No Division Among Us

PRAYER PRACTICE

Lectio – Read today’s short passage through once. Then spend some time praying and asking God to show you what you need to pay attention to in the text. Read it again. Now ask the Spirit to help you see what this text, and the part that has stood out, may mean for you. Don’t expect to get a clear word every time, but always be ready to hear from God through his Word.

DAILY READING

1 Corinthians 1:10-12

REFLECTION

A Church in Perfect Unity

 by Dan Kidd

One of the things that impresses me most about the Apostle Paul is how thoroughly convinced he was that God can put to death old, sinful, fleshly lives and replace them with new, resurrected, Spirit-filled, blood-washed ones. He believed that God could make someone an entirely different person. 

It makes sense; this was his story. Not so long ago he’d been the Pharisee of Pharisees, he knew the law backwards and forwards and had followed it dutifully, loving it because to love the law was to love God. But then, he was intercepted by the resurrected Jesus who gifted him with what the law never could. After that he’d confess his former life was garbage compared to knowing Christ Jesus. Paul was a man transformed; head to toe, inside to outside.

Surely it was because of the astonishing, transformative work that the Spirit of God had done on Paul that he had such lofty expectations for the church in Corinth? Because, frankly, his directive here seems terribly idealistic. The Corinthian church was a mess. From incest and promiscuity to suing each other; making communion into an exclusive dinner party and competing with each other about Spiritual gifts. Yet despite every last one of these deeply troubling behaviors, Paul sees the potential for God’s transformation. 

So, instead of simply telling them to agree to disagree, or instructing them to keep quiet, instead of recommending that they take a vote, split into factions, or learn to tolerate one other, Paul appeals to them like this, “agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.” 

Imagine with me for a moment being part of a church with people whom we disagree with. Perhaps sometimes in this imaginary church we disagree with each other silently, and every once in a while, we catch ourselves being self-certain about our rightness relative to their wrongness. Other times, in this imaginary church, we argue outright with each other. Now, imagine a pastor—someone all of us admire and trust, someone who has shown that they know us and love us—finding out about our conflicts. Upon hearing of our clashes, they plead for us to agree with each other in what we say and that we root out any divisions among us. What’s more, they tell us, we ought to be perfectly united in mind and thought. How would you receive this direction from this beloved pastor? 

Perhaps this is nothing more than an imaginary church for you. Maybe you don’t feel or experience the least bit of division within your church family. I’d love that to be true for all of us. But maybe that isn’t always true for you; every now and again you notice some division or acrimony? In those instances, how can we benefit from Paul’s hope for unity in the Church? We might start with a prayer like this: “Lord Jesus, please make me into a person discontent with division and help me to find perfect unity and agreement with my sisters and brothers.”