And He prays for many things, but He culminates it toward the end in verse 20. This is a far cry from what our Lord desired and prayed for.īut let’s go back to that prayer, John 17, and hear what He prayed to the Father. Christianity, as a church, could never be defined as one church it is so fragmented. Churches seem to be divided, filled with friction, conflict, animosity, breakups and you would be right. It goes without saying that just making that remark probably conjures up in your mind the reality that that doesn’t seem to be the fact. The divine gospel is most powerfully displayed in the unity of the church, this “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” It is the unity of the church that puts power on display, saving power. The unity of believers is crucial to our Lord and crucial to the mission of the church. The unity of believers, which obviously Paul writes about a lot-and we’ve looked at all of those passages in past weeks-the unity of the believers which the other New Testament writers speak of and write about basically is a reflection of the prayer of our Lord in John 17. But more strikingly, Paul picked its importance up from Jesus Himself. It’s the highpoint of this text: “ diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” That is important to the apostle Paul. In fact verse 3 is really the sum of this. This is a profoundly significant portion of Scripture, and the heart of this text is in verse 3, where the apostle is calling for us to be diligent, to “preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” And what we’ve been learning along the way is that our Lord wants unity in His church-unity. There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.” “Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The text that we’re looking at-and this will be our fourth look at this text-is Ephesians 4:1-6. And we’re still there and even after this morning, we won’t be done with this issue. We have been talking about unity because this is what Paul keeps talking about in this epistle over and over again. And you know that it’s been really weeks and months that we have been talking about the issue of unity in the church. Now, we are going back to the book of Ephesians, so open your Bible to Ephesians chapter 4.
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