BE The Church In Unity

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Shepherds Church podcast. If you are listening to this for the first time, my name is Kendall Lankford and I am blessed to be one of the pastors at the Shepherds Church.

Now as you know, churches are not gathering right now because of guidance from our state and federal governments, which is why I thought that it would be a wonderful time for us to think about and reflect upon what does it mean to be the church.

Because we know that this coronavirus has not canceled the church. It may have temporarily postponed our gatherings, but the church of Jesus Christ is alive and well. Jesus did not say that the world would easily overcome the church.

He said that the gates of hell would not stand against her. So why would we think that the spread of a virus could stop it? And while there are many aspects of the church that you and I could cover in a series like this called Be the Church, we could talk about what the church is, why we gather, we could talk about the elements that must be present in a gospel-centered church like communion and the preaching of the word, why all of those things matter.

All of those are wonderful topics. But in this season where we cannot meet together in person because of this pandemic, I wanted us to talk about what it means to be the church. Because the church did not stop the day that we were told that we could no longer meet.

We are the church. If you're a Christian, that means that Jesus died for you. And in his substitutionary death on the cross, he rescued you. And having professed belief and allegiance and trust in Christ alone, you have been made a member of the universal body of Christ, the church.

You're a member of the Christian church that spans the last 2 ,000 years. And it includes every single person who has ever placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. You are connected to a family that is bound, not by the blood of mom and dad, but by the greater blood of Jesus Christ.

And while some of you listening to this may or may not be members at the Shepherd's Church, some of you may be in different states or maybe even different countries. I want to say to all of us right now who are listening to this, as members of one universal body of believers, his church will be stronger because of this pandemic.

With Jesus in control of the church and with the promises that he made to his true bride and his word of God, incapable of being invalidated, she will continue. The church will keep on preaching the gospel until every tribe and every tongue and every nation has heard the good news of Jesus Christ.

And she will faithfully, without fail, until the day that Jesus returns for her, be about that mission. The coronavirus will not stop the true church. But that doesn't mean that churches are going to grow numerically.

That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I believe that there's going to be many people who leave the faith, who leave church and who even leave Jesus because of this virus or because of various other hardships that they're going to face in their lives.

So when I say stronger, I'm not talking about numerical strength. I'm talking about the true church of Jesus Christ. The gathering of the Good Shepherd's sheep are always strengthened by trial. During hardships, the goats run away, but the sheep stay and are strengthened.

Like gold in a fire is purified, so the true church of Jesus Christ will be purified during the fiery trial of the coronavirus pandemic. 1 John 4, 4 says this, greater is he that is in you than he that is in this world.

He is greater than the viruses, pandemics. He's greater than all of the secular opinions. He's even greater than Satan himself. And he is not only in you, he is Lord of his church, which means that nothing is going to be able to stop it.

Nothing is going to cause it to end. You and I do not just simply attend a church. We are the church. Jesus died, purchased, bought, and made us into a universal church. And I believe now more than ever, we must understand in times like these what it means to be the church.

Unity of Mind in the Gospel

And to do that, I want us to examine this collection of passages known as the one another passages, the one another passages. They are passages that say things like love one another, serve one another, be kind to one another, pray for one another.

And more than these passages just simply saying the words one another, each of these passages communicates something critical about what it means to be a faithful, participating, and godly member of the church.

They teach us what it means to be the church. And these truths extend beyond our Sunday morning gatherings. And they have real implications on the way that we live on Monday, on Tuesday, and beyond. You see, biblically speaking, the church gathers on Sunday.

But the church exists in the lives of every single follower of Jesus every day. And I don't say that to minimize the corporate gathering at all, by no means. The Spirit of Jesus meets with his people in a special way when they are gathered together on the Lord's Day for worship, and it cannot be duplicated.

Online services, services on YouTube, books, podcasts, none of that can sustain a true Christian for very long. Because we don't exist as individuals. We long to gather with the saints of God. The Spirit inside of us makes us yearn to gather in corporate worship and corporate prayer and to gather around the Lord's table and feast upon the grace of Christ, and to sit under the teaching of his holy word.

