Hey, good morning. Happy Sunday, everybody. Welcome to The Edge Church Online, my name is Steven Van Denend, I'm one of the pastors here. I’m really glad to have all of you joining us today. If you've been around for a little bit, and you've been following with us, then you know that we've been in a series for the last few weeks that we're calling Unity in Diversity. And in this, we've been talking about how though we are diverse and different in a number of different ways, how every single person has been created in the Imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God. And so, while our differences might help to describe us, in some ways, our differences do not define us as we are defined by our creator, God. And then out of that place comes how we are meant to see one another, love one another, treat one another as each person being an image-bearer of God himself, celebrating our diversity as part of God's beautiful and perfect design.
Really for the last few weeks, we've been honing in on and looking specifically at diversity, at the ways by which we see in stories and scripture and the like that we are different and yet how God invites us to love and care for one another. This morning I want to just focus us in on and talk about our unity. And so I want to just invite you to pray with me. I'm going to ask the Lord just to speak, to minister to your heart, to teach us by his word. So let's pray.
Father, thank you for today. Thank you for this morning. God, I thank you for every single person who's watching now. God, I thank you for every person who will, Lord, that it's not an accident or a mistake, God, that we're tuned in right now, Lord, that you knew long before this day ever came, God, that we'd be together in this way. And so God, I pray that as we open up your word Father, that you would speak, God, that you would minister to every single heart, God, that we would have ears to hear from you. Lord, that we would have hearts that are open to receive of you and that, God, you would transform and change us by your word. So Lord come and have your way, move in this time. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Well, as most of you know, one of the main phrases that we declare in our national anthem is one that says, “one nation under God.” I don't know about you, but I feel like when I turn on my TV and watch the news or read anything online or on social media, that doesn't really appear to be so. It seems that we are far less like the United States in a lot more like the Divided States, not so much under God, but under the banner of all different kinds of camps and parties and movements and agendas moving in all different kinds of directions, but yet all of them claiming to be the way. And not so much just moving in different directions, but also seemingly opposed and against one another.
It's this group versus that one. And within this, there are just all kinds of anger and offense and vitriol and antagonism and chaos and confusion. And though all of this is sad and tragic, this isn't something that's new. This is something that has been this way really from the beginning ever since sin entered into our world and our humanity. It is the nature of sin and the kingdom of darkness as scripture tells us to steal and to kill and to destroy, to tear down, and to divide. Perhaps the real tragedy in all of this, though, and one that certainly breaks the heart of God, is when we, as the church, when we, as his family look and act in that same way. Because as scripture tells us that we were called out of the darkness. We were brought out of the darkness and into the kingdom of light, into the kingdom of God's love in Christ Jesus.
God's family, his church, ought to look and act and sound different than the rest of the world. In John 17, on the day before Jesus will first be arrested and then will go to the cross to be put to death for the sin of all mankind, Jesus gathers his disciples together and he prays a prayer. And it's the longest recorded prayer from Jesus that we read in the scriptures. Starting in John 17:20, Jesus says this:
20 “My prayer is not for them alone.
He's talking about his disciples who are with him.
I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,
So Jesus here is praying, not just for his disciples who were with him, but also for you and me and all Christians everywhere, for everyone who would believe in him.
I love that because what that means and what that ought to say to us is that long before you ever had a thought about God, God was thinking about you. That long before you ever asked for him, Jesus was asking the Father for you. That's how much you're loved and wanted by God. Jesus says my prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,
21 that 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. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.
What you hear over and over again in Jesus' prayer here is that the heart of God for his people, the heart of God for us as his family, is that we would be wanted, is for our unity. Now when it comes to unity, it tends to be one of those words that gets thrown around a lot in our culture and even in our churches. It’s kind of like the word love. It's a word that everybody uses, but not everybody means the same thing. And so I want us to listen and grab hold of how Jesus speaks about it and defines it for us here. Jesus says that our unity is to be like the unity that he has with his Father. In other words, our unity as brothers and sisters in Christ is meant to be a replica, a reflection of the kind of unity that exists in the Trinity, where God the Father and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit dwell together in oneness. And yet at the same time, they are three distinct persons.
So one of the things that this tells us is that unity is not uniformity in the sense that we're the same, we're not the same. There is to be diversity in our unity. It's actually good that we're different. God purposed that to be so and so we might look different and we might think of some things differently, we might like some different things, have some different preferences. We might do some different things, and get this, we might actually vote differently. And yet we are according to God to be one.
