What is Church? Unity

What is Church? Unity. Or “Become what you are!”

What would make you embrace a stranger from another country that you had never met before and offer to let them share all your resources. And yet it happens!

I was watching the ads on TV for long lost family members being reunited. Several years ago there were twins who had been separated at several months old and given to different adopting parents. Then one family moved here to Australia. After nearly 60 years the show’s producers tracked down the lost twin in England and brought them to Australia to meet the sister.

These total strangers from different sides of the planet who had nothing in common but dna embraced in tears.

Why?

Because all the evidence said they were “family” so they acted on that belief and treated each other like family- with love.

All the things that made them strangers did not matter once they knew they were closely related.
Their belief changed their behaviour. Belief about family came first, loving behaviour came second.
I wise speaker once told us at Uni “Become what you are!” These twins realised they were family and then acted that way. A perfect example of becoming in action what they already were in essence: one family.
That’s what Jesus has done for us. Christian unity is not a hope for the future it is a reality that we simple fail to live out. We are one family even as we split into different denominations and factions of liberal, evangelical and Pentecostal! Unity is not based on how we treat each other or achieved by treating each other well.

Unity has been won on the cross by Jesus and this forgiveness makes us all members of his body. All of us are forgiven sinners and eat from the same ‘table’ and share the same future and have been given the same Holy Spirit in our hearts.

We are one.

Brothers and sisters, now that we know we are one family of God we have just got to act like it.
“Become what you are!”

Jesus prays for you and I that we might realise that we have the same unity that Jesus shares with the Father:
“I pray not only for them, but also for those who believe in me because of their message.
I pray that they may all be one. Father! May they be in us, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they be one, so that the world will believe that you sent me.
I gave them the same glory you gave me, so that they may be one, just as you and I are one” (John 17:20-22).

Graeme