That same Spirit is the one who has gifted each and every single one of us with spiritual gifts so that we will serve one another. Not so that we'll comfortably sit at home on our spiritual hands, but so that we will engage in the body of Christ, and so that we will serve the body of Christ, and so that we will love and build up the body of Christ.

Sure, we can listen to a sermon online, and it can be helpful and it can be meaningful, but it's not enough. That's not the Spirit's means of blessing the church. It's just through online individual engagement.

The Spirit has chosen to bless a body. The Spirit has chosen to bless a body that is many members, that spans the last 2 ,000 years, that has millions upon millions, maybe even billions of followers of Christ, who will one day gather together around the throne of God in perfect unity and unison, praising God for all of eternity.

That's what the Spirit has blessed. And when this coronavirus pandemic subsides, the saints of God will go back to gathering together on every Lord's Day, because it's vital to our faith. So nothing in this series, I know that there's some churches that say things like, be the church, because they want to downplay the gathering of the saints of God on Sundays, or in our case, on Saturdays.

That is not the purpose of this series. The purpose of this series is not to minimize the public gatherings. Those are vital. But we are not just one-day-a-week Christians either. We don't do our faith on Sundays and then live like atheists for the rest of the week.

The church is more than a building. The church is more than a day of the week. If you're a Christian, then you are a member of the church. Whether we gather together or whether we scatter to the ends of the earth, and over the next over weeks, I want us to know what it means to be the church while we're scattered, while we're quarantined, while we're walking through this pandemic.

Today we're going to look at what it means to be the church in unity. You see, as the scattered church of Jesus Christ, we're supposed to be in unity. That's what Jesus prayed for his church to be in.

And that unity affects us on three different levels. We're supposed to have unity of mind with one another. We're supposed to have unity in the manner in which we treat one another. And we're supposed to have unity of mission with one another.

Unity of mind, unity of manner, and unity of mission. Those are our three words that we're going to be examining together today. And we're going to begin by talking about unity of mind. Unity of mind just means that we think the same way, that we have the same foundation, that we have the same presuppositions, that we have the same beliefs, and we have the same core, and we have the same bedrock.

And maybe the best verse that we could examine on this when we're talking about the church being in unity with one another, especially as far as their thinking and their mind is concerned, would be Romans 15 .5.

Paul says it like this. Now, may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you. And when he says you there, he's not talking about the individual. That's not singular tense. That's plural tense.

He's saying you, the church. Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you, the church, to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus. So Paul is talking about that we're supposed to have unity with one another and that unity affects our mind.

See the history of the Roman church will shed some light on what this actually means. Paul is talking to a mixed church of Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome. And he's saying that in light of what Jesus Christ has done for them, that they are to be in unity of mind.

They are to have unity in their thinking while they gather and while they scatter with unity of mind. You see, at the time, this mixed church of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians were starting to cause controversies with one another.

The Jewish Christians were saying that they had an advantage for being Jewish over the Gentiles and the Gentiles were saying, no, they had an advantage because of their faith in Christ. And Paul is saying that both of you, both groups of people need to be of the same mind with one another, which is instructive for the way that we should approach Christianity together and how we should be the church as well.

Now when Paul says unity here, he does not mean uniformity. He doesn't mean that we're all supposed to be united on every single minor point of doctrine all the time. That is not what he was saying to the Jewish and Gentile Christians of the Roman church.

What Paul is saying and what you and I need to hear is that to be the church, to be the church, we have to be in unity on the essential gospel message, on the core foundational doctrines. It means when the church gathers, we are united by the core and fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith.

And when we scatter, we take those doctrines, we take those core beliefs and we take them with us every single where that we go. And you may even ask, what are those core and essential doctrines? There's things like God being infinite, eternal, almighty.

He's the creator of heaven and earth. That man, God's highest and best creation rebelled against God. They sinned and they turned their backs on God and therefore they deserve the punishment for their sin.

And without intervention, human beings are lost and incapable of saving themselves. We believe though that God intervened and he intervened in order to save sinners and he did so by sending Jesus Christ, his one and only son who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, who lived the perfect sinless life, who fully satisfied the demands of the law, dying an unjust death on our behalf, taking our sins upon him, drinking deep the wrath of God so that you and I could be rescued.

