What We Need 09/21/2011
 
“Do you need one?” This is the question that my husband asked me as I held up a jacket on a recent shopping trip. I do not highly regard that question! “Define need,” I responded, “Do you mean need like I need air and water or need like I don’t have one like this and may turn to an icicle when I walk as it gets colder if I don’t buy it?”

In the church there are things we need. We need sound doctrine. It doesn’t matter how nice the building is or if we have wonderful programs…if we are not teaching the truth according to God’s Word we might as well go play tennis on Sunday morning. We also need moral purity. Sound doctrine won’t gain much of an audience if there is gross un-going sin being tolerated in the church. Passionate commitment to God is another necessity. A church will not go far without people who are passionately in love with Jesus and committed to serving Him. But there is one thing, that if it is missing, the church will be dead in the water when it comes to reaching out into the community with the gospel. That one thing is unity. Read the words of Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, John and others in the New Testament. Over and over they call for us to have unity. It’s not that they were naïve about who they were writing to, the Jews and Gentiles, slaves and masters, men and women…group after group that were primed for strife. Yet they knew that the testimony of the church, the very spread of the gospel could be accelerated or stopped dead depending on whether Christians got along with each other.

Look at this quote from the early church father, Justin. “….we who hated and destroyed one another and on account of their different manner of life would not live with men of another tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live happily with them, and pray for our enemies and endeavor to persuade those who hate us unjustly to live conformably to the good precepts of Christ, so that they may become partakers with us of the same joyful hope of a reward from God”

The apostle John devotes much of his first epistle to the subject of believer’s love for each other.

   We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. (I John 3:14a NASB)
   We know love by this that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. (3:16)
   Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. (4:7)

In Philippians 2, Paul pleads, “make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. “(2:2 NASB) In verses 3 and 4 he gives them instructions on how to do what he has asked for and then starting in verse 5 he shows them the supreme example. “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus…”

I will close with a quote from a book called The Adequate Man: Paul in Philippians by Paul Rees.

   “Look at Him—this amazing Jesus! He is helping Joseph make a yoke in that little carpenter’s shop in Nazareth. This is the One who, apart from His self-emptying, could far more easily make a solar system or a galaxy of systems.
    Look at Him again! Dressed like a slave, with towel and basin for His menial equipment, He is bathing the feet of some friends of His who, but for their quarrelsomeness, should have been washing His feet….
    ‘He humbled Himself! Don’t forget this,’ cries Paul to these dear friends of his at Philippi. ‘Don’t forget this when the slightest impulse arises to become self-assertive and self-seeking, and so to break the bond of your fellowship with one another!’”

Dear Lord, help us to find the unity You desire for us as we seek to emulate the humility that you modeled before us!

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