Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Defining Unity | New Testament | Ephesians 4

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

What steps do you take to keep unity within the church? What even is unity and what does it look like? In today's episode, Patrick uses Ephesians 4 to describe the path to a more unified church. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Ephesians 4

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. How do you define unity, sameness, agreement, mutual care? I ask because the Apostle Paul spends a lot of time in the New Testament talking about unity. It's a theme he cared deeply about because the early church was so disunited. Jews and Gentiles frequently judged one another and separated over their differences. And this was a terrible witness to the watching world. You see, Rome was just as fractured as the church. If the church was a unified space where different kinds of people could come together, well, that would be the loudest witness imaginable that Jesus is in fact superior to Caesar. After all, if Jesus can unite what Rome couldn't,

then his kingdom has to be far better. And of course, people living in a deeply divided culture would be attracted to a church precisely because it was characterized by unity. Just like magnets, opposites attract. But if the church was no different than Rome, who was no different than the culture around it, well, then the polarity would switch. And rather than magnetizing the world to it, it would repel that world away. Isn't the same true today? We are divided over so much. We argue over so many different things. The church doesn't feel much different from the culture. But what if that changed? If the left and the right, black and white, rich and poor, could gather in one place as brothers and sisters, wouldn't that be the loudest, most beautiful proclamation to the watching world that

Jesus really is Lord? Well, I think so. And I think it's imperative. Not just for our witness, not just because Paul commands it, but because what we share is far greater than what divides us. Paul writes in Ephesians 4, verse 1. As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient. Be patient. bearing with one another in love, make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body, one spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is overall and through all and in all. Do you make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace, like Paul says? Do you make some effort at least, or no effort at all?

wherever you're at you have a reason to do it because we have been called by one god to share in one spirit and take hold of one unified hope we worship one god he unites us as one body and so we dishonor that god by sowing discord and shredding apart what he unites but at this point we have to ask what exactly is the unity that paul is talking about it well it's a unity of faith in jesus as the Son of God. It's the unity of orthodoxy. But this unity, it's not uniformity. In the same way that an engine is united, even though it's made of different parts, or a body is united, even though it's composed of many organs. In the same way, we are all united in the church, even though we're dissimilar. We are united for a collective purpose, which requires difference. If we were all the

same, we couldn't accomplish what God calls us to do as a body. Paul writes about this unity across differences. Verse 11. So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and the teachers. See, they're all different to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Yeah, you know what? We're all different, but that's by design. It's for the sake of our witness and for the sake of our mission. So let's rejoice in our differences and let's rejoice even more greatly in what we share. When you see the diverse body of Jesus, let it remind you of your God who is three in one,

a diverse unity in his very being. We've been invited into that divine life, into that trinitarian dance, into that diversely unified mission to rescue and restore the world. So do everything you can to pursue unity and to celebrate our differences, all to Jesus. To Jesus. glory.