Good morning again. And if you’re watching online, welcome to you. I tried to put myself in the place of someone who might be visiting in the midst of an announcement, like that kind of announcement. If you’re here, good Sunday to come. I, sometimes I wonder if those things feel something like, you know the Michael Jackson meme?

Where he’s eating the popcorn from the old thriller video, and he’s just there, just smiling away, and just enjoying his movie or whatever. Sometimes I feel like sitting in, it is just like that. You’re like, I just can’t wait to see how this turns out. This is gonna be, this is gonna be interesting to watch, at least.

Or perhaps it feels more it felt to visit my friend. Mark, we used to hang out a lot when we were about 17, 18, and he lived with just his dad, and they had this wonderful propensity to argue when I was there in the room, just the three of us. They would get into these big blowout arguments. In those moments, I always thought, could I just sink through the floor, please, and just disappear?

Our floors are concrete. And some asbestos. So you’re not going anywhere, you’re you’re stuck in the room. Today we’re moving on from a series that we got to spend three weeks on. We got to spend three joyful weeks, at least to me, in loop 15, the story of the prodigal son. We took these three different angles, the younger brother, the older brother, and the father, and I got to tune into the last two weeks from vacation and just Oh man, just the joy in hearing of God’s love, love for us as people.

It was just compelling. So much thanks to Aaron, to Kevin, for setting a standard of preaching length that will mean that you want to welcome me back. Their mere 55 minute sermons will make mine seem super short today. As we jump into this series on community, first some thoughts about community in general.

I would make this suggestion. There is no life without community. Perhaps some of you are aware of a story about a young man from the 80s called Christopher McCandless. An author called John Krakowa wrote about him extensively. He got very frustrated with society as he saw it and so he made a decision.

I’m just gonna get out of here. People are trouble. Society is a problem. I’m just gonna go find some place to retreat. So he went to Alaska. Not city Alaska, but Alaska, like the real, the wild of Alaska. And while he was there, he lost all of his food resources and all ability to leave the place.

He was, because of his desire to get as far from society as he could, he’d taken no map with him. He was only about half a mile to a mile from a bridge over a river, but he found himself trapped in this space. And this is a picture of the last note that he left for somebody. Attention possible visitors, SOS.

I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I’m out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless. Chris McCandless didn’t die because of loneliness, but he did die from aloneness.

He had nobody in his circle to support him, it was just him. The writer, Wendell Berry, talks about our society today in a way that reflects our lack of community. He says this, people use drugs illegal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work. And find no rest in their leisure.

They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies, drug use is celebrative, and convivial, and occasional. Whereas among us, it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other. He’s not just talking about the drugs that may first come to mind, the kind of hard drugs.

He’s talking about anything we use to compensate for the absences in our lives. To fill the gaps. Community, on the surface, is a simple word. It comes from the Latin word communitas it simply means together and work, to have something in common, the English word common actually comes directly from the term community, it’s something that holds together.

People together. It might be something as simple as sitting around a table with a meal yesterday. I was trying to catch up with some work just from being away. And so I was sat at the kitchen table working and my son, Jude, just loves to be around me. And so he came and he said, Dad, I know you’re busy.

No, he didn’t say that part. He just said, Dad, I don’t care that you’re busy. I’ve made you a meal. And so he put together his little six year old heart had thrown together some chips and some granola, because he said, I know you love granola, which is right. Some sugar snap peas and carrots and some strawberries.

He said, you can have the big one. I’ll have the small one. And then he disappeared off with the plate. I was like, wow. This little kid, he’s invited me to a table and I was just taking all the resources and then I heard him go into the next room to his sisters and said, Hey, I made food for us. Do you want some?

Let me bring you to the table as well. Community is as simple as that. Simple as gathering at times around a table in a living room in a church community like this. And yet it is where life is. John Veneer, who founded the community of L’Arche, which was famous for bringing people with all sorts of disabilities into a stable community, said this.

One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn’t as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress. Community is a transforming thing, both for us and the people that will come into it.

