“Unity”

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Last week, I told you that because of the graciousness of Clay, I was going to be able to preach three farewell sermons, not just one. I intend to use these sermons to focus on the three main personality traits of the Jackson Heights church, the things that will enable us to remain healthy and strong for years to come if we continue in them. Last week we talked about kindness; today we will explore unity.

During the pandemic, this congregation showed its commitment to unity. Other churches got in fusses or even split, but this one remained united in submission to the elders. I applaud all of you for that, but unity is a process, not an event. Years or decades from now, other challenges to unity will arise, and unless the people of this congregation are prepared for them, they will wreak havoc. This morning, then, let's examine Christian unity.

This begins with the basis of unity. We see it described in 1 Thessalonians 2:13. At first glance, this seems like an odd place to start studying unity. After all, the verse doesn't even mention the word! Instead, it describes the attitude with which the Thessalonians received the preaching of Paul. They didn't treat it like a message from a mere man. They treated it like the word of God.

This, indeed, is one of the things that we must believe in order to be disciples of Christ. We must believe that the Bible is the word of God and treat it differently from any other message. There are, after all, any number of human ideas that we might encounter. We evaluate those critically, accepting what seems good to us and rejecting what seems bad.

However, that is not the appropriate way to treat the word of God. People can be wrong; God can't be. Thus, the only appropriate response to divine revelation is to accept it without question.

Therefore, the Bible can be a basis for unity unlike any other. We might have all sorts of opinions about how we should worship and serve God. Some of those ideas might be good; some of them might be bad. If we found our church on ideas like that, any of us could very reasonably decide that we disagree and split the church over them.

By contrast, no such reasonable disagreement can exist over what God has revealed. God has told His people to sing, and if we truly honor Him, we cannot dispute that we should sing in our worship. In the New Testament, we see various ways that churches used their money. We know all of those ways are right, and they don't leave any room for argument either. Thus, if we limit our practice to what God has told us to do, unity must be preserved in our congregation because there is no godly basis for taking issue with any of it.

I fear that we have largely forgotten this today, but this was one of the main reasons why the leaders of the Restoration urged a return to the Bible. Within the Bible, there is no opportunity for sectarian division. Consider, for instance, this quotation from Alexander Campbell. It comes from the Millennial Harbinger, volume 3, page 5. It reads:

“We can only say, that all the items of our faith being facts supported by the testimony of Apostles and Prophets, there can be no article of faith in danger in all that we have written. But in our views of certain sayings, or in our opinions of these facts, it is possible we have not always coincided exactly with the Apostles. Hence the necessity of founding Christian union, communion, and cooperation upon the belief of facts—upon faith and obedience, rather than upon agreement in opinions.”

This must be our goal today too, to found our unity upon the belief of facts rather than upon agreement in opinions. Only then can we be sure that we will remain united.

Second, let us consider the development of unity. Paul explains this process in Ephesians 4:11-13. Here, he describes four categories of helpers given to the church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers. The apostles and prophets help us today only through the word, but we still have preachers and elders. All of these different men, though, work toward the same purpose. We equip the saints and build up the body until everyone reaches knowledge, maturity, and unity.

This is a rich concept! Among other things, it shows that unity is the product of Bible study. Sometimes, we think that unity is the product of sheer determination to be united. When churches split, it's because they didn't want unity badly enough.

Instead, this passage points us to a defect in teaching. Christians fail to be united because they have not been equipped and built up.

We are equipped and built up for the purpose of unity in two main ways. The first of these is knowledge of the Biblical pattern. Sadly, there are all kinds of self-described believers out there who could not be united with us because they are ignorant of the Bible's teaching about the early church. To return to Alexander Campbell's language, they can't be united by belief in the facts because they don't know the facts.

The cure for the disease is obvious. Teach the facts! If we want unity, we must make sure that everyone here knows what the early church did. It's not a long or complicated list, but it's one that we must return to regularly to ensure that we all stay on the same page.

Second, we must emphasize the importance of unity and the danger of division. The Bible has very little to say about a number of the hobby horses that preachers like to ride, but it is filled with exhortations to unity and warnings against division. When we know the facts, we know how we can be united in following God's pattern. When we know the Bible’s teaching on unity, we know how important it is to stick to that pattern.

Finally, let's contemplate the biggest threat to unity. Paul defines it in Philippians 2:1-3. He tells us that if we want to be united in spirit, we must do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit. This seems like an unlikely problem to arise. After all, all of us are people of goodwill. We don't want to be selfish or conceited!

However, it’s a problem that every one of us can create. It comes about because of our opinions. As we have already seen, unity created by agreement in opinions is much more fragile than agreement based on belief in the facts. If our unity is based on opinions, it will last only until one of us very reasonably changes our mind.

As a result, introducing human opinions into the work and worship of the church is a deadly threat to unity. We have moved from the realm of what God has said is right to the realm of what we think is right. When we start insisting that others must line up with our opinions, that's when we're acting out of conceit.

Sometimes, preachers want to start drawing lines in the sand here. They want to say that a church that practices X that is not in the Bible is apostate and doomed. Frankly, I think that's beside the point. We don't have to know that doing X will send people to hell. All we have to know is that it is not in the Bible and thus is a threat to unity. When we understand how desperately Jesus wants His people to be one, why would we even try to bring something like that in?

This, then, is my final exhortation to this congregation about unity. Stick to the Bible. Do only the things that are in the Bible. Don't try pushing your opinions and clever ideas on others. As long as this church stays committed to the Scriptural pattern in all things, its unity will never be broken.

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