We believe that on the third day he rose again, defeating death. We believe that he appeared to many people as a testimony of his resurrection and that he ascended publicly, visibly into heaven to rule and reign at the right hand of God.

We believe that he's going to return one day and he's going to claim the church and he's going to take her into eternal wedded bliss with him and they're going to spend an eternity together. But until then, he's going to send his spirit to build that church into a worldwide community of Christians.

And he sent us that spirit to convict us of sin, to redeem fallen people so that we would be saved and so that we would live for him. He came to justify us and to sanctify us and to unite us as a people who believe this same gospel.

That's Christianity in a nutshell. And that's what we're supposed to have unity about, whether you're Jew or Greek or whether you're slave or free, whether you're male or female, whatever size or stripe you are as a Christian, we are to have unity around the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That is what binds us together. That's what it means to be the church. And we might not always agree on minor points of doctrine, but the ones that are essential, we must agree. We must be in unity on those.

If you do not believe any one of those that I just shared above, the virgin birth of Christ, the deity of Christ, the humanity of Christ, the salvation of Christ, if those are things that you do not believe, then you're not a Christian.

You're not a member of the church, universal. You might actually be a member of a local church who hasn't examined you and hasn't asked you if you believe these things, but you're not a member of Jesus's church if you don't believe the core fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and therefore you are not in the body, and therefore you have no unity with Christ.

See the point of this is remarkably simple. If you want to be the church, you have to be in the church, and if you want to be in the church, then you have to believe the essential gospel truths that I've shared above.

And you must not only believe these truths on Sunday or Saturday when we gather, but they must get down into your heart, and they must be the truths that become your identity. They must get down so deep into you that they fuel your life, and they're what motivates you to serve, and they're what motivates you to love, and they're your core.

You see, biblical belief goes beyond cognition or mental assent to a set of data. You can believe something to be true and not have allegiance to it. That's not biblical belief. Biblical belief actually could be better translated as allegiance.

Biblical belief is to believe something so strongly that it informs all of your life, changes all of your behavior, and you give yourself to it. To be the church, you have to be in unity of mind, and what that means, you have to understand the core fundamental gospel, because if you don't understand that, you're not in the church.

And with this first point, being in unity of mind, we're starting to get at the beginning of what it means to be the church. It is to first and foremost be gospel-believing people who are gospel-living people, both in our gatherings and when we scatter throughout the week.

That is where we begin, but I want us to dig in deeper, because there's another aspect of what this means, because the gospel can come in and affect your head, and it can trickle down into your heart, but if it does not impact your behavior, then you are missing something.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to be a Christian who doesn't live like a Christian for seasons of their life, that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is to be the church. It doesn't just impact the unity of mind, it trickles down into your heart and it comes out through your behavior, so that you'll have unity in the manner that you treat one another, and by one another, I mean Christians, that you'll have unity with what the Bible says and how you treat other believers.

And we're just going to be able to barely cover this. There's a lot that the New Testament says about the manner that Christians are to treat one another, but for the purposes of this sermon, I'm just going to summarize this in a few key points, and we're going to talk about it in two ways.

We're going to talk about how the Bible says that we are not to tear down other believers, but we are, number two, to build them up. We are not to tear down other believers. Galatians 5, 25 through 26 says it like this, if we, the church, emphasis mine, live by the Spirit, then let us walk by the Spirit.

Let us not become boastful or challenging one another or envying one another. You see, there's something so unique about us. If we are Christians, then we are not like the world. We have the Spirit of God living inside of us, and we are to live by the Spirit and walk by the Spirit and talk by the Spirit and think by the Spirit and live by the Spirit.

And that same Spirit that lives in us lives also in our brothers and sisters in Christ. When you stand face to face with another Christian, you are looking at someone that God loves, that Jesus died for, and that the Holy Spirit of God is living inside of.

How pleased do we think that the Spirit of God is when we become angry with another brother or sister, when we challenge someone else who Christ loves, when we envy or when we boast towards them or we mistreat them?

