Make Us One - Learning from Others

– from R. Kent Hughes, John: That You May Believe.

Christian unity is supernatural because it comes from God’s nature and is only experienced in its fullness as we draw close to him: “… that they may be one as we are one.”

That unity, though, does not mean uniformity in everything. In the Trinity there exists a unity in diversity—three distinct Persons, yet they are one. Suppose, for a moment, that we could bring some of the great Christians of the centuries together under one roof. From the fourth century would come the great intellect Augustine of Hippo. From the tenth century, Bernard of Clairvaux. From the sixteenth, the peerless reformer John Calvin. From the seventeenth century would come John Wesley, the great Methodist advocate of free will, and along with him George Whitefield, the evangelist. From the nineteenth century, the Baptist C. H. Spurgeon and D. L. Moody. And, finally, from the twentieth century, Billy Graham.

If we gathered all these men under one steeple, we would have trouble! We would be unable to get a unanimous vote on many things. But underneath it all would be unity. And the more the men lifted up Christ and the more they focused on him, the greater their unity would be. There would be unity amidst a great diversity of style and opinion.

Christ’s prayer for unity does not mean we all should be the same, though many Christians mistakenly assume that. Too many think other believers should be just like them—carry the same Bible, read the same books, promote the same styles, educate their children in the same way, have the same likes and dislikes. That would be uniformity, not unity. We are not called to be Christian clones. In fact, the insistence that others be just like us is one of the most disunifying forces in the church of Jesus Christ. It engenders a judgmental inflexibility that hurls people away from the church with deadly force. One of the gospel’s glories is that it hallows our individuality even while bringing us into unity. That unity without uniformity is implicit in Paul teaching on spiritual gifts.