And the church in history has this unique stance of being the only community. that exists for the people outside it. That is the role we get to play in the world. And yet we know, probably from experience, community is at times a challenging, challenging because all of us bring this warped nature, this self centeredness that changes, challenges, affects the group that gathers in community.

One of the things that perhaps we’re all called to is this process of becoming weary of the me, the self that wants to impact that completely for my own good. I recently came across this prayer from the early 19th century from a British novelist called Christina Rossetti. There was one part of this that just grabbed my heart.

O Lord Jesus Christ, who art as a shadow of the great rock in a weary land, who beholdest thy weak creatures, weary of labor, weary of pleasure, weary of hope deferred, weary of self, in thine abundant compassion and fellow feeling with us, and unutterable tenderness, bring us, we pray thee, unto thy rest.

That idea of weary, of self, just grabbed at me. I get so tired of me at times and the way that I impact, or the way I bring myself, my demands upon people. I have to live with me all the time, and it’s just as awful as you’d imagine. Somewhere, This prayer reflects the sense that John the Baptist had about his own role in the community of God.

He said of Jesus in John chapter 3 verse 30, He must increase, but I must decrease. We all have to come to that point, and my prayer for you throughout this series, throughout this year, is that you and I together can come to that ability to understand that self is not the way to do community. Today I want to focus on a specific aspect of that.

I’d like to start with this idea. You can’t spell community without unity. You can’t have unity. community without unity. This is not a new idea, it’s been around for a while, right? The writer Alexander Dumas in his Three Musketeers gave us this famous phrase, All for one, and one for all. United we stand, divided we fall.

We fall. Community has to be lived with some kind of unity and this was Jesus deep concern for his church. In John 17, Jesus prayed for you and for me. I think with joy often of the fact that Jesus, the living God, prayed personally for me. And for you today, not his followers back then, but specifically for people like us.

In John 17 verse 20 he said this, My prayer is not just for them alone, just his disciples right now, I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that they all may be one Father. Just as you are in me, And I am in you. May they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

And so here’s the tension, here’s the problem. Aren’t we all more divided than ever? You only have to look around in society, right? Take the country that we live in. You look across from one state to another. Aren’t there just broad differences between one state and another? And then sometimes you go to the same place.

And you find the same state has huge divisions in it. I recently picked my wife up from Minneapolis, a city that’s liberal. It’s, I’ve driven through it multiple times. I drove through it after the riots of 2020 and the protests of 2020. And then we drive, we wind our way up to Orr, Minnesota, this town.

Tiny little town that used to say population 289. On the sign it now says Population 211, but the nor the 30 to 40 category just says not applicable. There’s no one of that age that lives there. It’s just a, it could be a million miles away from Minneapolis, the wider world we might say we are so divided.

nationally as a group of people. And yet the church is no different. The wider church is no better. At a recent count, there were 33, 000 Christian denominations worldwide. Most religions don’t have 33, 000 people, but 33, 000 groups. That’s just huge. And I grew up. with a theology as a Pentecostal that enabled us to track the lineage of the history of the church and we were able to state, we were on the right side of every single argument in the church.

We were batting a thousand. And then I got to talk to people from other denominations and realized they all thought they were batting a thousand as well. That sense of we know what we know was just all over the church. Unity. in the midst of community has always come at a cost. The very term we use for this country, United States, is to say that individual entities or states, as most countries are called, have chosen to be united with some form of government.

Cost to self. Folklore says there’s a moment after the death of Abraham Lincoln where suddenly people no longer said the United States are, they started to say the United States is. There was more of a reflection of something that was trying desperately to be close in unity. I think I learned that from Hamilton, but I’m not sure.

I would suggest part of our problem, part of our tension with unity is this. If we are honest, we no longer desire unity, we desire uniformity. Unity, as a term, preselects for disagreement, pre selects for moments where we push up against each other, moments where things come in to question. Uniformity precludes any kind of disagreement.

I would suggest that goal in much of society today is to say, if only we could find uniformity Everything would be great. Unity requires me to surrender. Uniformity allows me to be central. How many of you’re familiar with this phrase? It’s built into our culture now it’s this kind of little quote, my way or the highway.

