Biblical Unity

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I wonder how many of you remember the aftermath of 9-11. And some of you are too young to remember that. I was fairly young when it happened.

I was in high school. But I remember something was different for a few weeks after that happened. I remember going back to church.

That was on a Tuesday. I remember going back to church the next Sunday, and the place was packed. And this was a large church we were at in the city at the time.

And it was, in my memory, it was close to standing room only capacity in this building. And I noticed it was that way for a few weeks. I’m old enough to remember a time when Republican and Democrat members of Congress stood on the steps of the Capitol together and prayed and said, God bless America.

People who today don’t act like they can even be in the same room together. They did that. I remember the way we treated one another in the aftermath of that experience.

And I feel like that was the last time that our country really was unified. Other than maybe like two minutes when we were all laughing about the Bernie Sanders putting on his mittens. There were a couple minutes there when we were unified around that.

But I feel like that was the last time our country really was united. And the reason why we were united at that time was because we had a common purpose. Seems like our list of priorities got really short and got really in line with one another’s.

We knew that we had experienced this terrible attack. We knew that we were in trouble. And we came together because of that.

And our focus changed. Our focus got in line with one another’s focus. And it brought us unity.

And we slowly lost that. didn’t we? It took a little while but things went back to normal because we began to focus on other things.

We let that focus drop and we returned to being disunited. And the Bible describes how this can happen to a church also. The Bible describes in several places how this can happen to a church, how we can drift into disunity.

One of the scriptures that talks about that, the place we’re going to look at this morning is in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. There’s a lot that’s said about unity today when it comes to our country, when it comes to our churches. There’s a lot that’s said about unity, but usually it’s talked about in a kind of shallow sort of unity, just really a niceness that we’re just going to be nice.

But there’s got to be more to it than that, the way the Bible describes unity. And Paul is going to explain to us in the passage we’re going to look at where genuine unity comes from, where genuine unity must come from if we’re going to have it. And so I’d ask you this morning to turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 1.

I might have said 10 a minute ago, but it’s 1 Corinthians chapter 1. I would tell you there’s a link in your bulletin, but apparently it links to the wrong scripture this week because it’s, you know, why not? It’s that kind of week.

But it’ll also be on your screen for you if you turn there. And if you would stand with me, if you’re able, once you find it, and we’ll read together from God’s word. 1 Corinthians chapter 1, we’re going to start in verse 10 and go through verse 17.

It says, Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it has been declared to me concerning you, my brethren, by those of Chloe’s household, that there are contentions among you. Now I say this, that each of you says, I am of Paul, or I am of Apollos, or I am of Cephas, or I am of Christ. Is Christ divided?

Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name. Yes, I also baptized the house of Stephanas.

Besides, I do not know whether I baptized any other. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect. And you may be seated.

All throughout the book of 1 Corinthians, we see divisions in the church at Corinth, and we see the result of the divisions. By the way, as I bring you this today, I’m not bringing it because I know of any divisions here. we’ve been working through a series on Sunday mornings about some of the words and phrases and concepts that the Bible uses that we have allowed the culture to redefine and we’ve been talking about reclaiming those biblical definitions and today we’re going to talk about unity because it is one of those things that we have allowed the culture to redefine if we make a truth claim that somebody else disagrees with we’re divisive right we’re not being unified or unifying because we’re making those names.

Unity today is all about being nice. It’s all about having warm, fuzzy feelings. It’s sort of like the way society has redefined love.

That’s not the way the Bible describes unity. Unity should lead to things like us being nice to each other. As a matter of fact, as believers, we should just generally be loving to one another.

That should be a given. And we should be loving toward others as well. Unity is more than that.

Unity is more than that. And the church at Corinth experienced what it meant to be divided. See, the church was divided.

It says that some of them aligned themselves with Paul. Some of them aligned themselves with Apollos. Some of them aligned themselves with Peter.

In verse 12, it says, some of you say, I am of Paul. Some say, I am of Apollos. Some say, I am of Cephas.

Cephas is another name for Peter. And to say, I am of Paul means I’m a follower of Paul. These people at the church at Corinth, they were picking out their favorite teacher and they were siding with that teacher, it almost became like a team jersey kind of situation, as though Paul and Peter and Apollos were all preaching something else.

It would be like, for example, you know, Brother Rodney has filled in here for me. He also was the interim here before I came, so you’ve gotten to hear his teaching. Brother Rick fills in for me on occasion on Wednesday nights.

