Does unity even matter to God?
November 17 - 23, 2024 | Always Peachy Devotionals | Unity Week 3
Your life and your choices are between you and God.
Agree? Disagree? You can do either. We talked about that last week. ;-) But it’s generally accepted that when we begin to follow Jesus, the best, most important relationship we have is between us and Him. Our choices are between us and Him, and no one else can really understand because God is the only one who knows our hearts.
So if our relationship with God is all we actually need, why do we need each other? Why do we need community? Why should it matter to us if we have friends or colleagues or fellow travelers in our lives?
Well, whenever I’m trying to discern what actually matters in my life, the first place I go to find that answer is Scripture. Because the best way to identify what should matter to me is to first identify what matters to God.
So that’s the question we need to ask: Does God care about unity? Well, if you read the Scripture, it won’t take you long to find that He does. God has a very strong opinion about His people working together toward a common goal. He wants us to be unified, but He wants us to be unified in His purposes—not our own and not the world’s.
If you want to know what happened when humanity acted together in unity against God’s will, just give Genesis 11:1-8 a read. God had given the human race specific instructions, and they refused.
Fast forward to the New Testament, specifically the Gospels. People like to talk about Jesus coming to bring peace on earth, that He is the prince of peace and all that. And He is. But His first coming wasn’t about bringing peace. His first coming wasn’t about bringing unity. In His own words in Luke 12:51, Jesus came to bring division, not unity. He came to give people a choice, and not everyone was going to choose Him. That’s still true today.
So where do we get the idea that unity even matters to God? If God divided people in the Old Testament and then came as Jesus to divide people further, does He even want us to be unified?
That’s what we’re going to be talking about this week. We’re going to look into verses that talk about why unity truly matters to God, but we’re going to be defining unity the way God does.
Monday - We are stronger together (Acts 2:42-44)
Tuesday - We have a lot of work to do (Matthew 9:36-38)
Wednesday - We don’t want to forget anyone (Matthew 22:9-10)
Thursday - We need help staying focused (Galatians 6:1-3)
Friday - We need all the gifts to make a difference (1 Corinthians 12:25-27)
Spoiler Alert: God wants us to be unified, and He gave us the Holy Spirit to empower us to do it. I’m excited to dig into this concept of being unified according to God’s Will because the Body of Christ can do impossible things with God’s Power working in us and through us and even for us.
There are so many of us who love Jesus around the world, but even though we are often far apart from each other, God is the same no matter where we go. And that desire to live a life unified with God and with the Body of Christ made me think of our memory verse for this week, Ephesians 4:4.
I love that so much. One glorious hope for the future (again, spoiler alert, because we might be talking about this concept in a bit more detail in December).
Once we know Jesus and decide to follow Him and make Him Lord of our lives, we can lean into this verse with everything we are. And despite our differences and inequalities and disagreements and conflicts with each other within the church, because of what Jesus did for us, we are still one. We are still unified. And that glorious hope for the future is the perfect unity we will one day experience in our heavenly Home.
Does unity matter to God? Absolutely. Let’s talk about why.
Praying for you all this week.
Amy
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