March 22, 2007
Setting Aside
My Sunday school teacher noted the church at Ephesus was small in comparison to the population. “People could go all day without meeting another Christian. In order to keep from feeling alone, they had to have unity in Christ.” In today’s church the call for unity is geared more toward issues, than toward Christ. For instance we’ve all heard the unity trumpet sound a call in areas of women priests, same sex marriage and the latest trend in visions. Jesus told the Pharisees, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!" (Mark 7:9 NIV) Not unlike the Pharisees, we seem to be setting aside unity in Christ in order to give priority to unity in issues
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Gail;
-----I don’t know how many years my poor wife has had to put up with hearing me talk about “thinginess.” God’s children seem to get wrapped up in techniques, objectives, ideas, ornaments, tunes, etc. as if the Holy Spirit were running around passing these out to everyone. And of course the worst and most common misperception is, “Those things in my spiritual life ought to be in yours, too, or your not legitimate. After all, it was the Holy Spirit that grew them in my life!”
----I am not so sure the Holy Spirit is interested in these things. When I read the scriptures I hardly ever see anything that formulates for us such objectives as attending the same Sunday school class with the kids, or such ideas as whether baptism is three times forward or once backward, or whether a gold fringed flag should be present or absent from the front of the meeting place. When I read the Bible I have never been impressed that God was nervously concerned about such trifles.
-----But the impression of His Word that I can not escape is His concern about our characters and our behaviors towards one another and towards Him. In page after page after page of the Bible I notice substantially less ideological encouragement and substantially more behavioral encouragement. It’s like God is more concerned about the godliness of the core elements of our character than He is in our ability to do everything precisely the same as one another. He is wise enough to know that when the core of what we are is alive in His Character, then the things that we do will be similar to the things that He does. No, I never read in I Corinthians 12 or Romans 12 about the Holy Spirit giving a particular Sunday School program as a gift, or a worship style, or a piano, or a guitar. Instead, the gifts He gave and His fruit as defined by Paul in Galatians 5, and the many other exhortations of Scripture are about the core elements of character that cause unity in the way we treat each other, not in the things we feel are important to do, say, sing, teach, or look at. God help our leaders to understand this!
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