You’ve gotten to hear his teaching. Now imagine if you were all walking around here, maybe not with literal team jerseys on, but some of you were saying, I’m team Jared. Not the best team you could probably pick, but you know, whatever.

And some of you are saying, I’m team Rodney. And y’all are going down. And others are saying, no, I’m team Rick.

And you all stink. And you’re fighting as though Rick and Rodney and whoever else and I, as though we’re preaching different things. Now, there are some preachers and teachers that would like that kind of adulation, would like to build a following.

But I speak for myself and I think I know those guys well enough to say that would be very concerning to us. Because we’re preaching the same message. We might say things a little differently, but we’re preaching Jesus.

We want you to be on team Jesus, right? Right? We want you to be on team Jesus.

And so they were divided. They were picking teams based on what teacher they liked best. And so they developed followings around these guys. Now, it says that happened in verse 12.

Verse 11, it tells us that led to contentions is the word that it uses here. Now, the way the Greek word there is described by one expert, I’m not an expert. I just know enough to be able to read, to make sense of some of the commentaries that talk about the Greek.

But I can’t have a conversation with you in Greek. But some of the stuff I read this week, one of the men that described this Greek word used the phrase unseemly wranglings. think of politics think of I don’t know some of the the backroom things you might have seen on the west wing or madam secretary if you watched that I’d say house of cards I don’t recommend that I watched half of an episode and needed to go take a shower and never went back yeah it was so disturbing but we think of that kind of stuff going on in politics the wrangling and the horse trading and the corruption and fighting and backstabbing and stepping over one another.

And that’s kind of the idea of what you get here with contentions. See, the church was breaking into factions and then they were willing to step over each other. They were willing to stab each other in the back.

They were willing to do whatever they needed to for themselves and their faction to get ahead. In other words, this means the people were working against one another in the church. Now these contentions resulted in divisions as it describes in verse 10.

The word there is schisma. And you may have heard the word schism, or I always thought it was pronounced schism until I started studying at Greek. A schism is a word we still use today for a division, but we have trouble fully appreciating what this word means in our society.

Because in our way of thinking, you get mad at one church, you just go down the street, there’s another one. It shouldn’t be that way where we can just that easily walk away from our fellowship, but that’s kind of our culture. The word schisma doesn’t mean they just didn’t see eye to eye.

It doesn’t mean there was division in the sense that they disagreed about something. This word describes something being physically torn into. And when it was used in ancient Greek to describe situations.

It talked about like the time in, I think it was 1054, when a bunch of the bishops got together and decided they didn’t like each other. And the Eastern bishops excommunicated the Western bishops. And the Catholic Church broke apart between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

And they all excommunicated each other. They all anathematized each other, which is another word we don’t use. But anathema is a biblical word like when the apostle Paul pronounced a curse on somebody for preaching a false gospel.

So I want you to understand, this is a word we have trouble understanding, but it’s a word that meant a lot to them as something was physically torn in two. And they kind of hate each other at this point. They were basically treating each other like, you are not a follower of Jesus Christ. You are no longer my brother.

And what Paul’s describing here is that they were in danger of becoming warring tribes instead of one united church. And so he called the church instead to be unified. He told them, here’s how this is going to happen.

They needed to have the same message. Verse 10 says that you all speak the same thing. He’s not calling them to say the exact same words.

He’s not calling them to repeat mantras. He’s not calling them to chant slogans. He’s calling them to have the same message.

that their church was supposed to have one message it preached, that it wasn’t there to preach Paul. Paul said this of himself. The church is not here to preach Paul.

The church is not here to preach Apollos. The church is not here to preach Peter. The church is here to preach Jesus.

He’s the message. And he wanted them all to speak the same thing. And then in verse 10, he tells them that unity means they’re going to work together instead of against each other.

He says that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. This is the opposite of what they were doing. If that word schisma means something’s ripped apart, here he’s describing that it needs to fit back together and not just kind of cram together, but fit together perfectly.

I want you working in the same direction. I want you working toward the same goal. I want you cooperating together. That’s what he called them to do in order to experience this unity.

But we also see in this passage that a church will only experience biblical unity to the extent that it’s focused on Jesus. We are never going to be more unified, not just us, but any church. We are never going to be more unified than we are unified in our focus on Jesus.

