Pastor Mike emphasizes the importance of maintaining unity in the church, rooted in the spirit and not in external factors. He discusses the significance of unity in Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Father, highlighting the need to preserve this unity and live in accordance with the faith. It also touches on the challenges of living out this unity and the grace needed for believers to walk in Christ.
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Pastor Mike Candy
Sermon Excerpt from “Walking in Unity: Part 1”
Video Transcript:
Finally, maintaining unity here, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit, a unity that exists is tethered, harnessed in one through three chapters.
One through three. We’re not fabricating. We’re not making up unity. We have been unified in the spirit. Paul’s exhortation is just for us to maintain, to do that eager. Maintaining, preserve what you already have in a church of our size. It’s easy for us to, to be left on the one side of this. We, we gravitate towards people who talk and think and act and live like us.
And though that could be good, that’s more uniformity than it is unity. Being eager to maintain the unity of the spirit is not unity in our political stance. It is not unity of our ethnic heritage. It is not unity of our socioeconomic class. It is not unity of the foods that you like. It is not unity of the color of your skin.
It is not unity of the clothes you wear. It is not unity of the music that you prefer, nor is it unity on your favorite Bible teacher, or unity on the ones that you don’t like. We have unity in God’s Holy Spirit. We are not unity designers, or builders, or constructors. We are unity maintenance crew were the janitor at best.
He’s given us unity. Keep it, maintain it, restore it, help us. Oh God, to live in this way. And we do so with the bond of peace. Paul’s writing here and other places. He writes in the book of Colossians to a group of people who had some teachers coming in that we’re we’re trying to line up around festivals and and things that could maybe unify the church.
These people came in attempting to fabricate unity on the basis of something other than Jesus. They lost the connection, he said, to the head that is Christ. Colossians 2 19, the whole body being supplied and held together by joints and ligaments grows with a growth which is from God. This word, the bond of unity, is the same word for ligament.
There’s a men’s soccer league that happens on Monday nights, through FCA and, there’s the blue team. I play on the blue team. We are dead last. We’re awful. We’re so bad. but, this league has been really, really cool inviting non Christians to come to know Christ through this ministry, through soccer.
But there’s been a couple injuries, you know, throughout. Jared was injured. Our guitar player, Justin, was injured. And there’s a couple others that were injured. But one that really takes the cake is the torn, ruptured Achilles tendon. Just all over the place. all the way through. the weirdest part of what happens actually when you, rupture your Achilles tendon is that your foot hangs there.
It just kind of is limp. There’s no connective tissue to move it about. The recovery is really tough without the bond, the ligament of peace in the body of Christ. We We tend to just go limp. We’re not connected. We can’t walk in these ways. We’re disconnected from the head that is Christ. Our unity is not based in him.
It’s on something else fabricated. Paul says, preserve this unity quickly here at the end, he gives us finally, as we walk away this confession, this beautiful confession that is one body, one spirit called to one hope. It’s a cast dating song of remembrance rooted and established in the Trinity. We have lots of things hung up here in Mount Laurel and in Collingswood, but we have our DNA specifically hung in the walls.
And this section probably got hung if there was a building or a gathering or a home. maybe they would have hung this in their walls, in the church in Ephesus. The first one starts with the Holy Spirit. We have one body, one body that is the church. It’s an entirely new concept. The Jews are not supposed to become Gentiles and the Gentiles are not supposed to convert to Judaism.
They are one new body together in the spirit. The Holy Spirit gives us the presence of God in us. No longer was the temple the place of the dwelling of God’s Spirit. It was now living inside of each of them. We are the temple in which His Spirit dwells. One body, one spirit, one hope that we have in Christ.
The eager expectation Paul reminds us in Ephesians one that we have been given the spirit that when we believed we were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, he is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession to the praise of his glory, signed, sealed, waiting.
But we’re his, there’s a deposit inside of us and we confess this hope together. What we hope for oftentimes in the, in the now causes us to determine how we live, live in the future. I’m sorry. What we hope for in the end to come causes us to determine how we live in the present. Like a boat kind of setting up its bearings and fixing ahead on that way.
Or maybe you’re like me and you really want to get the lines right as you cut your grass. And if you look down right in front of you, often times you come through and it’s this squiggly mess of a line. But if you fix your eyes on a point ahead and aim for that, the lines come out straight. We fix our eyes.
On one spirit, creating one body, giving us a future hope. We also have one Lord Jesus Christ, the same one. Faith. And this is not describing the faith, our, our religion, or the, the way that we do things. It’s our, literally our putting our, our, our faith in Christ. It’s the activity of placing our trust, our allegiance, our surrender, one Lord.
One faith, one baptism. Now this is like, okay, great. Is he gonna say if it’s sprinkling or dunking? I mean, what’s the one right way for baptism? It’s not what it’s saying. Baptism is actually just the, the symbol of what’s happened in us. The, the identification that we’ve died and, and risen again. to life in Christ, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father overall referring to all believers.
This is not referring to everybody. This is God is our father, which means that you are my brother. You are my sister. Great way to walk out into the lobby today. You forget that person’s name. Hey, brother. Hey, sister, but truly. That’s who we are in Christ. We are identified with the same, unique, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father overall.
Notice what this confessional list is missing. It doesn’t talk about how the Ephesians should eat or not eat. It doesn’t talk about the candidate that they should vote for in the next Ephesus election. Or the type of music that should be sung in their gatherings. The specific local causes that they should champion in order to be the church.
The specific vision or strategy of how they do their gatherings not included. All of those things require a unity planted in a location. It involves the beautiful work within a community. That is why Collingswood campus looks really different than Mount Laurel intentionally. We are not planted there, they are not planted here.
It’s intentionally a diverse place. And in Ephesus it was Jews and Gentiles coming together. I don’t know about you, maybe you get to the end of a sermon like this and it’s, it’s possible you could say, well, gosh, I don’t meet any of those standards of how we are to walk in Christ. Maybe you felt inadequate or you didn’t measure up to the biblical standard.
And I would say for some of us, that’s a really great thing because we need Christ. We cannot measure up to this example. This is impossible. We are not to start reading at chapter four, one through three say, come to Christ salvation. But for those of us who are Christians, maybe you haven’t had a moment where you Where, like I had when I was in junior high, somebody came to me and said, I see you naming the name of Christ.
I see you saying you’re a Christian, and if that’s true, the walk that you’re walking does not line up. It is not worthy of the call to which you have been given in your life.
Your walk has some blind spots, gentleness, humility. We have to be anchored in what we have been forgiven of our sin, our brokenness in chapters one through three, but chapter four exists. In this book that we will walk together, eager to maintain unity because of what he has done in us, reflecting the unity of one father, one Lord Jesus, one spirit.