Before we begin this morning, I would like to read a few verses from John 17:20-22. This is the Lord’s high-priestly prayer, His prayer before He goes to the cross.
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word;
that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You;
that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.
And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one.”
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You this morning for Your great love toward us, how You have shown it to us by giving us the Saviour, Your Son, Jesus Christ. We thank You for how He suffered for us, Lord, because He loved You. He brought us to You, and He has brought us to You this morning. We come to You, Lord, clean because of what He has done.
We ask You, Father, to open our eyes and our hearts to You. Lord, come against the coldness that I know is in my heart, and draw us to Yourself because You love us so much.
Father, as we look at Your Word today, we do not want it merely to be me talking. We do not want it to be the ideas of men. We ask, Lord, that You will take Your Word by Your Holy Spirit and make it alive, make it real, and make it what it is supposed to be, so that we might be drawn to You and made one because You have spoken this Word to us.
Father, we want to tell You how much we need You and how much we need the ministry of Your Spirit. We ask that Your Word would be unadulterated, Lord—that it would be Yours and You would own it.
So, Lord, we commit it to You. Thank You that we are hidden in You; we are hidden in the Lord Jesus. He has cleansed us from our sins. Now we offer Your Word up to You, Lord. Speak to us, we ask, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I have been speaking from Ephesians, and it has been quite a while since the last time. So I brought all my messages, and I thought I would just read them to you.
No, I am not going to do that.
Just by way of review, I was at the men’s retreat for the first time, and our brother Ed Miller is such a good teacher. I am talking about his pedagogy, the way he teaches, being a teacher myself. Every time, he brought us to the place of what we had seen before, then added to it and made sure that we knew it. It was very, very good. What Bob shared this morning was very good as well.
So I want to take a little page out of his book and say that we have been going through Ephesians. Instead of looking from the ground up, beginning with us as sinners—as we do in Romans, looking for a way to be justified and accepted by God—in Ephesians we started from the top, looking down.
We started seated in the heavenlies. We have seen what God has done for us. Romans leads us to the place where we find what the Lord has done for us and how He has justified us through Christ. Then it brings us to the question, “Now what are we going to do? Now that we are free from our sins, what are we going to do?”
Then Romans 12 speaks about being a sacrifice, a living sacrifice, and the practical part follows. In the same way, Ephesians begins in the heavenlies. We see where we are and what the Lord has done through Christ. We are in the heavenlies, and we see what is ours.
Then He brings us back down to earth and says, “Okay, this is where you are, but now let us live it out.” Not in some legalistic way, as though He says, “You had better do this or else.” He begins by showing us where we are and where the Lord has placed us.
Then He brings it down a little further. In Ephesians 2, He speaks about how we were sinners, yet that did not stop the Lord. Despite who we are, He was able to bring us to Himself, lift us up, and make us one.
Ephesians 3 ends with a prayer. Before Paul gets into the practical matters—chapters 4 through 6—he prays. His first prayer, in Ephesians 1, is that our eyes would be opened to see what the Lord has in us and what He has done for us.
Then the second prayer says, “Lord, strengthen them in the inner man,” because Paul knows that he is going to speak about walking. We must be strengthened, not in the flesh or in the natural man, but in the inner man. He prays that the Lord will do this so that we are able to walk.
When we began Ephesians 4 last time, we saw how practical it is. It is like having two legs in your pants. We do not walk around with a limp, and we do not walk around with our heads in the clouds. We come down to earth, and everything is made practical for us.
It is as though Paul says, “Now is the time. You have been on the Mount of Transfiguration, and it is time to come down to earth, where you find demon-possessed boys and all the other things that happen.” Is this going to take away from what is yours? That is a good question. Is it?
Thomas Paine called the colonists during the Revolutionary War “sunshine patriots.” Are we only going on with the Lord while the sun is shining? Or are we able to take hold of what we are in Him and walk even when we have mud all over the place and the sun does not shine?
Last time, we considered walking worthy. I am going to read the first six verses of Ephesians 4. I told you last time that we would probably get through six verses, and we only got through three. This time, I am not going beyond verse 6, because there is a good break between verses 6 and 7, where Paul begins speaking about the gifts given to the church.
This morning, we want to consider what unifies us.