See, unity is not just being nice. We have this idea that it’s just holding hands and sitting around the campfire, singing Kumbaya and roasting marshmallows and just being nice. That’s not what unity means.

And the reason this becomes a problem is because if that’s your definition, people who are doing the right thing can get accused of being divisive. And we’re seeing it happen in evangelical circles. We’re seeing it happen in our own convention that people have begun to import ideas that have more to do with Karl Marx than Jesus Christ. And then when somebody says, no, no, we need to come back and focus on Jesus.

We need to come back and focus on the gospel. We need to do this. They’re accused of being divisive.

Now, I know that not everybody says everything the right way, and I’m not going to defend everything that every conservative in the Southern Baptist Convention has ever said or the way they’ve gone about it. But if our unity is based in Jesus Christ, then those who are calling us back to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to focus on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of worldly theories, they are not the ones responsible for the division. It’s the ones who led us into worldly theories in the first place who are responsible for the division.

Calling somebody back to saying, let’s focus on Jesus. Let’s focus on the gospel. Let’s focus on his atonement.

Let’s focus on his redemptive message. Let’s focus on the resurrection. Let’s go back to Jesus.

The people who are arguing for that are the ones who will be responsible for bringing unity to our churches. Paul called them to speak one message and focus on one mission. And they didn’t get to pick.

All right, he didn’t say just get together and decide among you what it’s going to be and then go out and make sure you’re doing one thing. He said you need to have one message, you need to have one mission, speak one thing fit together, all the stuff that he says in verse 10, but he identifies what is keeping them away from their unity. And he says it is their focus on things other than Jesus.

And for that, we come back to verse 12. Here’s the problem. Again, each of you says, I’m of Paul, or I am of Apollos, or I am of Cephas.

You are focused on these people. You’re focused on these personalities. you are focused on men and what men say as opposed to being focused on Jesus.

Now, there was nothing wrong with respecting Paul or Apollos or Peter. There was nothing wrong with listening to their teachings, especially as they were preaching the message of Jesus Christ. The problem was that they were so focused on those men that their identity became wrapped up in who they were following. And if we are not careful, we can do the same thing.

We can do the same thing. We can walk in here wearing a jersey other than Jesus if we’re not careful. Now, you may say there’s not a preacher I like well enough to wear the jersey.

We all have something. Just to bring it into my world a little bit, one of the most convicting things I’ve heard in a long time was when somebody said, if you feel more at home with somebody who agrees with your politics and disagrees on Jesus than you do with somebody who agrees on Jesus and disagrees with your politics, you’re doing it wrong. Let me simplify that a little bit.

If I could walk into a political meeting and sit down and have more in common with the atheist who shares my political views than I have in common sitting with a brother in Christ who doesn’t share my political views, I’m wearing the wrong jersey. Does that make sense? We can get wrapped up in all sorts of things where our identity becomes about those things.

It can be about our politics. It can be about where we come from. It can be about where we work.

It could be I knew some people who had retired from rival companies and were members of the same church and didn’t like each other because they were members of rival companies. They had economic interests that were opposed to each other. Guys, we’re doing it wrong.

When our identity and our focus becomes wrapped up in anything but Jesus, it will lead to disunity in the church. It can happen with teachers. It can happen with ideas.

It can even happen with ministries. I spoke with a friend last week who said she and her husband had made the difficult decision to leave their church. And I believe it was a difficult decision.

And I wish they lived here because they’d be an awesome addition to our church. But they said they had left, and I know they had struggled for quite some time because of some of the things that their new pastor was preaching. But they said what really clinched it for them was that a new ministry had been brought into their church, that they didn’t have a problem with the ministry, but that became the focus of everything in the church.

Everything was oriented around this one ministry and what that one ministry needed and what that one ministry was trying to accomplish. And anybody that didn’t participate in that one ministry became an outsider to everybody else. And I know they’d been to talk to him multiple times about it.

And they finally realized this is our cue. We’re not mad, but this is our cue to go serve somewhere else where we can actually serve. Now, if I didn’t know this person so well, I would question the story a little more.

But I know them and know how faithful they’ve been to their church. I also know a little something about the church. And so I see no reason not to believe because I’ve seen it happen elsewhere too, that one ministry became the focus of everything else.

And people’s identification with that ministry trumped everything else and caused division within the church. See, we have to be careful. It’s not just bad things that can cause division.