I get my way or you leave. But perhaps there’s another twist to it. I get my way or I leave. There’s this kind of idea built into our culture now that I want everything to fit exactly as I want it to fit. There’s an Arabic proverb that says this, Me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins.

Me and my cousins against our clan. Me and my clan against the world. Everything’s good until it infects me. Gets down to that moment of self that I just can’t surrender. Everything is good in the city until the food is gone, and we realize it’s us or them. There’s this moment where we can come together in agreement, unless it’s us.

Our stance is opposed and yet, here’s the beautiful thing friends, the story of God is one of surprising unity against all the odds. The first community of God in Genesis is a community of a man and a woman who with different interests on the surface can come together in unity. The community in Exodus is one of people from different tribes, different nations.

different languages where the people come together under the unity of God’s law given to them. And the community in act is one that comes together despite people from all nations across Gentile and Jewish background with all sorts of histories. Those people come together and in the midst of their differences beautifully find what is real unity.

The story of God is one of surprising unity found in the midst of division. And I want to show you that in a passage from Acts chapter 15. So if you’re holding a text in front of you, you can flick across to Acts 15. We’re not going to have time to get into all of this because we’ve also got to get to Romans chapter 14 and so we’re going to do what we can to cover some chunks of it.

I’m going to start, I’m going to pick up in verse 5, but I want to give you a little bit of background to this chapter. The Church of Acts has grown dramatically in the first couple of chapters. God has given his Spirit, which is the new marker of who’s in and who’s out in this new community. No longer is it centered around exterior signs, but this internal giving of God’s Holy Spirit, which transforms us from the inside out.

outside. As the church has added new members and start to spread, there’s been this moment of crisis that is instigated when Peter the Apostle shares the gospel message with a person who is a Gentile. That Gentile believes and they receive the covenant marker. Two, they are given this Holy Spirit, they are included in what God is doing.

But this still hasn’t been sanctioned by the church in Jerusalem. This is just a thing that’s happening independently and so the leaders of the church come together in Acts chapter 15 and say, what do we do about this? God seems like he’s doing something in this group of people but what are the rules now?

They don’t look like us, they don’t live like us. What are we inviting? And so in Acts chapter 5, we see the first idea for what it might be to bring the Gentile believers into this new Christian community. In verse 5 we read, Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said the Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.

We’re going to invite them in, but we’re going to invite them to the things we’ve been doing that have been important to us for so long. They were like, circumcision’s a great party, guys. We’re going to invite you all to it. We’re going to keep this thing going. We’re going to keep it real.

And required to keep the law of Moses. These two huge things that are external markers of being part of the covenant. But one of the leaders questions this. One of the leaders says, I don’t know if this feels right. We’ve been wrestling with this thing for years. We’ve not been able to keep this law code.

Are we really going to bring all of this and put it on the new followers of Jesus who’ve never had this culture? Is that what we’re called to do? James, the brother of Jesus, is the one who gives these words in verse 10. God, who knows the heart, showed that He accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them just as He did to us.

He did not discriminate between us and them, for He purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No, we believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ Ding. Is that an ESPN alert?

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that we are saved just as they are. It is my judgment, verse 19, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead, we should write to them telling them to abstain From food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.

In figuring out what rules to give this new group of believers, the earliest church in Jerusalem came up with just four. In figuring out what were their hills to die on, these I would suggest if you want unity, you and I each have to keep the main things. And that’s hard, right? Because how do we know what they are?

How do we know what’s central? How do we know what to hold on to? How do we know what hills to die on? How do we know? And I want to tell you a story that I think illustrates one of the principles that come into play when we’re determining what is central to us. This last couple of weeks I got to go on one of our vacations to one of what I might call my happy places or places of joy.

It’s a place that Laura’s family have owned for a few decades now. It’s a place up in northern Minnesota called Pelican Lake. They have a cabin up there and Pelican Lake is this place of just beautiful sunsets. The lake’s about 11, 000 feet. Thousand acres, Chatfield’s about 1100. So it gives you a picture of just the size.

It is this enormous thing with 52 islands. It’s a place for me of refreshing, a place for me of fishing, a place for me of tubing, of time with my family, of just escape. When you listen for traffic in Pelican Lake, there is not. It’s just quiet, joyful, restful. On our trip up there this year, there was this day around the end of the trip when Laura’s folks were going home, and so we decided this.

