UNITY BASED ON AGREEMENT?
There have always been disagreements among God’s children, and there is no basis upon which to think that this will ever cease to be the case. No two people can think and reason exactly alike any more than they can look exactly alike or manifest the same personality traits. Distinctive dispositions, conditioning and background are but a few of the contributing factors that qualify us all as individuals. Like the snowflakes or the fingerprints, no two people are alike in every way—including Christians. If we would all understand this, and accept the reality of it, we could eliminate a lot of the divisions that continue to hinder the work of Christ upon earth.
We don’t think exactly alike and we don’t approach problems and questions in the same way. Its not that one is smarter than another in every case or even more well-informed. It’s just that we are different, and that’s the way God created us to be. And yet, the beauty of it is, even though we don’t think exactly alike and even though we don’t always come up with the same answers and even though we don’t even agree on every issue, religious or otherwise, we are one in Christ.
As children of God, you and I and every other believer in Christ on the face of the earth have been united with Christ and have been called by God into the fellowship of his Son (1 Cor. 1:9). We have been added to the one body, along with every other child of God, and we are in the fellowship of the family of God. There is one body (Eph. 4:4). It’s not that there should be one body or that we are working toward one body. No, there is one body! There has always been and will always be one body of Christ, and every saved person has been added to it. The body of Christ existed before any human denominations were formed, which makes them divisive and irrelevant, if not completely evil.
If Jesus is your Savior and God is your Father, then you are my brother or sister, and that is all there is to it. I have no say so whatsoever about who is in the family and who is not. You have no choice who your physical siblings are and you have no choice who your spiritual siblings are.
The only thing we can choose is how we are going to treat each other and whether or not we will accept in our hearts what is already a reality—that we are all brothers and sisters. Our fellowship in Christ is not determined by what opinions we hold or how we interpret the Bible, but on our mutual reception of Christ as Lord and Savior of our lives. When we accept—choose to love and follow—Christ, we become members of God’s family. By accepting Christ. It is not by scoring well on a doctrinal exam or by holding all the right beliefs, but by our trust in God’s Son that we are added by God to the universal body of believers known as the church.
If our fellowship in Christ is determined by seeing everything alike then we will never have fellowship because we will never see everything alike. Different people are at different stages spiritually and disciples are not to judge one another but to “bear with one another in love” (Eph. 4:2). If there were no serious differences between us there would be nothing to “bear with.” The entire 14th chapter of Romans is about fellow believers accepting one another as brothers and sisters without demanding doctrinal conformity and in spite of serious differences.
Dewayne Dunaway