It's one thing to challenge another brother or to challenge another sister in the Lord when they're in sin. That is a loving thing to do. It is another thing to do what was going on in the Galatian church, where pride, boasting, challenging in a way that tore down brothers and sisters, envying one another.

All of those things are sin, and we are not to do those things to one another. We are not to use any motivation, any attitude, any expression, any moment of our lives to tear another brother or sister down, because when we do, we tear down the one that God loves and the one that Jesus died for and the one the Spirit is living inside of, and he is not pleased when we do those things.

James 4, verse 11 says it this way, humble yourself in the presence of the Lord, and he will exalt you. Again, that's not plural. That is, or that's not singular. That is plural. He's saying humble yourselves, church, in the presence of the Lord, and he will exalt you, church.

Do not speak against one another, brothers and sisters. He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, then you're not a doer of the law, but a judge of it.

James is simply saying here that the sum total of the law of God is love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And trust me, we know why the world doesn't follow this.

We know why the world hates each other. We know why the world maligns one another, mocks one another, persecutes one another, talks all manner of evil against one another. We know why they do that, because they don't have the Spirit of God living inside of them, but not so for the Christian.

We are to humble ourselves. We are to accept the fact that we may not always be right. We are to submit ourselves to the Savior who bought and paid for us, as well as the person that most frustrates us, who's also a Christian.

We are to live according to the Spirit of God, and we are to not slander one another or speak against one another. Again, there is a difference between going to a brother or sister and trying to love them and care for them and call them out of their sin.

That is biblical. The Bible never advocates a you-do-you kind of culture. The Bible never tells you to turn a blind eye towards a fellow Christian who is in sin. The Bible never tells you to overlook hypocrisy.

Paul did that to Peter. He called him out to his face. The point of it is, is in our correction, in our love, in our behavior, in the way that we interact in the church, are we doing everything that we can possibly do to build one another?

Are we building one another up, even if it's hard, challenging conversations, or are we using those moments to tear one another down? And if we're doing that, then we're not being the church. We're being something wicked and utterly different than what Christ died for.

James 5, 7 and 9 says it this way, Therefore, in light of everything that he had been teaching up to that point, be patient until the coming of the Lord. Verse 9, Do not complain, brothers and sisters, against one another, so that you yourselves may not be judged.

Behold, the judge is standing right at the door. James is not only appealing to our shared faith in Christ, and he's not only appealing to our shared love from the Father, and he's not only appealing to our shared experience of being indwelled by the Holy Spirit, he's appealing to our shared hope.

We are all waiting patiently together for the same Lord to come and return and rescue us. So while we are waiting, be the church. That means that you must not, while we are waiting for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to return, we must not tear each other down.

We must not bash one another, gossip about one another, provoke one another, speak harshly to one another. We must actively remember that our brother or sister in Christ is a trophy of Jesus' grace. He loves them.

He cares for them. And we must not do anything whatsoever to tear them down. And this is absolutely true when we gather, but it's also true when we scatter. It's true when we interact with our families.

It's true when we interact with our children. It's true when we interact with our believing neighbors or our believing acquaintances. It's true when we interact with members of the Shepherd's Church. It's true when we interact with members of other churches.

It's true when we get on Facebook. It's true when we, if you get on Twitter, our role and our job to be the church is to not just have unity in the central fundamental doctrines. It's also to be the church by not tearing each other apart, but instead to build one another up.

See, there's two manners of behavior that you can have when it comes to the way that you treat one another. You can tear one another down, which is expressly forbidden, or you can build one another up.

Paul says like this in Romans 15, 7, Therefore accept one another, just as Jesus Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. Now let me just say right off the bat, biblical acceptance is not what the world thinks acceptance is.

We don't accept sin in our life or in anyone else's life. We don't accept the world's way of thinking. We want to see Jesus defeat sin and defeat death and defeat worldly patterns of thinking. We want to see, we want to see his holiness wrap this earth and his glory wrap this earth so that the world looks like Jesus, thinks like Jesus.

That's what we want. So we don't want to, we don't want to call what Jesus calls sin good just because the world does that. We don't want to accept what the world affirms and how it normalizes all of these various sins.