When we take a last boat ride all together, we’ll go out and explore a bit of the lake. We usually stay in a fairly quiet place. confined area of like only like 4, 000 acres or something like that. Yeah, it’s still huge, but still confined. And so we went out and as we were making this journey, we see these dark clouds building in the distance.

We keep going because we’re like storms and water. What can go wrong? It’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna, we’re gonna take this little journey. And so we saw this final island that we were gonna make our way around and suddenly this huge fork of lightning comes crashing down just over the hill. And so I’m like, we’re just turning the boat.

We’re just headed home. I know the Germans say there’s no inappropriate weather, only inappropriate clothing. I respectfully disagree. I do not know what the appropriate weather is for fork lightning. But I suspect it’s not a boat made of sheet metal with fishing rod sticking up to the sky. I just don’t think that’s it, in the middle of a lake.

And so we start to head back. And I just get this sense, we’re not going fast enough. We’ve still got a comfortable distance. Why does this boat just feel like it’s lagging? And suddenly, it dies. Just dead, not a drop of gas in it. I don’t know who was responsible for filling the boat with gas. But I suspect it was me.

Instantly, I have this moment of we’ve got to solve this somehow. What do we do? We all have different kind of ways of dealing with it. The kids huddle up on the sofa under the canopy. I grab my phone and start looking for phone numbers that we might be able to call. And Laura’s dad grabs an oar.

Which is a brave move. It’s that’s like having a semi run out of gas and say, who’s going to get out and push? Like it’s a reach to believe that we’re getting this boat anywhere with an oar. But what do you do? It’s a crisis. And so we start looking for phone numbers and then I happen to see a couple of guys on a boat.

Now we usually see no phone numbers. It’s just so quiet, and these two guys, I’m pretty convinced they’re angels, but they didn’t look like angels. They were there, they were fishermen with a mean dog, and I said, look, hey, any chance you can just take me to shore? I’ve got to get the other boat, got to come back and get everyone, we’ll come back and get the boat later, but we just got to, we got to go.

And they irritatingly hovered in the distance, not coming close. I think they thought we were going to hijack them. Hijacking people with five kids is a brave move. I don’t know who does that. But they were distant. Eventually they came close and I jumped on the boat with them and they drove irritatingly slowly towards shore.

It’s can I get that oar? I’m gonna give you a hand you’re just not moving quickly enough. But finally we get to the shore, and I jump onto our dock, and they’re about to drive off. I grab the ties for the speedboat, throw them onto the boat, push it off, and jump in, turn the key, It’s dead.

It just doesn’t go anywhere. So I jump back onto the dock. I say to them, Please, can you just go and get my kids off the boat? We can see this huge storm coming in. There’s now lightning just hitting the ground constantly from it. So I’m like, just please go tow them in. I’m going to go and see if I can get another boat.

So I have this great idea. I’m going to steal the neighbor’s boat. At this point, my ethics are just out the window. I’m just like, I’m just taking other boats. It’s going to be fine. And then I noticed from the corner of my eye, the speedboat just steadily drifting off into the lake. It may not have turned on, but it can still float.

And so there it goes, floating away. I have a moment where I say, you know what? I’m going to swim after it. But then how do I get it back to the shore? I can’t row, or some people think I can, but that’s not a practical solution. So I realize that the speedboat is drifting close to my neighbor’s dock.

I can go and grab it, then I can steal their boat, and everything’s going to be fine. Get into their boat, no key. Who takes the key out of a boat in northern Minnesota? It’s not, no one’s stealing boats except me in northern Minnesota. So at that moment, I decide, you just gonna run through the forest to the nearest lodge.

I’ve lost all sense of perspective at this point. I’m gonna run through the forest and I’m gonna get a boat from the lodge. And so I get into the forest and it’s northern Minnesota. You just can’t move anywhere. So I call Laura and I’m like, what am I gonna do? She said, there’s a golf cart by the dock.

