Stress Test Devotional May 4
May 04, 2024
DAY 10
Our faith is so rich, and our God is so wonderful that many different kinds of witness are required! The many forms of Christian life allow many kinds of people, and many different cultures to find a place. The number of different churches is partly something to be celebrated rather than denigrated because there is a richness to our diversity that can be powerful.
However, unity that is largely founded on denominational identity and focused on legal and formal processes may not actually achieve the kind of connections that God wants us to have. Throughout the final discourses and within the great prayer of Jesus in John 17, I find six kinds of unity:
- Relational—I no longer call you servants but friends. (John 15:5)
- Doctrinal—What the Father handed to me (taught me), I have handed on to you. (John 17:8)
- Missional—As the Father sent one into the world, so I send you. (John 17:18)
- Doxological—Visible in the shared communion and shared prayers in John and John 17. (John 13 and John 17)
- Mystical—I pray that as you are in me Father and I am in you, may they be in us. (John 17:21)
- Final—Jesus asks that we will experience, eventually, the glory he knew with his father before the foundation of the world. (John 17:24)
Denominations must be judged on the basis of these deeper kinds of unity. Sometimes they are able to advance them, even across denominational lines, and sometimes they inhibit them.
How do you think we are doing advancing the deeper unities God desires?
FAMILY TIME—
We are family. How can you tell we are one?
How do we know a church is our family?