Even good things can cause division if we put them in a place where they become our focus. The ministries that we do are important because they bring people to Jesus. They’re not important just for their own sake.

So even good things make bad substitutes for Jesus. And Paul points out the foolishness of being devoted to any cause above Christ. I’m not telling you, by the way, to stop the ministries you’re doing. There are some wonderful ministries going on in our church, and I don’t say any of that because I think anybody’s doing that.

I’m just warning you of the pitfalls. If we put our loyalty to anything, put my loyalty to my family ahead of Jesus Christ, then it becomes a problem. Paul points out how foolish it is to be devoted to any cause above Jesus Christ he asks in verse 13 was Paul crucified for you or were you baptized in the name of Paul now Paul was a good person to listen to he he wrote a good chunk of our new testament of course he’s a good person to listen to but he asked the question are you are you really going to be that devoted to me did I die for you on the cross am I the one whose authority you were baptized in and of course it’s a rhetorical question.

We know they knew the answer is no to that. Jesus died for them. Jesus died for you and me.

When they were baptized, they were baptized because of Jesus Christ. Their focus belonged on Jesus Christ, not on Paul or anybody else. And he also asked in verse 13, is Christ divided? All right, so your focus belongs to Christ. Is Christ divided?

The answer to that question is also no. And if Christ is not divided, if Jesus is not fighting against himself, Jesus is the one who originally said a house divided against itself cannot stand. Jesus is not fighting against himself. So if we’re loyal to Jesus Christ above everything else, we shouldn’t be divided either.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to be exactly the same. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never have any differences. It doesn’t even mean that we’ll never have any differences of opinion.

We’re humans. We’re different. God has wired all of us differently.

That’s just a fact of life. My wife and I do not agree 100% on everything. I think the big important things we do, but if we were exactly alike, one of us would be unnecessary, right?

It would be really boring. I like that my wife, sometimes I like that my wife thinks differently than I do. She’d probably say the same thing.

Sometimes, sometimes it’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean that we’re never going to have any differences. What it means is we recognize that those differences are there, but there’s something more important that trumps all of those differences.

I think of some of the reports that I’ve seen coming out of Eastern Europe through Friends of Friends and the churches in Ukraine. There are Baptist churches. I know there are others, but I run in Baptist circles, so that’s what I know.

But there are Baptist churches in a Baptist seminary in Ukraine right now that are ministering to refugees and trying to feed people and trying to take care of the wounded. They’re trying to do all of these things while in the middle of an illegal and immoral occupation of their country. And as much as I do not care for the Russian government, there are Baptist churches on the Russian side trying to do the same thing.

And in some cases, they’re cooperating to take care of the wounded and the refugees and the hungry and the orphaned and to tell people about Jesus. Not because the question of Ukraine and Russia doesn’t matter. I think as Americans, it should matter to us, not saying boots on the ground, but it should matter to us a lot, a group of people that just wants to be free from another country.

We know a little something about that, or we used to. But it’s not that that difference doesn’t matter. It’s just that the Russian and Ukrainian believers recognize that something matters even more.

Folks, you and I are going to have differences. I haven’t taken a poll or anything, but I assume in a group this size, we didn’t all vote the same way. We don’t all have exactly the same amount of money or the same background.

We don’t all have the same ethnicity. All the things that the world says should tear us apart are present in this room. And yet we’re all here together this morning because something matters more than all of that.

Better said someone matters more than all of that. Those things may be important, but they must never take precedence over our loyalty to Jesus Christ. That’s where unity comes from. Not from a jelly-like lack of convictions about anything where we’ll just go along with what anybody says.

But unity comes from unifying around what our core convictions are in this case, that Jesus Christ is exactly who he said he was. And if we can focus on that, everything else just kind of fades in comparison. Paul even said in verses 14 through 17, he was glad to have less influence.

He was glad to have baptized fewer people and left that to somebody else if it meant that they would focus on Jesus. He said, I’m glad I didn’t baptize any more of you than I did if it was going to cause that much division. And we need to get to that point where we can say, I’m going to let everything else go if we can focus on Jesus.

And so our first and greatest loyalty as believers is to Jesus Christ and his gospel. But even here, too, I want to be clear about what I’m saying and what I’m not saying and what the Bible is saying and what it’s not saying. Our loyalty to Jesus Christ doesn’t mean to any ideas out there about Jesus Christ. I’ve heard Christians quote Gandhi talking about his love for Jesus.