Why don’t you just take that? I was like, that’s a brilliant idea. It did not occur to me at the time. So I go dashing back and all the way through this crisis, there’s just this crashing sense of God, please let them be okay. Please hold the storm off. Please have mercy on us. And watching as this lightning is getting closer and closer to the lake and these repeated ground strikes, I’m like, just keep my children safe, keep my wife safe, keep the people I love safe.

In this moment, I am absolutely, concretely aware of what’s important to me and what’s not important to me. And all of the silly arguments, all of the interchanges, all of the frustrations, all of the tiredness, all of the weariness, it all just disappears. And in this moment, I’m like, God, this is the center for me.

This is what I need from you. This is what I need you to protect. There’s something about moments of crisis that bring that kind of clarity that rarely comes at other times when we’re so prone to getting caught up in the whirlwind of everything around us. This is Leo driving a boat, just because I was supposed to show you earlier.

Crisis has a way of distilling life, allowing us to see what matters to us. Most, but when you, what do you do when there isn’t a crisis? How do you go about figuring out what is central to you for the Christian faith over the years, theologians, scholars wise, people have come up with a framework and they’ve said in the center there are absolutes, things that you must have.

The writer of 1 John gives us one of those straight off the bat when he says, if you deny Jesus came in the flesh, that’s outside of the Christian faith. There’s others dotted around, other things that seem so central. God as Trinity seems to be one of those. Jesus death for us as atoning, as a sacrifice, seemed to be one of those.

And then they recognize that outside of that, there’s convictions. Increasingly, outside there’s opinions, and outside of that there’s questions, but here’s the challenge that still remains. How do you know what’s a conviction for you? How do I know what’s a conviction for me? And how do you wrestle with the fact that for what you may be a conviction, and what for someone, and that same thing for somebody else might be an opinion?

Or that their convictions may be the opposite of your convictions on things that began as opinions. Working through those dynamics is painful, challenging, and the hard work of community. So why years ago someone said anonymously, in essentials unity, in non essentials liberty, in all things charity. In the absence of crisis, I would suggest that we have a couple of tools that enable us to figure out some of that.

We have contemplation, the prayerful conversation that comes with our relationship with God. And conversation, the ability to talk to those around us that are wise, that are passionate, that love Jesus. Both those that are similar to us on the surface and those that are different to us on the surface, that seem to hold the same convictions and seem to hold different convictions.

We’re not given all the tools to figure out what those things are, we are given the tools to figure out what they might be for us. When we 14, Paul gives an oft forgotten phrase that speaks to this issue. He says this in verse one, Except the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters.

Again, doesn’t tell us what the disputable matters are. Gives us a couple of examples in the next verses. But he wants us to know, it seems straight away, that there will be moments of conversation where we’re not called to quarrel, but we are called to work through a process. together. In the RSV version, it says this, Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions, that kind of outside part of the framework.

Paul does not divine which issues are disputable. He does tell us how to act once we decide. In the next verses, he gives us a couple of key words that I think are important when it comes to our attitude. The one who eats everything, this is one of the issues he covers, what you can eat, what you can’t, must not treat with contempt the one who does not.

And the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does. He talks about our interactions through these two concepts of contempt and judgment. Two concepts that I know, historically, I have been so confused about. Prone contempt is the first. The writer, John Gottman, is a brilliant psychologist, works a lot with married couples, talks about contempt as his biggest pointer to the fact that a couple won’t make it together.

He said contempt simply puts, says, I am better than you. You are lesser than me. He says, in your interactions and your conversations and your disputes, don’t look at each other and say I’m better than you. I have this figured out more and don’t. land on judgment, and I didn’t have a quote for judgment, so I just wrote one.

Judgment says, I, on behalf of God, contemn you. I know the mind of God so clearly. I can speak for him in this issue, and I say that you in this issue, you are wrong, and therefore condemned. These are two things that Paul gives us, that he says don’t do this in conversation, don’t do this when community gets hard, when you find yourself battling to keep unity.

How do we keep unity even when processing disagreement? We listen charitably, we engage charitably, we keep love as central at all times. In essentials, unity. In non essentials, liberty. But, regardless of what you think are essentials or non essentials, in all things, Hold on to Jesus key principle that he says overrides every other thing, of the three that remain, faith, hope, and love.