“I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called,
with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love,
endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”—Ephesians 4:1-6
Last time, we saw that when Paul begins this exhortation about walking worthy of the calling with which we are called, I would have thought that he would have gone right down to Ephesians 4:17 and begun speaking about cleaning up our lives. To me, that sounds practical: “Okay, walk worthy of the calling. This is how you do it.”
But he did not begin there. He said that the first thing in walking worthy of our calling is to preserve the unity of the body. That is really, really interesting.
One of the things we considered last time is that preserving the unity of the body is a work of the cross in our lives. The thing about the work of the cross is that, in this case, preserving unity means that you do not come off the cross.
Floyd Police once told me a story about a man he used to work with. There is that Scripture in Matthew where it says that if a man slaps you on the face, turn the other cheek. This man had gotten into a fight and beaten up the other fellow. He was a Christian man.
Floyd asked him, “What did you do that for? Don’t you know what the Lord said?” The man answered, “Well, he hit me the first time and I turned the other cheek. Then he hit me on the other cheek, and I figured the Lord had delivered him into my hands.”
Sometimes, when we think of being on the cross, we think, “Okay, I will take it for a little while, and that is it.” But the cross means death. Crucifixion in Roman times sometimes took days. It was a slow death—suffocation.
People hung there for days, and sometimes the Romans felt pity for them and broke their legs so they could not stretch up for another breath. That made them expire a little more quickly. But being on the cross is not a pleasant thing.
An angel does not come down, kiss your hand, and nail it to the cross; then kiss the other hand and nail it too. That is not how it works. It is gruesome. The thing is, you stay on the cross.
Even the Lord was tempted to come down from the cross. The Pharisees and chief priests said, “If You are the Christ, come down from the cross, and then we will believe. That is the miracle we want to see.” But the Lord endured it all because that was the purpose for which He was sent.
When we preserve unity, it means the cross for us. It means staying on the cross until, speaking figuratively, we have truly died—until that part of us has died. Then we are not raising up later and saying, “Well, I have sat on this long enough. Now I am raising up because…” No, it is dying to it.
It is dying to it in such a way that you never come back and say, “Well, if you had listened to me.”
I always marvel at Barnabas. When Barnabas and Paul split, it was over Mark. Yet at the end of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he says, “Send Mark to me, because he is useful.”
Barnabas, I believe, went through the cross in such a way that he never poisoned Mark. He could have said, “Paul is such a… You just follow me more.” But Barnabas allowed Mark to travel with him in such a way that Mark had no problem later going to be with Paul.
Barnabas never badmouthed Paul. Barnabas bore the cross, and the fruit of it was, “Send Mark to me. He is useful to me.” There was a time Mark was not useful, but Paul came to see otherwise.
Now this morning, we want to look at these seven expressions of unity—seven times it says that there is one of this and one of that.
Before looking at the seven, I would like to read a hymn. It is in the book, though one verse is missing. It is by the Reverend Samuel J. Stone, and it is very familiar to us.
The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died.Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation:
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed;
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forevermore;
Till with the vision glorious
Her longing eyes are blessed,
And the great Church victorious
Shall be the Church at rest.Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won.
O happy ones and holy!
Lord, give us grace that we,
Like them, the meek and lowly,
On high may dwell with Thee.
The third verse, the one about schisms, is not in the hymnbook. But I read this hymn because it contains so many of the things we find here: one Lord, one faith, and these other expressions.
I do not want simply to say, “This is what this means, and this is what that means.” Since unity is to be preserved, the question is: what does unity look like? What does the Lord say unity looks like? These seven things speak about unity, and that is what we want to consider.
I was inspired to begin teaching Ephesians by Alan Alloway. I know he did not know it, but he spoke about the plural “you,” and that really struck me.
I am always an individual kind of person. I look at your individual walk and those kinds of things. But those of you who are my age may remember when the Beatles came out—not the beetles in your garden, but the singing group. When the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came out, there was another English group, the Animals—Eric Burdon and the Animals.
They had a song: “It’s my life, and I’ll do what I want.” If you do not see the church, if you do not see Christianity as a collective reality, then that song becomes your Christianity: “It’s my life, and I’ll live it how I see fit.” It becomes detached from everything else.
That can be our Christian life. But when the Lord instituted the Passover, every individual family took blood and put it on the doorpost. Individuals did that, but it was a company that came out of Egypt.
It was individuals within a company who came out. That is what I think the Lord is after. Yes, He wants our individual hearts—please do not think I am playing that down—but He wants individual hearts within a company.
