UNITY THROUGH JESUS

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval.

So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk. Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter!

So then, my brothers and sisters, when you gather to eat, you should all eat together. Anyone who is hungry should eat something at home, so that when you meet together it may not result in judgment.

And when I come I will give further directions.

1 Corinthians 11:17-22, 33-34

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Many churches today have problems with division within. Ask most pastors and they will attest to that.

These divisions can arise from many different places, spiritual and physical. Most of the time, the divisions are over petty items that hold little to no relevance to the Gospel and the church’s responsibility to spread it with the goal of making disciples.

Need some examples?

There was an established church which had a rather large congregation. As the veteran congregants aged, they started to be more of the minority, especially as seniors passed away. The church had been very traditional in the music they played, always singing hymns from hymnals that were in the pew racks.

As the church got younger, the music styles changed. The church started doing more contemporary praise and worship music and the traditional service was replaced by a blended one (a mix of hymns and contemporary worship music). This didn’t sit well with the older members of the congregation and a schism started to form, those who liked the more contemporary service against the senior members of the congregation who preferred the traditional framework.

Within this issue, we find the root of the divisiveness problem. The focus was on the wrong thing. It was on a style of music instead of Christ Jesus, the source of our unity.

Here’s one more example of how a church became divided over something not related to the Savior.

A church had emerging from the COVID pandemic several months before Easter. As more and more people were comfortable coming to worship and there were still social distancing requirements in place, the church leadership had a tough call to make as they pondered trying to ensure everyone who came to the Easter service would have a seat in the sanctuary.

At the time, the sanctuary was very traditional with rows of pews. It had been that way since the church had been built. But the pews created an issue. They took up a lot of room and reduced the capacity of the sanctuary in regard to seating people with social distancing. So after careful consideration, the decision was made to remove the pews and open up the floor of the sanctuary for maximum seating.

Obviously, this didn’t go over well with some members of the congregation, again, mostly the older congregants. There was a lot of complaining about the pew tear out because the focus was on the wrong thing. People aren’t to come to church to worship furniture. They are to come to worship the Lord.

Now, this matter of division in the church isn’t anything new. For as we have seen through our study of 1 Corinthians, divisions within the church in Corinth was high on the list of concerns held by Paul as he wrote to the Christians there.  

At the heart of the divisions was a difference in alliances and allegiances. Paul writes that some of the Christians followed him while others chose to follow Apollos or Peter. A fourth group followed Christ and they were the ones who placed their attention in the right place. Paul hoped to get the whole church centered on Jesus.

As we see in today’s scripture passage, the Corinthian Christians were allowing their differences to trickle down into the way they interacted with one another in church affairs. Their disputes were making meetings “more harm than good”. These meetings also included joining together to worship Jesus and often that worship included an observance of the Lord’s Supper, the commemorative sacrament used by the church to remember Jesus’ great sacrifice in bringing salvation to all mankind.

The Lord’s Supper was intended to be taken as one, all members of the body partaking of the bread and cup together. But in the church in Corinth, we read where people were choosing to hold their own individual communions without sharing with the people who were destitute and without anything. They, the poor, were essentially excluded by those who had affluence.

This practice needed to stop. That was Paul’s main message to the Corinthians. When they ate, whether in fellowship or in partaking the elements of the Lord’s Supper, they were to do so together, one body united by Jesus. The Christian church is only that way because of Christ. He is to be the primary focal point.

It was true in first century AD and it’s still true today.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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