Love is the greatest. Love is the center of Christian community or nothing else is. Why does he say this to us? He tells us in verse four, who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand and fall,

and they will stand, he says, for the Lord is able to make them stand. Verse five. He says, one person considers one day more sacred. Another example that he gives us the days and their sacredness, another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. Whoever regards one day is special does so to the Lord.

There’s a writer from, a writer who’s a professor of a New Testament, but is also Jewish. Her name is Amy Jill Levine. And one of the things she says about Christianity and Judaism and their different cultures is this. She says, it’s interesting to me that in Judaism, we disagree, but we stay in community.

In Christianity, you have a propensity, it seems, to disagree. That’s why you have 33, 000 denominations, because we’re all convinced God is so grateful that we have figured it out to the T. And yet I’ve felt that tension before. Felt that tension of being so sure about what I believe that I’m convinced that everybody else is wrong.

And sometimes I want to grab hold of the younger me and just give him a talking to. I have a moment that I remember where I sat at my cousin’s wedding, 600 people sat for dinner and I at the time wanted to be on the senior leadership team of our church and they had a policy of no drinking alcohol. And so they served champagne to 600 people and I sat there as a 19 year old and demanded that they bring me orange juice.

And I look back at myself and say, what is wrong with you little jerk? Can’t somebody get a hold of you? And look at the ways that I was so sure I was superior to those around me. Look at the ways that I was so judgmental. And I’m so thankful for people that shepherded me through that process.

I remember one particular person who kindly sat with me in the midst of my wrestling over ordination in a particular denomination, a church community that I loved, a denomination that I felt was a healthy denomination. And I remember my, me expressing my frustration with a particular element of their doctrine, something that would land in this disputable issue.

And I said to him, I can’t stay with this denomination, I can’t do my ordination, I disagree. And that’s it. And this wise person who was just a couple of years older than me looked at me and he said, Alex, there’s no denomination that I agree with a hundred percent. Where are you going to go? Where’s going to be community to you?

Where’s going to be home? If your bar is uniformity, you end up floating every time because nobody sees the world just like you. But if you could land on unity, then community can happen. Unity is not the absence of disagreement. Community, it’s community in spite of disagreement. Paul, as he always does, brings us back at the end of this section of Romans 14 to the bigger perspective centered on who we are in Jesus.

In verse 7 and 8 he says this, one of my favorite passages, for none of us lives for ourselves alone. None of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live for the Lord. If we die for the Lord. So friends, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. We are the Lord’s in the midst of wrestling with a community this week, processing changes, wrestling with some of you, processing that wrestling with some joy, wrestling with some heartache.

One of the beautiful things to me was this. on Tuesday night over this building was a rainbow. Doesn’t speak to decisions that are right or wrong. Doesn’t speak to sides. Does speak to the God who is faithful to his church, who says, this church is mine. And each of you and my servants, one day will answer to me, but to no one else.

And they will stand. Because God is able to make them stand and whether they live or die, they are the Lord’s. John chapter 17. My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

Did you catch the purpose at the end, the why? Not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the world. May this church worldwide show itself to be one, so that the world might be changed. That’s our hope.

God of the church, thank you that in your mercy and goodness, you love this community. As we wrestle with what are our absolutes, What are our convictions that we just have to have that thing? Give us grace. Help us to know that feeling that way is absolutely okay. And yet there’ll be other people that have the opposite conviction, or think that conviction is an opinion.

And there’ll be times where that conversation seems long and deeply frustrating. But most of all, help us to find unity for the sake of this world, of which you are the Lord too. This world that you love. Thank you for your transformative power for us and in us. Because of the work of Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us.

Thank you that whether we live, or whether we die, we are yours. Thank you that you allow us to wrestle with disagreement, to find unity, and not uniformity. Thank you that the relationships that are forged in that unity are far greater than the ones of uniformity. We simply agree. Help us to keep pursuing the Jesus way of love for our neighbor, the one that is like us, and the one that is not like us.

Challenge our hearts, Jesus. Speak to us.