March 2, 2023 Show with A. M. Brewster on “The Nature of Biblical Unity”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's iron sharpens iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own question.

And now here's your host Chris Arnzen.

Good.

Afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensirenradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of iron sharpens iron radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this second day of March 2023.

I'm thrilled to have back a returning guest on iron sharpens iron radio. In fact, not only is he a returning guest, he is now a featured monthly guest and also a sponsor of iron sharpens iron radio. His name is A .M. Baruster.

He's president of Evermind Ministries, a biblical counselor, an author, podcaster, and conference speaker, and today we're going to be addressing a very vital theme within the body of Christ, the nature of biblical unity, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to iron sharpens iron radio, A .M. Baruster.

Thanks a lot, Chris. I am very excited about today's topic. It is something that has just been permeating my life as of late.

Amen. Well, for the sake of our listeners who perhaps were not tuned in the days that you've been on, tell our listeners about Evermind Ministries.

Yeah, so Evermind Ministries was started back in 2007 and it has slowly grown over the years to become a broader and broader, I call it a family of ministries. The idea is that these individual little ministries in the broader Evermind Ministries are designed to help keep God's Word at the center of the human experience.

So there are a lot of human experiences we have. That's why Truth, Love, Family was created to keep God's Word at the center of the family experience. Specifically, and we deal a lot with parenting, but we also work with children to understand how they are supposed to fit in the family and we deal with marriage and all the topics that affect the family.

Then there's the year-long celebration of God that focuses primarily on our personal discipleship with the Lord. It deals with the concept of worship, what that really is in terms of the Christian life, and it's really more about me personally, you personally, following along with the year-long celebration of God as we grow in Christ.

However, oftentimes we have issues where we need help. We need help from the outside. And Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship is our crisis counseling side of things. People come to us who are struggling with addictions and really big issues in their lives.

And then A .M. Brewster Ministries is where I go out and I speak and I preach and I travel and connect people with God's Word in that way. So those are kind of an overview of the various ministries that are all part of Evermind Ministries.

And I know one of your websites is TruthLoveParent .com. TruthLoveParent .com. Any other URLs that you care to offer?

Yes, so TruthLoveParent .com was the first and right now is kind of the hub where we're working on EvermindMinistries .com and so on and so forth. But CelebrationofGod .com is another website you guys should definitely check out.

And because you guys are listening to this show, I want to encourage you to go to TruthLoveParent .com forward slash iron and there you'll see all of my conversations with Chris, the past ones and this present one and what I have there for you is a bunch of related resources.

We can't always talk about everything we want to talk about in the span of the show. So a ton of other related resources for you to dig deeper into the concepts that we're talking about today. Great. And.

Today as I even mentioned in the introduction to the program, the nature of biblical unity, obviously that major theme could involve many things. It could involve marital relationships, parental relationships with children.

It could involve relationships or unity or disunity within specific congregations. It can also involve.

The.

The tension that exists where churches may be too free with unity where they are linking arms and having ecumenical relationships with organizations that actually deny the gospel. Or you could have on the other end of the spectrum churches that have become islands unto themselves, very cultic in their behavior towards other churches and congregations may even warn people in the congregation never to visit any other church.

So you have those opposite ends of the spectrum and you have many varying degrees of unity or disunity in between those two. So what was the main issue that you were interested in discussing today? It might be all of them for all I know, but.

Yes. So, I think the truths that we're going to talk about today literally could apply to every single one of the things you just mentioned. I do want to deal with specifics, like so if any of your listeners want to run a write-in and have specific questions about unity and any of those contexts that you brought up, I'd love to talk about that.

But in lieu of that, I do want to really talk about some big picture concepts, which will apply to unity across the board. I will say that for me personally, this started as a result of two concepts. One of them was, you know, I've moved around a lot and in the past decade or so, I have heard so many calls to unity from the pulpit.

Oftentimes this comes when, you know, we've lost a pastor, he's moved on for whatever reason and we're getting a new pastor and there's always this, you know, we need to be unified, we need to be unified.