We don't want to call those things normal. That's not what biblical acceptance is. The Bible doesn't say that churches are supposed to be open and affirming when it comes to sin. That's not what it means to be the church.

We're the bride of Christ. We are the blood bought bride of Jesus Christ. We are the gathering of believers who worship God and we are the scattering of believers who share the gospel. We don't affirm what the world calls sin.

We don't accept what the world says is normal. But hear this, we must accept what Jesus has said is his. If Jesus has died for you and I, then we must accept each other as brothers or sisters in Christ.

We are family. And while the family at times may need to have serious heart to heart conversations about things, and while fathers in the faith may need to rebuke younger brothers in the faith, and while mothers in the faith may need to rebuke younger sisters in the faith, we are family.

There's no one who calls Jesus Christ Lord and Savior who will be abandoned. No one should ever be rejected in the kingdom of God if they're in. If you are his, if Jesus truly died for you, if you are saved, then you always have a place at the table.

And I apologize if you have ever experienced anything other than love from the people of God in your life. If you've been hurt by the church, I'm so sorry. That's not the way Jesus designed it. We are to be a family, loving, caring, serving, accepting one another with open arms, even when it hurts, even when it's necessary to correct.

In everything we do, we are to build each other up, not hurt or break or tear one another apart through petty, stupid squabbles. Paul says in Ephesians 4, 1 -3, Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner that is worthy of the calling with which you have been called.

With all humility and gentleness and patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace, Paul is not saying that we're supposed to tolerate one another's foolish beliefs, that we're supposed to tolerate unbiblical thinking.

That's not what tolerance is. Tolerance doesn't mean that you believe that homosexuality is a sin and I don't, but we're just going to both agree that we're both right. That's not what biblical tolerance is.

That's foolishness. Either one of those views is right or wrong. Same thing with abortion or the same thing with any other particular sin that you could possibly imagine. There is a biblical way of thinking and then there's not.

There's the world's way of thinking or there's the Bible's way of thinking. Tolerance in the Bible is not you and I are both right and we're going to treat each other like both of our points of view are right.

We are not going to say, well, if it's true for you, then it must be true. We are not going to say those things because that's not what tolerating means. Toleration in the Bible goes beyond just accepting one another as members of the family of God.

It means putting up with one another. It means that we are to walk in a manner that is worthy of being called Christian and by doing that, we are to be patient with other people. The picture that maybe is the best example is Jesus on the cross looking down at his fearful disciples, looking down at those who are angrily shaking their fists at him, looking at those people who have rejected him, looking at those people who were too scared to say a word in his defense, looking at all of them and saying, Father, forgive them.

They don't know what they're doing. And there's plenty of examples within the church where we need to be patient with the weaker brother, that we need to be kind towards the weaker sister. There's plenty of examples where we need to tolerate one another in their weakness while not accepting it.

We accept the person, yes, but we don't accept sin or the unbiblical way of thinking. We disciple people so that they'll understand God better. We teach right thinking and all of us as we grow in our knowledge of God are to tolerate one another in patience and love and being diligent to pursue unity.

I actually learned this as a way of example over the last couple of years with sarcasm. See, I really like sarcasm. I'm a huge fan of the Babylon Bee. I enjoy witty humor. I enjoy satire articles. I like all of that.

I think it's funny. I think it's witty and I appreciate it. But I've also seen the dark side of sarcasm. I've seen how it can hurt or wound people. I've seen how that sarcasm can look disingenuous or it can look like that you're trying to disguise how you really feel through a funny comment.

And I've seen how that it's hurt people. I've seen how it's caused disunity. And listen, I've been in several relationships where sarcasm was the main language that was spoken and I just, I began feeling convicted to pull back because it was not preserving the unity of the spirit or the bond of peace between me and my brother or sister in Christ.

I've had to repent of that. And while I still use sarcasm, sometimes effectively, maybe sometimes not, I try my best to be very careful not to use sarcasm or not to use lazily formulated speech that can harm or hurt another person.

There's a phrase that says the gospel is offensive enough. You don't need to be. I don't want to be the thing that offends someone. I want the gospel to do the offending. I want the gospel to do the rebuilding.