In Hebrews, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob traveled in tents. Abraham came at the beginning, but then it became a company. That is what the Lord is after.
Yes, He died for us personally, praise the Lord. But He died for the world. Do not get a big head and think He died only for you. He died for the world. He not only bore my sin; He bore the sin of the world.
He wants a company of people, and this company is united. It is in union with Him and with each other. So He gives us a picture of unity here, and that is what we are going to consider.
In Ephesians 4:4, the words “there is” are in italics. Paul says, “In the bond of peace, one body.”
When you think of the word “body,” you do not think first of parts of the body. You think of the whole thing together. If I think of a body, I do not simply think of an arm. I think of an arm attached to a trunk, chest, legs, head—the whole thing. A body is a unit.
The body is not merely a collection of parts. My car is a collection of parts, skillfully put together. We could say that the body is skillfully put together too. But the difference between my car and my body is that I am alive, and my car is not.
I began as one small fertilized cell. That is how I started. Look at what has happened through the life of that small fertilized cell. If that were true of my car, I do not know what it would become—an SUV or maybe a minivan. But a body is alive.
A body does not say, “We need to bring in some more arms. We do not have enough arms for this body. Talk to management.”
When you first have children, you receive those little picture books showing the development of the fetus. The body looks strange at first, like some alien thing, but the whole thing is there. You see the large head, the little body looping over, and the buds coming out. Those little buds are the arms and legs.
The whole thing is there. It is never apart; it is always together. That is why this picture is so good when Paul speaks of one body. The body is a unit.
There are not separate bodies all connected to one head. That would be freakish. Imagine the Baptist Church and the Methodist Church as separate bodies all hanging from one head. That is not the picture of the body.
Nor is there an Asian church, an American church, a European church, an African church, and a Latin American church as separate bodies. There is one church, made up of all nations.
Remember Ephesians 2:16: He reconciled both Jews and Gentiles in one body. They are one. The body is a unit, and it has always been a unit. From the fertilizing of the egg, the body is a unit. It is not meant to be torn apart.
We may see things and say, “This is bad, and that is bad,” but there are invisible things that we do not see. You do not see my heart beating, but you know it is. Otherwise, I would not be standing here. You do not see the blood pulsating through my body, but it is. You do not see my liver doing its work, but it is.
There are things that are not on the surface. We tend to look at the surface and say, “Oh, gee whiz, we will just throw it out.” That is what the world does. The world sees the outward, nominal church and asks, “How can we believe in this?” They see the outside; they do not see the invisible.
Let us not be caught up in the same way. The body contains different things. I have limbs, a head, feet, and all sorts of tissues inside. Organs are made of different tissue than the epidermal skin. There are little hairs on your arms for protection. There are all these differences, but it is one body.
There is a tendency to divide ourselves into little factions. We could speak of Baptists and Methodists, but even within this small company of believers, we can divide ourselves into young people, older young people, and adults.
I do not mean this as a judgment, but look around: who are you sitting with? Are you sitting in groups? It is a natural thing. But we cannot say, “We are just one organ over here,” or, “We are that particular tissue.” That is a lie.
The Lord says in 2 Corinthians that we know no man after the flesh anymore. We are a body. We were placed by Him into this body, and we are to be this body.
My leg bones may be old, but do you know what is inside them? Life. That is where blood cells are made. The oldest things in my body—the bones—and the newest things are together, living together in harmony.
The blood cells are not saying, “Pretty old bone here. I am getting out of here.” No. They live with it. That is simply part of the body.
This body that we are in is one body. It is not split up or compartmentalized. It functions for the whole. The liver functions for the whole body; everything in the body functions for the whole body.
What does unity look like? Unity looks like a body. Are you not glad your body is controlled by your head? Can you imagine sitting here with no control over your arms and legs? Some of you would be punching the person next to you, and everything would be going wild all over the place.
The body is under the control of the head. That is a picture of unity.
Then Paul says, “One Spirit.” The Spirit is the life principle. In other words, there is one life principle in this body.
People say this is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who imparts life to us, and that is true. But consider this: there is one Spirit. Let us look at a verse or two.
Peter went to the Gentiles, preached Christ, and they were saved. That caused a row. The Jewish believers said, “What is this? Why were you in the town of the Gentiles?” Peter told them what happened, and they calmed down.
Then Paul and Barnabas returned from their missionary journeys, and men came from Jerusalem to Antioch saying that Gentile believers had to practice the law. There was a dispute over it.
