March 25, 2021
John 17:11, “And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”
Jesus here speaks to something so crucial to the life of the church: unity. Think of this: if the Father and the Son are united as one, and we are in union with Christ by virtue of being adopted by him into the family, then we are one with him - one with God. That sounds all mystical and strange, and it’s not meant to sound that way: our connection to God is the most human thing about us - that’s how we were created to be. And it doesn’t diminish our physical bodies and this physical world - in fact, it redeems those ideas. This world is good, and our bodies are good - our earthly lives are valuable and our activities here are valuable - they are just being redeemed into perfection for eternity. God doesn’t say, ‘let’s be whisked away to this fairy-tale land,’ he says instead, ‘I am bringing a new heaven and new earth,’ and it will be right here on this current space we call Earth right now. As Abraham Kuyper says, ‘If Heaven is real, then plant a tree.’ It’s important that we have one foot here and one foot in Heaven - they are related places.
But if we are in union with Christ, connected to him, then we are to be connected to all other brothers and sisters in Christ on this earth. Our unity in Christ as the church is integral to a strong witness in the world; and that unity is based on trust in Jesus as Savior, and an understanding his atonement given to us a free gift on the cross. There isn’t much else to unite us - those are the core principles, and if we have agreement there, then we share the family values, we are at peace in our togetherness under those headings. Everything else will divide - and in some cases, to preserve unity, it is best that people worship under different camps - or else they would be fighting all the time.
But the thing that “gets us up in the morning,” so to speak, as the church, is that Christ died for me. Please let that unity anchor your heart when you think of your church and its purposes. The unity can be cultivated proactively and then we can launch from that place of unity into all the particular avenues of service to which we may be called - but we start with unity.
Prayer: Let the unity of your family, of your Spirit, be my anchor now, Lord. Let me pleased with your church as it is united under the banner of Christ’s blood and salvation; and then let me encourage my brothers and sisters in the Lord, with things that are celebratory and with things that are challenging. Let me be a humble recipient of that same challenge when it comes my way. We pray this in the unity of the name of Christ. Amen.
40 Days of Joy: The Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Dance is something not to be missed - a celebration of the human body and its potential. What makes Alvin Ailey different is that they create dance not to tell a story or to emphasize some outside idea, their dance is for the sake of dance itself. They aren’t telling stories primarily, they are showing you what the body can do. Enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDXerubF4I4&t=20s