Gandhi did write some things. I’ve never been able to find the quote that said, I like your Christ. It’s just that your Christians are so unlike your Christ. I’ve never been able to find where he wrote or said that. He may have.

But one thing I’ve read in his own books was how dear Jesus is to him and how much he loves Jesus or loved, how much he loved Jesus. And people will say things like that. Doesn’t it just matter that we love Jesus?

And you might get that from what I just said. I mean, I did say our greatest loyalty. I did tell you the Bible teaches that our greatest loyalty is to Jesus Christ, but not just any Jesus Christ we make up in our minds, Because even as Gandhi said how dear Christ was to him, he also wrote, and this is a direct quote, I regard Jesus as a great teacher of humanity, but I do not regard him as the only begotten son of God.

Now that doesn’t mean I hate Gandhi or anybody else who thinks that way, but how am I supposed to be unified with that? That’s not what I’m talking about. Just any ideas about Jesus Christ. When I say our loyalty is to Jesus Christ, part of that involves the truth of his word.

We have to be united about what he says about himself. Jesus claimed throughout all four gospels to be God the son. He claimed to be the son of God.

He claimed to be the savior of mankind. He claimed to be the only way to be reconciled to the father. He said those things, not me.

I’m not making that up. It’s in the book. And we have textual evidence that says it goes back to the original copies.

Nobody made that up. He said it. So was he right or was he lying or was he crazy?

It’s what C. S. Lewis called, I believe, the great trilemma.

Liar, lunatic, or Lord. Those are our three options. If we’re going to be loyal to Christ, we have to know who we’re being loyal to.

Part of that loyalty means standing firm on the conviction that he is exactly who he claimed to be. And Paul describes the importance of this. When he says in verse 17, Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel.

not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect. And he said that I’m willing to forego everything else as long as that is done. So clearly to Paul, that is the most important thing.

And so what is Paul saying here that is most essential to his ministry? Jesus Christ and his gospel. Not just that people love some version of Jesus Christ, but that people know the Jesus Christ that Paul knew.

That people understood the Jesus Christ of the gospel that was preached by the apostles that we have recorded for us in their writings. Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father, God in human flesh, who became a man to live a perfect sinless life among us, who fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament by coming and taking responsibility for our sins on himself when he had none of his own, being nailed to the cross to be punished in our place for them, to shed his blood and to die so that he could bear the full penalty that we deserve for our sins. The Jesus Christ who after that was buried, but then three days later showed up and walked among people while the tomb was empty, appeared to numerous eyewitnesses over the next 40 days, and in the presence of hundreds of people ascended back to the heavens with the promise that he would return again.

The Jesus Christ who promised that we would be forgiven not because of our own but because he had paid for our salvation. That’s the Jesus that we unite around. The Jesus that Paul preached.

The Jesus that the apostles preached. The Jesus who went to the cross. Even today, the idea of the cross is under attack.

Even in Christian circles, even in some so-called evangelical circles, it’s become popular to try to reinterpret the cross as it was an example. It was an example of love. It was that, but there’s more to it than that.

Paul’s not preaching the cross. He says in verse 17 that he does not want the cross of Christ to be made of no effect. The cross is not important because it’s a good idea.

The cross is not important because it’s a nice reminder of his love, although it is that. The cross is important because Jesus Christ paid for our sins. He was the only one who could, and he paid for it in full.

And so he called the church at Corinth to find unity around these most important things. Jesus Christ and the gospel, the truth of who he is and what he’s done for us. He called the church at Corinth to find unity around those things.

They would probably always have some differences, but the most important thing that they could focus on was Jesus Christ, who he is, and what he did. And folks, the same thing is true of us. There are differences in this room, as I’ve already pointed out.

I don’t know of any that are tearing us apart, but what better time to talk about unity when we’re already unified? It’s just easier if we keep ourselves that way, right? and come in and try to fix it after it’s not there anymore.

There are differences in this room, but folks, one thing trumps all of those differences. One thing is more important than all those differences, that we are focused on Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and coming again. Everything else is just the details.

Not to say that they’re not important, but nothing is more important than that. If we want unity, if we want to keep unity, we will only find it in the truth about Jesus. and church if we ever find ourselves disunified there’s the answer go back and refocus on jesus go back to where we got off track focus on him and get back on track there’s nothing more important than jesus and what he did