Hebrews 7.25 always shakes me: “Therefore He is always able to save those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to intercede for them.”
The King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the resurrected Savior makes time to pray for us…for me???
What does Jesus pray for us?
Certainly we do not know the full answer, but John 17.20-23 gives us some specifics:
“I pray not only for these, but also for those who believe in me through their word. May they all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us, so that the world may believe you sent me. I have given them the glory you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me, so that they may be made completely one, that the world may know you have sent me and have loved them as you have loved me.”
I’m not real bright, but three times in the passage Jesus prays for “oneness,” for unity.
I type this on Sunday morning. Soon I’ll head out to church…a Southern Baptist church. Many of my friends will head out to a Nazarene church, an Assembly of God church, a Methodist church, a Pentecostal assembly, etc.
And that’s okay by me. We are brothers-and-sisters in Christ; not identical twins.
We can and do differ on secondary things. Some are calvinistic; others more arminian. Some don’t know the difference (I wish I were you!)
Some are pretrib, post trib, mid trib; we differ on the ways we look at other aspects of eschatology.
Gasp. Some speak in tongues, some don’t.
Some believe “once saved, always saved,” while others believe you can lose your salvation. (and others, like me, sometime wonder if you can give it up)
I don’t think those secondary doctrinal differences break our oneness…unless..unless…we start loving our pet doctrines more than we love unity.
Colossians 2.2 reads, “I want their hearts to be encouraged and joined together in love, so that they may have all the riches of complete understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery—Christ.”
The ESV reads “knit together in love.“
I like that…yarn that goes around other yarn to become stronger.
Maybe we can be more unified if we’d “go around” those secondary things and strive to obey the command to “love one another.”
It’s not compromise.
It’s obedience.
It’s answering, in a way, the prayer of our Lord.
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