Unity in Jesus

 

Unity is very, very important to God. God speaks about unity a lot in scripture. It is an essential for the Body of Christ.

 

In Romans 15:5-6 Paul writes, “May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

 

Paul prays that God’s church will live in harmony. Harmony is unity without uniformity. In music it means taking the four parts (bass, tenor, alto, and soprano) and blending them together to make something more beautiful than those parts alone. In the church, it is taking our many differences and allowing God to blend them into something stronger and more powerful than we are as individual.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is allowing God to blend our difference into a oneness in Jesus as His church.

 

Jesus says in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

 

When God’s people are in unity it will been seen by us loving each other. This command is to love each other even if we don’t agree. Jesus loved His disciples even when they didn’t believe Him or understand Him. Jesus loved the people of Israel even when they rejected Him. When we love each other, especially when we are very different from each other, it is a powerful testimony that we belong to Jesus.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is loving each other even when we disagree with each other.

 

In Galatians 3:28 Paul, talking about unity in Jesus, says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

 

Among God’s people there are to be no made-man barriers of race or nationality, no barriers of finical or social standing, and no barriers of one gender being superior over the other gender.

In John 4 Jesus has an encounter with a Samaritan woman and in this encounter, Jesus breaks down man-made barriers.

 

The Barriers of:

Religion

Social Standing

Ethnicity

Moral Life

Gender Relationship

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is living God’s way and not letting man-made barriers separate us as God’s people.

 

Jesus does not want anything to be a barrier that separates His human creation from Him.

Jesus does not want anything to be a barrier that creates disunity in His church.

 

My prayer for us as God’s people is summed up in two verses.

 

The first is Romans 8:1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

 

Jesus does not condemn us as His people, so we are not to condemn each other. I pray that would be true of us, the Body of Christ.

 

The second is Ephesians 4:13. Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, for the building up of the body of Christ.

 

That we as the church will be united in our faith and knowledge and love so the church of Jesus is built up.

 

Loving each other leads to unity and unity leads to building up the church and leads to a powerful testimony to the world.

 

Just as God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - are in unity, then God’s people are to be in unity to reflect the truth of who God is.

 

In Unity Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

                                   Joe