How Important is Unity to You?

by John Jackson

How important is unity to you? Does it really matter to you? Do you care about it as much as Paul did, or even as much as Jesus does? Paul tells the Ephesians in 4:3 to be "eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." There are many things that we unfortunately overlook in living as God wants us to. Whether it is by ignorance of how important it is or by ignorance of it altogether, we all sometimes neglect some crucial part of God's will for our lives.
Are you eager? The word here does not simply mean to be enthusiastic. It means to make an effort, you must take action. And to maintain is not just to keep something as it is, but to guard it and protect it. Are you making an effort to guard the unity of the Spirit?
On a personal level unity is not really difficult when two people are acting peacefully in love towards one another. While not everyone will do this, personal unity, between you and another individual, is the easiest because you have the most control. You may not be able to control the other person but you can control yourself and that's half the people involved. In any other social situation you don't have that much control, usually there are more people involved; and the more people there are the harder it is to control. Do you make an effort to guard the personal unity between you and every individual you know?
Working as a group is both a blessing and a curse. While many great things can be done when we have many working together, it also makes it harder to keep unity. Keeping unity for the group is what we are told most about in the New Testament. It is more difficult because it takes the most compromise; not in the sense of the Bible doctrine that should not be compromised, but in the things which can be compromised; the unfortunate gray areas. These areas give us so much trouble because they can be compromised but most won't give them up. Most of the problem is with things that should not be issues; the color of the carpet, the song books, the amount of songs sung in a worship service, and the list goes on. Splitting unimportant hairs has marked the division of God's church from the time of the apostles. The question to ask ourselves is how eager are we to deny ourselves to guard the unity for the church?
The unity of the global church is the most difficult to consider. We are held back by denominationalism, man made doctrines, and outside theologies and philosophies that plague the Christian ideas of both God and His word. Are we willing to take on that challenge? The Restoration Movement was driven by men from the midst of denominations and man made doctrines with the focus of bringing unity to all Christians by way of true Bible based teaching. Have we been successful in taking up their cause? Are we still working to the unity of all who claim Christ?
I am not including any suggestions for striving for unity because there is no real standard way. Just as the letters of the New Testament were addressed to specific churches for specific reasons, we must deal with unity individually with the specific cases that arise. My main question to myself and my family in Christ is: Are we doing enough to attain and maintain unity for God's children? In John 17:21 Christ prays for unity of His followers so that the world may see them and believe that their God is real. The world sees Christians and all we have to show them is arguing and division. How can we expect the world to believe what we say when we cannot even agree ourselves, nor do we talk long enough to work toward a common understanding. What to do will always be hard to decide, but we must decide if we are willing to do what it takes to have unity.

• Unity -Jan 20, 2008