I have been engaged in a study of the second half of Paul’s letter to
the Ephesians, and, not surprisingly, the themes from that letter have
been resonating in my mind over the past few weeks. I have been struck
by Paul’s emphasis on the importance of love and unity in the local
church. On the one hand it’s kind of obvious—we need to love the
Christians around us—but on the other hand, the personal implications
are profound. I’ve always known that God calls me to love the people I
covenant with in my local church, but until now I haven’t been quite so
aware of the danger of falling out of love.
Paul did not seem to
have any particular concern with the unity of this church in Ephesus. As
far as we can tell he wasn’t writing because the church was splintering
apart or because he had heard rumors of their disunity. But perhaps
this was even more reason for him to address the issue. Paul knew
that Satan is the great enemy of God and his people, and one of his
enduring tactics to disrupt the church and to hinder our witness to the
world is to bring about disunity. How does he do this? He does it by
first eroding the love between brothers and sisters in Christ.
Wherever
there is disunity there will first be the absence of love and the
presence of pride. Satan’s great desire for your church and for mine is
to fracture the people in those churches into camps, into groups built
along lines that have no business dividing us. We may know this in the
abstract, but we need to make it personal. Here is what we need to see:
God wants me and commands me to love the other people in my church;
Satan wants me to hate them. God wants me to feel a great deal of unity
with those people; Satan wants there to be an issue between
us—something, anything, to drive us apart. Continue at Tim Challies