1 Corinthians 12 says that in Christ, we are one body. It tells us that each of us is a part of that body, that the body has many members, different parts, different gifts, different functions, but all of those work together to make one body. What that really says is that we're not meant to be independent of one another, but interdependent that there is a need that we have for one another, in order for us to be the body of Christ in the world and to fulfill his calling. God has put us together on purpose and God has put us together with purpose.
If you go up to verse four in John chapter 17, Jesus says this to the Father in his prayer. He says
I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do.
So unity is also about the oneness of purpose. Unity is not sameness, but rather unity is distinctiveness all moving in the same direction to achieve a common purpose. Unity is purpose-driven and not persons-driven.
If you think about a football team, if you’ve ever been to a football game or you like football, you watch football, hopefully, you do. I'm really excited that hopefully the football season happens this year, Go Bears. But when a football team lines up, there are all different people who come to that line. There are different positions that each player has. There are players of different sizes, there are players of different colors, there are players from different backgrounds, but there is one goal line for all of them. They have different positions and yet their differences are designed to achieve a shared purpose. In the church, we have many different callings on our lives, but yet all of us share in the same call. The one that Jesus gave to us, that we call the great commission, where he tells us to go into all the world and to make disciples of all nations, to baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and to teach them, Jesus says, to do everything that he has commanded.
So we may all have different callings within the call, but all of us are to share in the collective purpose. When you listen to an orchestra, warming up their instruments before a performance, there is discord. You can't necessarily tell what they're playing because everyone is doing their own thing. But when the conductor comes out and he calls them to attention, and when they set their focus on him and look in his direction, all of a sudden these independent disjointed instruments become harmonized. And out of that, you get one song played by multiple distinct instruments, all following their leader to achieve the same goal and purpose. This one beautiful song. When everyone has their own purpose, there will automatically be conflict. Unity happens when we are together in step with our conductor, Jesus, looking at him, following him and contending for our purpose together in him, Jesus said in his prayer, he said, listen, I do the work that you, God, sent me to do, which is to say that, it's not about my thing.
It's about God's thing. And it's about each of us submitting ourselves then to him and to his purpose. To have unity, we have to have a shared and clear purpose. Without it, all of us, we end up in a whole lot of different places, but all of us convinced that we're in the right one. Now one of the main keys for us in this unity of purpose, we find here also in Jesus' prayer and we find it in verses 17 and 19. And here Jesus says this in his prayer. He says
17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.
19 For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
Jesus' goal is that we as his people, that we would be one and that our unity and our oneness would be rooted in our being sanctified, meaning to be set apart with purpose or for the purpose to be sanctified in truth.
There cannot be legitimate, Godly unity apart from the truth, which means that we need to know what the truth is. We live in a world of probabilities and potentialities and preferences and opinions on really everything. And we tend to base our life and our decisions on our own ideologies and feelings and ideas. This is where, where you often hear people say, “well, this is my truth, and that's your truth.” Right? But when everyone has their own truth, that you have everyone moving in their own direction. And when everyone moves in their own direction, you don't have unity. Unity happens in the truth. And truth by definition is an absolute standard by which reality is measured. So just because you believe something that doesn't make it the truth, you might just be believing and operating in a lie, thinking that it's the truth.
Truth lives outside of yourself.
It is objective rather than subjective, meaning that it's true, whether you like it or not, whether you feel it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you believe it or not, whether you accept it or not, it's still the truth.
Jesus says that just as he was sanctified or set apart for the purpose of fulfilling God's purpose for him. So we also are to be set apart for God's purpose for us in the truth. In John 8:31-32, Jesus makes this powerful statement. He says,
31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Now there's a whole lot in there that we can unpack. But a few things real quick, for one Jesus, tells us that truth exists. Truth is real. It's not a subjective thing. It's not a relative thing. Truth is real. It exists. Secondly, Jesus says that you can know this truth, that this isn't a truth that can't be known, but a truth that can be known. And then thirdly, here, Jesus says that knowing this truth that does exist has the power to bring freedom.
This also means then that truth can exist without you knowing it. And without knowing it, you will remain captured and enslaved to a lie. Something that probably a number of you have heard me say before, I tend to say this often is that, something doesn't have to be true in order to devastate your life, it only needs to be believed. Truth has liberating power and truth is ultimately God's view on any subject matter. Or as the Bible says in Romans 3:4
Let God be true, and every human being a liar.