Peter came forward in Acts 15:7-9:
“Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe.
So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us.”
There is one Spirit. It is not that Gentiles must have a different manifestation or a different kind of life than someone else. It is all one life. In my body, there is one life.
James says that the body without the spirit is dead. The spirit is life. When you see a dead body, you know there is no spirit in it.
I remember seeing my father in the casket after he died and saying, “That is not the man I knew.” The spirit—the life that was going on—was gone. All that remained was a shell.
How could I demonstrate life to you? I was walking the dog this morning, and I was looking at the trees. Trees are like telephone poles with leaves. They do not do much. You can hardly tell they are alive.
But when the wind blows through the trees, it makes the trees bow. That is the life of the Lord in the body. The response is a bowing of the neck.
We might think of bowing the knee, but a bowing of the neck is an act of submission. It is what you do before execution—you bow the neck down, and they chop your head off.
When there is life in the body, there is submission to that life. That submission is part of unity. Without submission, there is no unity.
When you see the wind blowing through the trees, let it remind you that the life in us is the life of the Lord Jesus. What do we know most about the life of the Lord Jesus? He submitted Himself to the will of the Father, even unto death, so that He could be highly exalted.
This brings us to the third point: one hope of your calling. I like this because it reminds me of playing basketball. The tournament is on, right? The young people know it is tournament time. Maybe older people do not care—you may be into baseball or football. Kenny is into the Redskins.
But do you know what the hope of being on a basketball team is? It is to win the tournament. That is why people play. If you are in it only for yourself, you may get something out of it, but you want the glory.
That is our hope as Christians: glory. Sometimes I used to think that being like Christ was the hope, but it is more than that. Christ in us is the hope of glory.
Glory is a hard word to define, but put it in basketball terms: it means you win. It means you have it all. There is nothing left. You are complete.
All the practices, the two-a-days at the beginning, the running, the training, and even the defeats during the season culminate in that moment. Those who win the tournament are not always undefeated. They may have had five or six defeats. Yet all those things lead to the moment when you can say, “It is over. It is complete. I have won.”
Brothers and sisters, that is the hope of us all: to be complete. It is not, “Gee whiz, I am going to be complete. I do not know about these brothers and sisters, but by gosh, I am going to be there.”
In a team situation, if everybody does not buy into it, can you imagine what the practices would be like? I played, and I never won the championship. We came this close, but never won, and that is disappointing.
But I know what it is like to be on a team. The people I held in the highest esteem were not the people I played against in games. They were the people who practiced against me every day, because they made me a better player. They were after my job.
That was good. They were trying to benefit the team by practicing hard, and I was trying to benefit the team by keeping my job and practicing hard against them. So when the game came, I was ready. When one player fell out, another player could take his place. The whole team benefited.
It was not one player; it was the whole team. That is a wonderful thing.
To be complete as a body is the same thing. We are all after the same goal, but we are not striving as individuals, saying, “I am going to get mine before you get yours.” It is a team; it is a body.
It is as a body that we are going to be complete, not as isolated individuals. Yes, there is completeness in the body for each individual, but it is the body whose completeness is the glory of all. We share in that glory.
It is like the 1980 hockey team winning the gold medal. The wonderful thing was that the captain called all the guys up to the stand. That was the glory. It was not one man’s glory; it was all of theirs.
One hope of your calling means the expectation of glory. Do you expect that? That is what hope is. Are you expecting it?
The purpose is that we have a common goal. For Israel, it was to get to the promised land. It was a common goal: let us get there together.
The next expression is “one Lord.” Judges has a key verse that everybody laments: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
That is an individual walk. But, brothers and sisters, unity is shown in having one Lord—one King.
We are not our own masters. That is very simple. You may say, “Yes, I know that,” but it is true. You may know it in your head and heart, but what effect does it have on your life? We are not our own masters.
What is that movie, Master and Commander? Well, you resign when you step into the body. You are no longer the master and commander. You cannot serve two masters.
The Lord Jesus said that in the Sermon on the Mount: you will love one and hate the other. You cannot serve two masters.
He has bought us, which means He owns us. Sometimes when we think of being ransomed, which is a wonderful term, we think that somehow we have been kidnapped and held, and someone says, “I am not giving you this person back unless you pay so much money.”