But very, very often the details of that, really, they don't go into too much detail about that. And then in addition to that, I have recently put together an online course, which will be available to all Iron Sharpens Iron listeners if they go to truthloveparent .com forward slash iron.

It's a significant discount. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But it's a, it's a, it's an online course about family unity, how to achieve biblical family unity. So that's been a big focus of mine.

I've been traveling and speaking on that topic and putting together this online course. So that's kind of the genesis of this for me recently has been just this, this, the talk that people have about unity.

I mean, even the world today, our politicians, they always, you know, the new president gets voted in and we're talking about how we need to be unified. And you hear it a lot in Christian circles talking about unity, but very rarely are we talking about the context of that unity.

So actually it, this might sound strange, but I really want to, I want to, I want this to be a freeing conversation. And I have three goals for today that I really want in the big picture. Number one, I want us all to achieve some level of freedom from the pursuit of what I'm going to call perfect unity.

If we're pursuing that on this earth, we're never going to achieve it. And it's going to drive us crazy. And we're probably going to be, we'll probably sin in the process if we're not careful. Secondly, I want to give us freedom from the shallow concepts of Christian unity.

And we want to talk about what real Christian unity is and what it isn't. And then the third one is I want to give us freedom from the angst that comes from what I call the spectrum of functional unity.

But there's a lot of angst involved with that because we just don't know where we stand oftentimes. And I want to kind of free us from that angst. So free us from the pursuit of perfect unity, free us from the shallow concepts of this idea of Christian unity.

And then free us from the angst that comes from this spectrum of unity that we're all engaged in on a daily basis. That's kind of the main goals, obviously, and answer any questions that may come up from your listeners.

So do you want to jump right in or do you want to throw in your oar?

Well, let's just jump right in. Well, actually, let me give our email address to our listeners in the event that they have questions of their own. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And I know that whenever we have a counselor on the program that seems to lend itself for people who want to remain anonymous to ask questions, because they often do involve personal, private, intimate kind of things.

So we understand that and will grant your request to remain anonymous. But please, if it's a general question on what the Bible has to say about unity, a theological question, a doctrinal question, please give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence.

There's a key word in your theme that you have chosen, the nature of biblical unity, because you have those on the one side of the spectrum, the more left-leaning side. Unity is desired, it seems, between anybody who will have some kind of respectful, tolerant attitude towards the differences that exist with those seeking to be unified.

And they think that unity is more important than biblical truth. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have those who are actually denying the brotherhood and sisterhood of true Christians over issues that are of secondary or tertiary or even lower on the rung of the ladder of importance of seriousness.

So tell us right off the bat about some of those things that involve the very nature of biblical unity.

The Impossibility of Perfect Unity on Earth

Yeah, well, first of all, I just want to, the very first freedom I want to give us is this idea of this freeing us from this pursuit of perfect unity. The reality is on this earth, it is impossible for us to be perfectly unified.

And when I say perfectly unified, I mean point for point unified with every, not just point for point unified with people, but unified with all people. It can't happen. It won't happen. And if you really want to go a little bit more extreme with this concept, even in eternity, there won't be perfect unity.

Yes, those of us who are Christians with Christ for all eternity will be perfectly unified with him. It'll be an amazing thing, but there will be billions of billions of lost souls separated from God for all eternity in hell.

And there is no unity with those people. They're just as much alive as we are. Though that's an eternal death and there is no unity with them. So, I mean, there really is outside of the Godhead, this concept of perfect unity, this all encompassing unity with all people at all times and all ways is an impossibility.

And the people who are pursuing it are not pursuing a biblical unity.

Well, let me ask you something to clarify that you made. You made it clear that there will be no unity between those in heaven and those in hell. But will there not be perfect unity for all those who are saved with Christ for eternity?

There's not going to be any reason for tears. There's not going to be anything involving sin. Pride will evaporate. So where would there be any cause for alarm for those who believe that there will be perfect unity in heaven?

