Unity

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info visit us at thrive-fl.org. Last week I talked about Paul praying that Philemon would continue to share his faith with others outside of his church circles and how we can share our faith through many different avenues, ultimately loving others and seeing Jesus more and more each time. This week we will be looking at a prayer of Paul's having to do with unity among the church. Now when I say among the church that doesn't mean Thrive. I'm not trying to call out everybody's like secret beefs with each other. This is the capital C Church, right, the church of all of Jesus' followers on the face of this earth. And this capital C Church is Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, all denominations of people who ultimately proclaim Jesus as Savior. So this prayer is found in Romans 15, but before we go further let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you Lord that we can all be here today praising and worshiping you and learning more about you. I pray that I would be a vessel of your spirit and that your word would work through me and that hearts would be opened and ears would be opened and ultimately lives would be changed. In your name I pray, amen. Okay, awesome. So this passage is Romans 15, 5 through 7, but before we read this together I want to kind of explore the idea of unity. So thinking about unity, I realize it's kind of all around us and we experience it on a lot of different levels as we live life through our societies and cultures and lives. So the obvious one, we're all experiencing it right now, right, we all just sang a bunch of songs to Jesus together, we're a bunch of people who have the same belief or are at least pursuing that same belief. But speaking in more secular terms of unity, we see it in sports all of the time, right, like I'm a big baseball fan, anybody else like baseball? Very few, but baseball fans nonetheless, so there's a few out there. But if we get even more narrow, who likes the Pittsburgh Pirates? Probably nobody except me, yeah. So yeah, not many are out there, but for me one of my favorite things is getting to go to PNC Park and go to a Pirates game, which I actually get to do next week which would be cool. But it's such a cool feeling being in the stands with a sea of fans at PNC Park, all anxiously hoping for the same outcome of a Pirates victory and cheering the whole way. It's just an amazing feeling to be surrounded with like-minded people like that. Another way that many of us maybe recently just experienced unity is nationalism. Now, you know, not all of you are out there with being the guy with a bald eagle ripping through an American flag tattooed on your chest, right, but I'm sure most of you celebrated the 4th of July. And if you didn't celebrate, you at least went and watched fireworks. And the thing is that our whole nation did that, like all on the same day. Every one of us together in unison decided that we're going to obliterate our air quality with copious amounts of gunpowder for an evening to celebrate America's birthday. And another more personal form of unity is marriage. Now, that's not personal to me, but that's obviously a bond between two people. That is two people coming together, making a commitment, saying, hey, we're going to do life together. Now, I don't know much about marriage yet, but I do know that in a healthy one, you must make decisions together, right? You have to learn to communicate and compromise, and in many cases, to agree upon a decision that both of you will make together whether one of you likes it or not. Because when you single-handedly make these decisions for yourself and your spouse without consulting the other person, what happens? Nothing good, probably. I'm going to be learning more about that soon, hopefully, but that's a conversation for another time. So, these aren't the only ways we experience unity. It happens all over, in politics, work unions, military, our families, even in music. Unity is all over, and it's really not a tough concept to grasp, but for some reason, we struggle with it when it comes to this capital C church. But it's pretty clear in Scripture how we ought to treat it, so let's go ahead and dive into our passage together and read Paul's prayer for Rome. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another and accord with Christ Jesus that together you may, with one voice, glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God. Now, just in the first sentence of that passage, Paul finds five different words or phrases to use that are synonymous with the word unity. If we look back, we see, May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus that together you may, with one another, glorify the G...