Thursday: The Unity of the Spirit
WEEK 18
THURSDAY
THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT
Ephesians 3:1-6
We have seen the six unities that came into being with the coming of the Holy Spirit. They are an amazing list: unity with God, with themselves as persons, among the inner circle—the twelve—unity of all believers, with enemies, and in material relationships. To these must be added some unities we have seen previously: unity of the secular and the sacred, of all classes, all races, all ages—old and young—both sexes in spiritual equality, the ministry and the laity. Everybody and everything was brought into a living unity, called the “unity of the Spirit.”
This was the profoundest unity ever seen in any age in any place.
It was not a unity of picked people. It was a unity that included people who a few weeks before had crucified Jesus, their Lord and Savior. The one hundred twenty had been with Jesus more or less for three years; but the unity that was now manifested included murderers, the dishonest, the sexually loose, the morally depraved in general. And more astonishingly it included proud Pharisees, the separatists who claimed moral superiority. All these were welded into a living unity in a matter of days, if not of hours. It was a miracle in human relationships.
“Don’t use the word fellowship here,” said a professor in a Christian college in India, “for the word has a bad odor. We have tried to have fellowship, but it is all very unreal and hollow.” Here was a picked group of Christian people, college professors, who tried to have fellowship and failed. Why? Because it was from the outside in. Fellowship in the Acts was from the inside out. They didn’t try to have fellowship; they just had it, had it in the Spirit. A common bond held them together. It was not the bond of race or economic class or common social origin; it was the bond of the Spirit. They shared a common Life, and hence they shared a common life. The Spirit that had brooded over the chaos of matter in the beginning of creation had now brooded over the chaos of human relationships and had brought out of it a cosmos—a fellowship, a unity of the Spirit.
O Divine Spirit, brood over the chaos of conflicting and diverse human hearts and make out of us a fellowship so deep within that it will be undisturbed without. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I will let the unity of the Spirit lead me into unity with everyone who is unite-able.