This means it doesn't matter who else says it. It might be you, a family member, your boss, your neighbor, the government. It doesn't matter how many people believe it or feel it or vote for it. If it disagrees with God, then God says that's a liar. God says that's a lie. Which is to say, then that you're not operating in the truth. And if you're not operating in the truth, then you cannot be set free. And you're not going to be a part of leading others into freedom, either. Now, something else about truth is that the truth is bigger than the facts.
Something can be true and not still the truth. For instance, if I have a headache, my head is just hurting really bad. It's pounding. It's hard for me to open my eyes and function. Some of you've maybe experienced that before. And so I go to the pharmacy and I get some medication and I start taking pills because I have this fact that my head hurts. I know it hurts. Okay, that's true. And I'm addressing that this is what I know needs to happen. I have a headache, I take medication. But if in spite of all this medication, I still hurt, and so I go to my doctor, my doctor sends me to get a scan and the scan comes back and tells me I have a tumor. And there was nothing that medication was going to do to help my condition. I had a fact that my head hurt, but I didn't have the truth. Because I didn't have the truth, I went to the pharmacy to get some Tylenol instead of to a doctor. And I applied the wrong remedy.
This is why the devil, the enemy of God and his kingdom, is called The Liar and The Father Of Lies. Ultimately because if the devil can keep you and keep us from the truth, then he can keep us from unity and walking in the freedom of God and our purpose in God. If you remember the story of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the garden in the very beginning, God puts them together. He performs the very first wedding ceremony at the end of chapter two. And in that God says at the very end there, that for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. That's unity, that's oneness. God says you are to be unified. You think they're going to live happily ever after, right? And then the very next verse, chapter three verse one, tells us that the devil shows up. And the first thing that the devil says to Adam and Eve is, did God really say…? The very first conversation between mankind and the devil is a conversation about God and his truth.
The devil, the liar. Then we know he twists the word of God and he convinces them of a lie because ultimately he knows that if he can keep them from the truth and he can break apart the unity; and that unity that was broken apart in them, it wasn't just for them. It was what was going to come from after that, it was going to be for their family, their children, that the whole world would be affected by that. Disunity is a result of the absence of truth. And the devil knows this. And so we twist that. So that through a lie, our unity might be undone.
Jesus said in Matthew 12:25,
25 Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.
Division isn't simply something that separates us. Division is something that destroys. Division is something that brings about desolation. So if I was the devil and I wanted to keep God out of your life and out of your marriage and out of your family and out of your city and out of your church and out of your nation in the world, then what I want to do is create disunity through a lie so that you cannot stand or fulfill your purpose in God. This is why the apostle Paul makes so many appeals to this in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 1:10, we hear him pleading with the church and he says this.
10 I appeal to you, brothers and sisters in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.
Paul is like, listen, church, this is so important. This unity, this oneness, this is so important. I appeal to you. He says, I exhort you. I'm pleading with you in the name of Jesus for the sake of the gospel, right? Because that's what's at stake. That's how big of a deal it is. Remember Jesus’ prayer, John 17:23. He says,
I 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.
Jesus says, when you have a godly unity, church, the world will see something that it has not seen. The world will see that God, the Father loves them. And that Jesus came for them. Not because of all this, but through our unity, through the unity and oneness that you have not because of your good programs, not because of your campaigns and your causes, but through your unity. This is a big deal, then. Unity is a big deal. Jesus prayed for this. Our unity is not just for the sake of us getting along. Our unity is a gospel proclamation for the whole world to see that they might know that they are loved by God and that Jesus came for them.
This is why the apostle Paul will go on to say in Ephesians 4:1-3—and I'll close with —the apostle Paul writes this to the church and Paul's actually in prison. This is how much it matters to him that we get this.
4 As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2 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.
Paul says to us, listen, church, when it comes to our unity when it comes to our oneness, make every effort, make every single effort, do every single thing possible you can do to preserve unity, to protect unity, to promote unity.
How do we do that?
Well, verse two gives us something to work with. We do this by being humble; being humble means that you don't make everything about you. That's not all about what you want and how you want it and what you're getting and what you're not getting. And what's being done for you. And what's not being done for you. It means honoring others above yourself. It was C.S. Lewis who said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.” And it says, Paul writes here, we don't just do this with humility, but we also do this with gentleness, meaning that we're not harsh towards one another with our words or our conduct, but rather we treat one another with dignity and with the respect that we're gentle towards one another.