Well, and this is going to be a little bit of a semantics game, and I definitely don't want to play that, but it's important to define our terms. I really came up with this term of perfect unity to describe an impossibility, and I'll use the Trinity as the best example of this.

If we are going to define perfect unity as a point for point, identical nature, right? We're not just unified. We are identical to the degree that there are no differences between us whatsoever. Well, that's not even true in the Trinity, though God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, all one God.

There is a distinction in their role, the distinction in their personality.

They are co-equal and co-eternal, however.

Exactly. Very true. Yes, 100 agree with that. And yet, they're in function, the Spirit submits to the Son, the Son submits to the Father, the Father was not the one who died on the cross, the Son was, so on and so forth.

And so if we're demanding that we be identical, if that is our understanding of perfect unity, it will never be achieved. But if we want to soften our terminology and we want to picture a sinless unity, a beautiful, wonderful, perfect in the sense that it's exactly what it should be unity, we will definitely achieve that in glory with God for all eternity.

And I look forward to it.

Amen. So where in the whole realm of unity would you like to begin as far as the specific area of life where Christians should be seeking unity and trying to repair, by the grace of God, disunity?

Great question. Before I jump into that too specifically, there's just three more things I want to share really quickly about all unity in general. This is true of all unity. And this is important that we use this in our jobs, in our churches, in our families, whether we're interacting with believers or unbelievers, okay?

Unity really does require, despite what I just said earlier, unity does require similarity. I'm going to illustrate these points momentarily. Unity requires similarity to some degree or another. Unity also requires specificity and unity requires separation.

This last one we're going to talk about a little bit more later. But for right now, I want to just illustrate this idea of unity requiring similarity and specificity. I'm going to use an illustration.

I went back and forth about the wisdom of this particular illustration because it's probably a lot of your audience members aren't going to resonate with it. But if you have any beekeepers out there, they're going to be like, what, a beekeeping illustration?

I can't believe it. And they'll be so tuned in. But everyone else is sick with me here. You'll get where I'm going. I'm a beekeeper. I've been keeping bees for over 10 years, right? I love keeping bees.

And the moment that I meet another beekeeper, right? And that information is exchanged. We're beekeepers. There is a unity that we experience. All right. It's similar. If you have a favorite basketball team, it's similar.

If you graduated from a university as somebody else, right? There's that similarity and we feel unified. We're relating to that person on that way. However, the more detailed, the more specific I become, there's opportunities for increasing unity or increasing disunity.

For example, I start telling people that I don't, I'm a Langstroth 10 frame equipment user, right? And well, the people who aren't Langstroth 10 frame equipment user, people who use top bar hives or people who use other hives.

Well, all of a sudden I don't have as much unity with them as I do the people who use the Langstroth 10 frames. When I go a step further and I tell people that I don't use deeps, right? That blows most people's mind.

I learned to beekeep in Illinois and the Illinois super, the medium super is what I use. And so the people who don't use mediums are like, oh, I don't, how does that work? Right. But the people who use mediums, there's a deepening unity there between us.

Now, what's really funny is I can tell people that I don't use chemicals in my hive. I can tell people all sorts of things. I can tell people that my preferred species of bee is the carniolan, right? But the thing, if I'm on a beekeeping, like a Facebook page or whatever else, the thing that has gotten the most disunity, the thing that I tell people about how I keep bees, that really seems to bother people more than anything else, is that when I keep bees, I don't use a veil.

I don't use gloves. I don't use a bee suit. I always just go out there wearing whatever I'm wearing. And for some reason that just gets under some beekeepers skins. It gets under their veils, right? It's a bee in their bonnet and they just annoys them.

It's funny. Like we're beekeepers. We love using the same bees. We use the same equipment. But the fact that I don't go out there with that protection on bothers them. And all of a sudden the unity is broken.

Is that because of jealousy over your courage?

I know I've tried to figure it out. I'm not really a hundred percent certain, but maybe. Maybe. So the point I'm trying to illustrate here, and I think you guys see it, is that the more similarity there is, the more unity there is, the more specificity there is, the more unity there is.