I want the gospel to do the convicting. I want the gospel to do the saving. I want to be just an instrument used by the Lord. I don't want to be the one that's causing hurt or offense or any of those things.

And for me, sarcasm was one of the ways that I was doing that. And I had to repent of that because I wasn't building one another up. In my lazy, sarcastic speech, I was unfortunately tearing people down.

You see, we are to be patient, humble, and gentle people. We are to be the kind of people who build one another up, not tear one another down. And while we're all one in Christ, we're all different. We know that.

We have different gifts. We have different strengths. We have unique characteristics and perspectives. We most certainly all have different personalities, which is a testimony to the creative nature of God.

So I get that it's not easy. I get that it's hard to be in unity with people who are very much not like you. But while we unite around the core and fundamental doctrines of the faith, I also pray that we would unite in loving one another like Christ loves us.

I pray that the world would see Jesus Christ on every single one of us, just by the way that we treat each other. The Bible even says that they will know us by the way that we love one another. I want that to be true in my life.

I want it to be true in yours. So I pray that we would tolerate each other in our distinctions. I pray that we would be patient with each other in our disagreements. I pray that we would be slow to anger, but we would be quick to build one another up.

And we'd be quick to forgive one another when we sin against each other. Paul says this in Galatians 5, 25 through 26, he says, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

Let all bitterness and all wrath and all anger and all clamor and all slander be put away from you, the church, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted to one another, forgiving each other, just as God and Christ has forgiven you.

He says this similarly in Colossians 3, 12 through 13, where he says, so as those who've been chosen by God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience, bearing with one another, forgiving each other.

Whoever has a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so you should forgive each other. In both passages, Paul is saying that we are to forgive our fellow Christians. We're not to carry anger or bitterness over years of hurt or unmet expectations, because if you do, then you are not just hurting the other person, you are grieving the Spirit of God.

We are to act like the chosen people of God by exemplifying God's behavior and his love and his kindness towards his people, the same love and kindness that causes him to show compassion and gentleness to others.

When we were dead in our trespasses, God loved us, and when we look across the table at another Christian, at another sinner saved by grace, we must be like that and show grace and compassion and humble gentleness towards them as well.

If you're married to a believer and you're prone to anger or bitterness or frustration, then you're grieving the Spirit of God. Let your kindness be especially pointed to your spouse. Let your patience blanket them as a follower of Jesus.

If you're a parent or maybe you have children who frustrate you, imagine that, right? Let your compassion and your patience and your gentleness overflow to your children. Look at them the way Jesus looks at you.

While you were yet sinner, Christ died for you. While your children are frustrating you, die to your need to be angry and frustrated and bitter and build them up in the love of God. If you're a member of the Shepherd's Church, my prayer is that you would love one another so much during this season of coronavirus pandemic and beyond, but specifically when we're talking about quarantine, I pray that your love would cause you to check in on one another, that you would write that letter or send that text or make that phone call so that you could check in and love and care for each other and build one another up.

I pray that you'd be patient with your brother or sister on social media. I pray that if there's someone in need that you would go to the grocery store and that you would care for them by providing for them.

For people outside of the Shepherd's Church, God's put many believers in our life, family, friends, acquaintances, and it doesn't matter which local church that they go to, all of these things apply to them as well.

If we are dealing with Christians, we ought to love, care, forgive, and build up in everything that we do. Paul says it in 1 Thessalonians 5, 14 through 15, where he says, If we're supposed to seek the good for those who belong to Christ, whether they belong to Shepherd's Church or whether they belong to another local congregation, we're to seek the good for all those who call upon the name of Jesus.

And again, while the Bible has much to say about the way that we treat the unbelieving world, these are things that I want us to examine so that we could be the church, so that we could be in unity with one another in the way that we think and our mind by believing the same gospel things and in the manner that we treat one another, not tearing one another down, but building one another up in Christ.

Unity of Mission in the World

But being in unity also includes a third element. It includes being in unity of mission. We're to be in unity of mind, we're to be in unity of the manner in which we treat one another, and we're to be in unity with the mission that we're all called to.