Then we imagine that we are returned and everything is hunky-dory. No, He bought us as slaves. Read the book of Hosea. It is a wonderful book about a man who married a harlot, a woman with harlotry in her heart. The Lord told him, “Go back and buy her again.”
We have been bought as slaves. But do not think that is a harsh thing. The service we offer results in our becoming bondservants. A bondservant is one who, after serving the master, says, “I have tasted the wealth in your house, and I know how much you love me. I will give up my rights to myself and forever be yours.”
When we say that He owns us, we mean it in that way. It is not that He is going to give us forty lashes and beans and rice. He has brought us into His household. We are His. He owns us. He is our Head.
Remember Acts 4. The apostles had healed the man who could not walk, and they were told not to speak in the Name of Jesus anymore. Peter said, “You tell us what is right: are we to obey you or obey God? We have to obey God.”
Having one Lord means there is one driver of the truck and one driver of the car. We have to let Him drive. We give Him His way. We submit to His headship in our lives, and we submit to His headship in the body.
That is a big thing. Sometimes we can say, “I can do it in my own life,” but when all the brothers meet together, it can be pretty tough. Yet we submit anyway. We submit to one another. He is the Lord.
We are Americans. We may ask, “Where is the democracy? Majority rules. Didn’t we rebel against the king? Isn’t that how we got our freedom?” But, brothers and sisters, there is one Lord and one King. He is King. He is sovereign. He has the right to rule over you.
“What about my rights?” Well, you gave them up, brother. You gave them up, sister. When you came into His kingdom, you gave up those rights and gave them to Him. He bought you when you had nothing at all, so that you could serve Him.
One faith—this is where people kind of go nuts. These next two expressions, one faith and one baptism, are often debated.
Some ask whether “one faith” means objective faith—a creed, what we believe. I remember, as a Catholic young man, praying the Apostles’ Creed. Is that what Paul means by one faith?
Others say, “No, it is subjective faith, the faith that you have.” But if it is purely subjective, that makes things difficult. Who is to say what is right? I think it is a little of both. You must have the objective before you can have the subjective.
I was reading Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and he looked at it this way, which is wonderful. He said that the one faith we have is the faith that justifies.
What is it that saves us? Is it belief in a creed? I was raised Catholic, and I believed Jesus died and rose again. I believed that He was the Son of God. But it was not until I was seventeen years old that I laid hold of that through faith—a faith that justifies.
You can believe, but does your faith lay hold of what you believe? Does it justify? It goes beyond the head and brings you into the place where you are justified.
Think about Abraham. He did not have children. He looked at his body, and there was nothing there. Yet the Lord said, “You are going to have a son.” Abraham laid hold of what the Lord said. He believed the Lord, and the Lord said, “This is righteousness. This is justification.”
He laid hold of the Lord through faith. That is the one faith we have.
Yes, there are certain things we must believe, particularly about the Lord Jesus. If you want to speak of a creed, you must believe that you are a sinner and that you are lost. Otherwise, why would you seek a Saviour?
You must believe that God is, that God loves, and that God has sent a Saviour. You must believe that the Lord Jesus is God made flesh, born of a virgin. Otherwise, He would merely be a man with a sinful nature like the rest of us.
He was born of a virgin so that He could make the sacrifice. He lived a worthy life so that when He was crucified, God could raise Him because of His righteousness.
You must believe that He died for you, that it was God’s plan for Him to die, and that it was not some random death. It was God’s plan from the beginning to send Him into the world to die for us.
You must believe that because He did this, God raised Him on the third day and that He ascended into heaven. What good is the sacrifice if He is still in the grave? If He has not ascended, He is not in the place from which He can hand down salvation to us.
You must believe those things. But you must also have faith that they are true and that they are for you. By believing, you are justified.
Martin Luther’s breakthrough was this: “I do not have to do all these things. The just man shall live by faith.” The faith that justifies is one faith—the faith that lays hold of and receives salvation.
Then Paul says, “One baptism.” In 1 Corinthians 12, he speaks about being baptized into Christ.
We might say that baptism does not unify us if we are speaking of modes of baptism, because there are different modes. Some immerse, some sprinkle, and some understand it as something done spiritually. Quakers do not believe in actually doing it outwardly; they say it is something the Spirit has done.
When Scripture says “one baptism,” that can be a bummer for me. I have been baptized twice. As a Catholic child, I was sprinkled, and then in my twenties I was baptized. Have I done something wrong?