Now, does that mean that the most similar and the most specific unity is the best types of unity? No, not necessarily. Because unity does require separation. We're going to talk about that. So with that concept in mind, that's all unity across the board, right?

It requires those three things. Let's jump into this idea of Christian unity. Let's work on our second goal today of kind of saving us from these shallow concepts of what it means to be unified as Christians.

Now, I do want to say that, you know, I grew up in fundamental Baptist independent circles. I still consider myself to be an independent fundamental Baptist. All right. That's where I am because I believe in the fundamentals.

And so it's interesting that, you know, we became really good separatists. You know, there was the ecumenical movement where you had all these professing Christians siding up for the sake of the gospel, even though that's impossible with Catholics and with Muslims and with other ecumenical movement people coming together and praying and so on and so forth.

And we separatists did a really good job of separating from that. The problem is, is that in human nature, once you start separating from things, it's hard to stop. And we eventually got to the point where we had no one left to separate from but ourselves.

And so we just started separating from ourselves. And we kind of became split personality in the process because once I'm separated from everyone else in the world, the only person left to separate from is myself, literally.

And that's kind of where a lot of people ended up, especially in the 80s and 90s. So we want to have, we want to understand this biblical balance of what, how do we unify and how do we disunify? How do we detach from people?

And so in my study of the scriptures, specifically as it relates to family unity, but again, this is true of all people, I turn to the book of Ephesians. Families come to me as a biblical counselor. They come to me because there is disunity.

And we know why there's disunity. We know that sin separates. We know that sin causes division, right? And so these families come to me, they're divided, they're broken, they want help. And family unity is always one of the things we focus on or is one of the blessings of dealing with the sin issues.

And every single time, nearly every single time, this family and I are going to go to the book of Ephesians because the book of Ephesians is a fantastic book for many, many reasons. But it deals with this concept of unity.

In fact, kind of one of the middle chapters in chapter four has this, that beautiful passage everyone's familiar with. There's one body, 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 over all and through all and all and all.

Right? It's as beautiful. It's this hinged spot talking about unity. And so working through and studying through the book of Ephesians, I started to see a number of requirements for being unified in Christ.

And I call these the foundational requirements. This is foundational unity. This is what it means, biblically speaking, to be unified in Christ. And there are six things, I'll go through them, I'll just name them off and we can talk about them as questions come in or as we have opportunity.

But from the book of Ephesians, we see that true unity in Christ requires redemption. If we have not been redeemed by God, there is not unity in Christ. There can't be. We have to be in Christ to be unified in him.

Number two, new life. We see that in Ephesians chapter two. This new life that God gives us enables us to be unified with others who have this new life in Christ. But it's more than that. Unity isn't just I'm saved and I live however I want.

No, there's submission. There's submission to who God is. He's our king. He's our Lord. He's our savior. And there's the submission to him that is required for a Christian to be unified with other Christians.

I can't be unified with another Christian who is not submitting to God. Now, as we all know, Paul gets more and more and more specific as he works through the book. And as we get into chapter four, we start seeing this concept of cooperation.

After what I just read, we talk about how there are pastors and teachers and they have their job in the body and the rest of us. What are we doing? We're speaking the truth in love. We're building each other up.

We're cooperating together as each of us is being fitted and held together by the joints. And we're growing up in the body and being built up in love into the head who is Christ, right? So this cooperation as we are working together to be who God wants us to be, as we're working together to submit to him, we are becoming more unified.

And then there's imitation. It goes on to chapter five, talking about be imitators of God, right? Specifically, what are we what are we submitting to? What are we cooperating in? We are called to imitate Christ as we are sanctified and grow in him.

We will become more and more unified. And, you know, most people following with me through there, they're tracking, they get it. They're like, yeah, I see it. If you're not born again, if you don't have new life in Christ, if you're not submitting to God by and cooperating together as we're all imitating Christ.

There is no foundational unity in Christ. But here's the one that throws people off. Number six, unity in Christ requires war. It requires it. And obviously, we're familiar with the wartime analogies and the language in Ephesians chapter six.

