Get the Family Together

If you love someone, you care very deeply about the things they care about.  If something is important to one you love, it is important to you.

Did you know that unity in the family of God is very, very important to Jesus? It is so important to Him that in the garden shortly before the soldiers arrived to arrest Him, Jesus prayed that we would be one just as He and His Father are one.  Here’s what He prayed:

“I’m praying not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me because of them and their witness about me. The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind— Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, so they might be one heart and mind with us. Then the world might believe that you, in fact, sent me. The same glory you gave me, I gave them, so they’ll be as unified and together as we are— I in them and you in me. Then they’ll be mature in this oneness, and give the godless world evidence That you’ve sent me and loved them in the same way you’ve loved me.” (John 17:20-23, The Message)

Sadly, you don’t have to hang out at church more than a few minutes to realize that we are not one.  In fact, the Body of Christ couldn’t be more disunited.  We’re fragmented into hundreds of denominations, and even within those denominations the members can’t even agree on the smallest things.

I am absolutely convinced the disunity of the Body is the devil’s proudest accomplishment in the last two thousand years.  Think about it: If you were the devil, how would you go about making sure the world didn’t come to know Jesus?  He can’t discredit the Savior; He is blameless and spotless.  He can’t discredit God’s word; it is truth without mixture of error.  He can’t discredit the message of the Gospel; it is the power of God unto salvation.  So what’s the devil to do to slow the spread of the Gospel?  He went after the weakest link in the chain – us. 

The devil is a liar, but he’s not stupid. If he can get you and me arguing and fighting with each other we’ll be so busy going after each other we won’t take the time to tell others about Jesus.  And that is precisely what he has done so successfully for most of the last two thousand years.

Here’s the truly heartbreaking part- We’ve been separated for so long and the divisions run so deep that most of us have a great distrust for anyone who proposes unity among the various factions of the Body of Christ.  I might have to admit that you are my brother in Christ, but if you adhere to a different belief than me about when in the course of history Jesus is going to return or whether or not a gift of the Holy Spirit is still valid today, I can’t worship with you, I can’t fellowship with you, I can’t work together with you to win our city for Christ, and in a lot of cases I will preach against you in my pulpit.  God help us!  No wonder the world looks at us and decides they don’t want what we claim to possess!

If you look at the disunity in the church and consider how many hundreds of years it took us to become this fractured, it is so easy to give up hope.  There’s no way we can ever put this back together again.  We can’t even get 10 people in our church to agree, how can we even dare to think the Body of Christ can ever be united this side of eternity?

But I still believe in and serve a miracle-working God!  A God who spoke the universe into existence with the power of His Word.  A God who time and time again has done the impossible. The Bible tells us in no uncertain terms that nothing is impossible for God.  And in the Garden hours before He died for you and me Jesus prayed – not that you and I would agree on everything, but that we would be one.

God, get your family together again!