together. You don’t want your hands to break loose and do their own thing.
In the same way, the church must work together as a body. We are part of the body of Christ, and we need to cooperate with each other.
However, Paul wasn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what we believe as long as we work together. Sometimes in our desire for unity, we can end up embracing the wrong people and the wrong beliefs.
We do not want to have unity with someone who doesn’t believe in the essentials of the Christian faith. That doesn’t mean we’re rude. We can disagree and still be pleasant.
But unity between brothers and sisters in Christ is a different issue. We might have differing viewpoints on the order of prophetic events or some other thing. But we shouldn’t break fellowship over that. We build our unity on the truth of what we have learned in Scripture, on the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
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