We're gentle in the way that we interact in the way that we talk. We're not looking to put each other down. We're not looking to tear each other apart with our words, with our actions, but we're gentle with one another. He goes on and says, look, we do this by patiently bearing with one another, which means that, that we will endure together. That we don't just quit on one another, but we stick it out. We actually suffer together. We don't just show up when it's easy and comfortable and convenient and nice, but we walk together when it's hard. We walk together when it's inconvenient, when it's messy, and when it hurts, when it costs, which means that there's going to be a grace that we have for one another, that forgiveness will have to abound. Later, actually, at the end of this chapter, he'll say that we are to forgive just as God has forgiven us in Christ Jesus, that the same measure by which we've been forgiven, we ought to extend forgiveness.
I think that one of the most unfathomable things to God is that a people who have been so forgiven don't forgive. And so grace ought to look like the people of God. Sometimes I wonder, and it feels like this to me, that sometimes I look at the church and I feel like, man, it almost feels like in some ways we have more grace for the world than we have for each other. In Galatians 6, that actually tells us that not that we're not only to do good for everyone. Goodness should be a part of our faith and expression of our faith. But it says, especially to the family of believers, especially to the body of Christ. And ultimately Paul writes here that we're to do all of this in love and love serves and love gives, love is all the things that 1 Corinthians 13 tells us, right?
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
And love doesn’t fail.
Jesus’ prayer for his church, Jesus’ prayer for us, was for our unity and our oneness. And the question for us to answer is the one really that Paul invites us into in Ephesians 4 is, are we making every effort towards that unity? Not do I think somebody else is doing that, right? That's always where we tend to go is like, well, but I don't think they are, and they're not doing like this., and I don't feel like I'm giving ...no. The question is, are you making every effort for the unity of the spirit? Are you making every effort to not allow there to be any division in you and amongst us? Are you making every effort to not allow things like unforgiveness and bitterness and jealousy and gossip and judgementalism and self-righteousness to have its way? Are you choosing instead to walk in humility? Are you walking in gentleness? If people were to describe you would they say, man, that's a gentle person that even if I have a problem or I'm struggling or I disagree, they're gentle in their dealing with me.
Are you patient? Are you long-suffering? Are you willing to stick it out? Are you willing to contend until the end? That's really what patience is. Are you bearing with your brothers and sisters in love? Are you making every effort for unity? Because just as Jesus prayed, this is about way more than us. This is about more than how I feel. This is about more than you and I liking one another and getting along and enjoying times together. This is about Jesus and the good news of the gospel for our friends and for our families and for our neighbors and for our cities and for the whole world. This is about the gospel. And my prayer is that we, as the people of God, that we would not get in the way of that, that you or I, that we would not be a barrier to the gospel going forth. But that we would be a people who make every effort to contend for the unity that God gives us in his spirit, that we can see Jesus' prayer answered and the world knowing the Father and that Jesus came for them.
So what can we do? What steps can we take? I really think that maybe it sounds simple and perhaps the most obvious one is that we pray. How can we make every effort? One effort we can make is we can pray. And so I want to just do that. I want to close us in prayer. I want to invite you to pray and just invite the Holy Spirit, because this is something we need God to do in us. We need God to give us His heart for one another. We need God to move and to work out all the things in us that get in the way of that. And so this is going to be a work of God's spirit. So let's just pray. Let's ask God to move in us, around us, in his church, that we might see Jesus prayer answered and the world. See the Father. Let's pray.
God, thank you for this morning. Father, thank you for your word, Jesus, thank you for your love for us and the prayer that you prayed. And God, I pray that right now, Lord, that you would stir and work in every single heart. God, that we would be a people who fulfill and accomplish your purpose for us, that we would be, as you say, one, man striving together, standing side by side, contending for the faith contending for the gospel. Lord, I pray that we would be united by your spirit in your love, in your truth, God, that we would accomplish the purpose for which we've been made and brought together. God, that in our love and in our unity, the world would know your love and the world would know that you sent the son for them. Jesus, I just thank you for your church. God, Lord, you love your church. You call your church your bride, you call us your body. I pray, Father, that we would truly be a representation of who you are in this world. God, you said that they would know us by our love for one another. And God, I pray that would be so. God do a good work in us, I pray. Thank you for your church, unite us Lord, in Jesus’ name. Amen.