What is this baptism? Let us consider what baptism really is. Christ was baptized. Why? Did He need to be baptized? Even John the Baptist said, “What are You coming here for? You should be baptizing me.”
But Jesus said, “Permit it at this time.” At that time, the Lord Jesus was identifying with us. He identified with us by being born, and He identified with us fully on the cross.
In baptism, we identify ourselves with His death and resurrection. But, brothers and sisters, it is more than that. It is more than identifying with His death and more than identifying with His resurrection.
In 1 Corinthians 10, it says that the Jews were baptized into Moses. What is that about? It means that they came under his leadership.
The identification in this baptism is not merely with Christ’s death, though we are to identify with His death. It is not merely with His resurrection, though that is part of the one faith. It is also identification with His kingdom and His rule on this earth.
Consider Daniel 3. We have the three Hebrew children—Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah—whom we know by their Babylonian names: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I want to show you their baptism, and I do not mean merely that they were going into the fiery furnace.
“Then Nebuchadnezzar, in rage and fury, gave the command to bring Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. So they brought these men before the king.
Nebuchadnezzar spoke, saying to them, ‘Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the gold image which I have set up?
Now if you are ready at the time you hear the sound of the horn, flute, lyre, and psaltery, in symphony with all kinds of music, and you fall down and worship the image which I have made, good.
But if you do not worship, you shall be cast immediately into the midst of a burning fiery furnace. And who is the god who will deliver you from my hands?’
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter.’”—Daniel 3:13-16
In other words, they were saying, “You can play the music again if you want, but we are not bowing down.” Why? Because they were identifying with a different kingdom.
Play the music; we are not going to do the dance. We are identified with someone else. That is what the Lord is after. That is our unity: we do not dance the dance.
It is not one foot in the world and one foot in the church. We do not do that. We have one Lord. We dance to His tune; we do not dance to another.
“My sheep hear My voice, and they know My voice, and they follow Me.” The identification—the baptism—is not merely with what He has done for us, but with who He is.
We identify with Him as our King and our Sovereign. We are in His kingdom. We do not know the other kings. We do not know the other voices. We know only His.
Baptism here is the “Amen.” “You are going to throw us in the furnace?” Amen. So be it. Let it be so, because our kingdom is not of this world. It does not matter.
They said, “Our God is able to deliver us, but even if He does not, we will not bow down.” Sometimes we think that, as Christians, we will not have to suffer much and that God will deliver us from everything. That is not the right view.
Some of the times when He does not deliver us are the times we see that He strengthens us. He strengthens us in our resolve. More than that, when we go through something like that, as they went through the furnace, He is there.
One of the most wonderful verses in Isaiah is Isaiah 43:2:
“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee:
when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned;
neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”
It does not say that you will not go through the fire. It says that when you go through the fire, you will not be burned. When you go through the flood, it will not overwhelm you, because He is with you.
Our baptism is identification with Him—who He is right now, the King of the universe. Do we identify with Him? That is where our unity is: identifying with Him and His kingdom.
Finally, Paul says, “One God.” God is one. Though we have a triune God, He is one God.
The first part of this passage speaks of the Holy Spirit, the second of the Lord Jesus, and the third of the Father. I am sure that is so. But consider this: He is one.
In that time, people had pantheons of gods. If you read mythology and history, their gods warred against each other. One god would support one side, and another god would support the other side. The gods were duking it out.
What hope is there for us if the gods are duking it out? If the gods are not united, what hope do we have? But our God is one—one in mind, one in heart, one in everything.
He is Father of all. Paul is speaking to believers; he is not speaking about the human race in general. He is the Father of all who believe—Gentiles and Jews, barbarians, Scythians, men and women, slave and free.
We are all related to Him. You cannot say, “Well, I am on a higher level than you,” because He is Father of us all. No one has a higher place simply as one of His children.
Secondly, He is above all. That means there is no one superior to Him. No one and no thing, at no time, has ever been, will ever be, or is now superior to our God.
He is God over all, Almighty. He is ours, and He is the One who saved us. He is sovereign.
He is through all. Some say that means He accomplishes His will through us. He works through us, His body. We are His tools by which He touches the world.
Others say that He works indiscriminately through everything. He works through a shooting star, through trees, through nonbelievers, and even through a donkey. Remember Balaam? He works through all.
Then it says that He is in us all. He resides in us. That is how we are unified in this body.