But the reality is this. If I am unified with Christ, I am against I am not. I must not be unified with the things that he is not unified with. That's sin, Satan, the world system. That's everything that stands against who God is.

And that's what goes back to those those points I made earlier about all unity requires similarity, specificity, but it also requires separation. You basketball players, right? You have your favorite teams.

You unify together against the other teams. Those of us who experienced 9 -11 recognize the unifying effect that that conflict had. But we weren't just unifying together. We were unifying against something else.

And that is inherent in all in all unity, but specifically in the foundational unity in Christ. And this is where the people who get swept into the ecumenical movement, these people who have this idea that we're just supposed to tolerate everyone and everyone just be unified.

They're missing a really key biblical concept that unity in Christ requires us to be at war with other things. And that's that's something I think is severely lacking in our understanding of this foundational Christian unity.

Well, we have a first question from a listener who has obviously become a huge fan of yours, brother Brewster, and I think you'll recognize the name since he seems to email a question every time you're on.

Ramon in Taguig City in Metro Manila in the Philippines. And once again, Ramon, if I am mispronouncing Taguig, please let me know.

By the way, Ramon and I have recently started playing chess together on Chess .com, and I'm pretty certain he's going to beat me in this first game. I'm just saying.

Well, he made that evident because one of his comments in this email is let him know that it's his move on Chess .com. But he says, if perfect unity is not possible here on Earth, does that mean Jesus's prayer in John 17, 21 failed?

Oh, definitely not. Great question, though. In the high priestly prayer, Jesus is praying that we would be one as he and the Father are one. But as we already established, Jesus and the Father are one, perfectly co-equal.

Yes, God. Again, I don't want to risk heresy by means of trying to make clear what we're saying here. But God the Son is God. God the Father is God. We recognize that. And the complexities of the Trinity and the different personalities is something that we cannot conceive of.

OK, I want to put that out there right off the bat. But Jesus Christ is not the Father in that Jesus Christ had a different role. Jesus Christ has a different part in the justification process. And he is a unique personality, dissimilar from the Father, though co-equal with him.

All right. And this, again, this is something our brains don't completely understand. So as Jesus prayed to the Father, may they be unified, may they be one as we are one, he was requesting the most perfect thing.

The best unity we have is going to contain diversity. That's something I really hope to talk about a little bit later in the show. Unity does contain diversity. God created it that way. It's a good thing.

Now, that diversity keeps us from striving to be identical. You have to dress like me, talk like me, listen to the music I listen to, part your hair on the same side I part my hair, whatever the case may be.

That's not what God was calling us to. And the people who are looking for that being identical, that unity as being identical, those people are not understanding that to which God has called us. So no, Christ's high priestly prayer definitely has come to fruition as we are unified in Christ.

These foundational concepts I just listed out doesn't require absolute being identical, but we still are unified in our diversity.

And I want to make certain to our listeners, I'm sure you believe that there is perfect unity in the Godhead and that there are Christians who perpetuate a heretical understanding of the differences between the persons of the Godhead, where you almost have a scenario where the Godhead is playing a good cop, bad cop.

You have God the Father being bad cop and Jesus Christ being the good cop. Somehow they have different desires for an outcome, but Jesus straightens out the Father because he's more merciful and loving and tender and compassionate and forgiving.

But that's a completely heretical understanding of the Godhead.

Amen, definitely. And I recognize that any number of things I've said today could be misunderstood or misconstrued, and we definitely don't want that. I'm talking about the inappropriate thought that unity demands that we be identical.

That is not—it's not a biblical concept at all. That would not be—if that's your definition of perfect unity, the Godhead doesn't even have that. But true, what we'll call perfect unity, or unity without disunity, doesn't require that we be identical.

It requires that we be unified in what truly matters. And obviously the Godhead is a perfect example of that, and we Christians are called to have similar unity amongst ourselves.

Well, by the way, Alexander in Goldenrod, Florida, please be patient. We'll get to your question right away when we return from our first commercial break. And if anybody would like to get in line behind Alexander, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

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