Blog # 339 Unity in Truth

Blog  # 339  Unity in Truth

                  We are in the Gospel of John, Chapter 17, v 17ff.  Jesus is with the Apostles in the final hours He would spend with them before His agony in Gethsemane and His loving and obedient death on the  Cross.  We hear Jesus saying:  " I pray...for those who will believe in me.  May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as You are in me and I am in You, so that the world may believe it was You who sent Me.   I have given them the glory You gave to Me, that they may be one as we are one.  With Me in them and You in Me, may they be so completely one that the world will realize it was You who sent Me and that I loved them as much as You have loved Me.

                 I can not see how anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus could take these words of Jesus lightly.  Yet we tolerate divisions of the Church almost as if they were not in contradiction to His prayer and desire. Part of the problem seems to be that none of us wants to be wrong or deficient in our faith, and in order to give ourselves the security we need to live in the conviction that we are right it turns out that others who differ from us logically must be wrong.  Then we try to discover, with various levels of success, and generally with little or no significant personal contact with members of the actual people we are judging, the errors of the other churches   On the other hand, the way I see it, none of us is complete until all of us are one.  Isn't that clearly what Jesus prayed for the night before He died?

                 Suppose you were a teacher, and you had eighteen students in your class.  Suppose you taught them all to spell cat C-A- T.  In learning it, all eighteen students would agree with you.   But then, when they related to one another, if they really learned what you taught, it  would necessarily follow they would also agree among themselves.  If not, something would be wrong. That would be true of a first grade class in arithmetic and a course in theology. 

                    And it is similar to the way it is with churches. Jesus is the teacher of all.  We wish to learn and believe, to follow and to live what He taught.  We want to agree with Jesus. We want to be one with Him. Others feel the same way about Him. The fact we are not one indicates something is wrong. 
                  I invite you to join me in praying with Jesus about it.  "Father, That all be one...that the world may believe it was You who sent Me."