To close, what does this have to do with us? I want to return to what I learned from Alan Alloway: “you” as plural.
One went down to Egypt—Joseph. God sent him there so that he might save His heritage. One went down; seventy came after and dwelt there. After many years, over two million left.
They had their schisms. Between the time they left Egypt and the time they reached the promised land, there was Korah’s rebellion. There were people saying, “We are not going into the land because of this.” The people wanted to go back. They were filled with the world and wanted to return.
Yet you had Moses, Joshua, and Caleb preserving the unity. When God said to Moses, “Get out of My way. I will finish them right here,” Moses stood up and said, “What will all the people say? That You brought them out here to kill them because You could not do anything?” He preserved the unity.
Then they entered the land. Even after they had been in the land for perhaps a hundred years, it says everyone did what was right in his own eyes. There was no king.
Yet you had Jephthah, Deborah, Gideon, and Samuel, all preserving the unity until David and Solomon came.
David and Solomon came, and finally the glory of the kingdom was there, with rest all around.
What am I trying to say? You may look around and say, “I do not see it.” That does not mean it is not there.
For those of you who do see it, the encouragement is to preserve the unity—to be in your place, to do as Moses, Caleb, and Jephthah did; to stand in your place, be a watchman, preserve that unity, and bring others in.
For those of you who do not yet see it, follow those whom you see taking the lead until you do see it, until you come into it.
I will end with this verse from Hebrews. We use it so much that you probably have it memorized by now.
“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,
let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us,
and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,
looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith,
who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame,
and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”—Hebrews 12:1-2
Brothers and sisters, I should have said one thing: when we think of being this body, the body is not only the here and now. It includes all the saints who have gone before and all the saints who are yet to come.
That is why we can speak of so great a cloud of witnesses—people who have tasted and seen.
That is what unity looks like. Every time you look in a mirror, you should see unity. I did not say symmetry; I said unity. I did not say uniformity. When you come here, you should not see uniformity. There should be unity.
That is what the Lord died for: a body. Yes, you are included in that body, and He died for you. But let us make the picture bigger, because what He did is not small. It is huge. It encompasses all time, everything, and all eternity. We are part of it.
You cannot say, “Oh, well, I am just a small part.” Oh, my goodness gracious. Every part of the body is needed. You will find your place and your function in it, and that is true. But let us preserve this.
Let us not go home and think, “That is good for them, but I will just have my own Christian life.” No. Your Christian life cannot be separated. We are part of the vine. You cannot be pulled out of the vine. If you are, you dry up and die.
You have to be part of it. You are part of the body of Christ.
So what should we do? Let us take our place. Let us be one. Let the Lord make us one. We are one. It is not that we have to become one; we are one. Let us recognize that fact.
We serve one Lord. We have one hope. We have one faith that has saved us all. It is the same faith. We identify with one kingdom.
Let us do these things. Let us recognize that the body is one, that the Lord died for the body, that the Lord is the Head of the body, and that He may be glorified in the body. We win. We win in the end.
Let us pray.
Lord, we want to thank You today that You are so much greater—so much greater than we even think. We thank You for including us in this great work that You are doing.
Lord, You could have had nothing to do with us. You could have wiped us all out. You could have wrapped things up long before the time when we came to live. But You did not. You have included us, and Lord, we want to be included.
We want to be those who identify wholly with You. We want You to be our Head—not merely individually, Lord, but the Head of us all. We want to be part of the body. We want to know what it is like to be part of a body, to function, and to do what glorifies You.
We want to be used by You to touch the world. Lord, we do not want to be disjointed from the Head, and we do not want to be disjointed from our brothers and sisters either.
Help us to realize that this life is meant to be lived together, to be traveled together, not apart. Forgive us, Lord, for wanting it to be otherwise, for wanting only an individual walk.
Lord, show us how to walk with our brothers and sisters so that You are glorified and magnified. Lord, how can You be magnified in one? That is hard. But can You be magnified in twenty? How about fifty? How about a hundred? How about a million?
Oh, Lord, be magnified that many times and more because of Your saving grace and because of what You have done for us.
Lord, make us those who go out and, in claiming Your kingdom and claiming that we are from Your kingdom, draw others into it. May they be the buds that we wonder about—“Gee whiz, what is that?”—and may they grow into limbs and organs needed in the body that You are building.
Lord, do not let us be alone. Let us be united with Your body, to Your glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.