John 17:11

CHRISTIAN UNITY

‘That they may be one.’

John 17:11

The duty of unity is the hardest duty to fulfil. After all the teaching of the centuries the Lord’s Prayer in text has not been fulfilled. Divisions have become deeper, more permanent, more real. What is the real binding power for drawing men together? There must be—

I. Union with Christ.—To live in Christ is the beginning and the completion of carrying out the Lord’s desire.

II. Charity between man and man.—Charity is the bond of peace. With a spirit of mutual trust each will endeavour to follow his own conscience, and if cause of separation come, will still place a sure confidence in another’s truth and desire for service.

III. Perpetual labour for the truth.—The divisions of Christendom damage the Christian cause. Christ has set before this Church and nation a special opportunity of doing His will. Shall we pass by this glorious call? Our divisions are the saddest spectacle for angels and for Him Who died to save men. Of all the things the Church aims at, peace within herself is now the most necessary.

Archbishop Temple.

Illustration

‘It would in no way surprise or interest the world, the outsiders, to see professors of a faith all holding precisely the same opinions and adopting precisely the same definitions and externals, living amicably together. They would have no excuse for discord. That which would arrest the attention of outsiders would be the spectacle of professors of the same fundamental belief, widely differing as to details, definitions, dogmas, and external methods, so bound together by the magnitude and reality of their common fundamental belief that they were content to suffer each other to worship precisely according to the preference of each, because they recognised beneath all externals a “unity of the spirit” so profound, so real, so intense, that it transcended all human sects, methods, and denominations. This would be an exhibition that would interest and astonish the outsiders, and their conclusion would be that the fundamental truth which could thus weld together those widely separated by distinctions of creed, method, and sect, must be a reality. It is to this kind of unity, surely, that St. Paul referred when he bid us “keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.” The fact is that “the Church,” in its essence, is a spiritual and invisible body, existing wholly independent of its external manifestations and methods, which may be national, geographical, almost even climatic, and with regard to which there may be, and ought to be, room for almost unlimited divergence of opinion without any rupture of true spiritual unity. If the Lord Christ were to-morrow visibly to return, after the manner in which some Christians expect Him to return, and call to Himself His Church, His Body, is there any one in his right senses who believes that it is only the particular denomination to which he belongs that the Lord would call? Would it not be that “great multitude which no man can number, of all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues” and sects and eras who are united by faith in the Incarnate Lord? And if that would be true in the event expected by some, it is true to-day.’