Main Idea: Our effectiveness as a church within our community depends on our expression of unity as a community.

Introduction: To say that a Baptist church is diverse is about as obvious as saying Chico Fletcher is quick. It’s not just Baptist churches but any church has within its membership a wide diversity of opinion on just about anything. That's true in this congregation:

We are diverse about music and styles of worship.

We are diverse about our affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention.

We are diverse about how effectively we can support missions.

We are diverse about what will happen when Jesus returns.

We are diverse about the most effective method of evangelism.

We are diverse about the way to address critical moral issues of our culture.

We are diverse about the best baseball team in the National League.

We are diverse about whether I should bring up the issue of our diversity!

The reality is that you can put two Baptists in a room and come out with three opinions. If you think about it, Jesus had the same challenge with the disciples. They were about as diverse a group as you could imagine. You had Peter, who was volatile and emotional, and John, who was quiet and stable. You had Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot, who hated the tax collectors. Yet, faced with the obvious diversity, the last thing Jesus does with these disciples before he begins the path to the Cross was to pray for their unity. He said, "I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one" (John 17:11 NIV).He never denied their distinct diversity, but he petitioned the Father for their unity.

The passage in John’s gospel we examine this morning is truly one of the most treasured of all the statements of Jesus. It very likely is made in the room where the disciples and Jesus shared the Passover Supper. In this prayer we hear our Lord pray for Himself (John 17:1-5), then He prayed for the eleven with Him in the Upper Room (John 17:6-19). Beyond that, He saw the future and prayed as He said, "for those who will believe in me." He prayed that night for every person who would call Him Savior in the ages to come. He prayed for you and me. He prayed for First Baptist Church, Jonesboro, Arkansas. What did He pray? He prayed "that all of them may be one" (John 17:21). He prayed that in the face of our diversity as individual believers we would have unity. Why? Because our effectiveness as a church within our community depends on our express of unity as a community.

Let’s see how these words are true in our church as we hear Jesus pray for us.

1. Jesus prays that we will have unity as believers. (20-21)

Jesus’ singular request is "that all of them may be one." He sees in one moment of time every individual Christian within every individual church, in every village, tribe, city, country and culture—"all of them" and prays that we would continually be one. It doesn’t mean occasionally or when we feel like it or when we finally find something that we can agree on but always we might be one. This oneness doesn’t mean uniformity or the loss of identity. It doesn’t mean that we are somehow spiritually cloned or that we have the same spiritual DNA. If being "one" doesn’t mean that we all have the same ideas about everything, what does it mean?

Jesus gives us an illustration of what He means when He says to the Father, "just as you are in me and I am in you." The unity we have as individual believers is like that of the relationship that God the Father, Jesus the Son and God the Holy Spirit share with each other. As each are distinct they are the same. God is the center of the unity, God is the center of our unity, and those who share His life are naturally drawn together as one.

You and I take for granted that everyone understands that the sun is the center of our solar system. That Sun is the force behind the orbits of all the planets, the rotation of those planets and for us on planet Earth it is the source of life for our planet. However, it has only been within the last 400 yeas that people were persuaded of this truth. In February 1998 I stood in the Old Town Square in Prague and watched a clock on the Old Town Hall chime on the hour. What was fascinating about the clock was that it kept the time, not only of the day but the month and the year. The clock was built in the 1500’s by Tycho Brahe, who gave his life literally to one task: proving that the earth was the center of the universe. The clock had as its center the earth and all else revolving around it. Later it would be Brahe’s calculations that would prove just the opposite: The Sun was the center and all the planets revolve around it.

For the believer God is the center of our spiritual solar system. Our lives, regardless of our diversity or individuality, find their source in Him. He is what holds us together. When we begin to believe that we because of our differences, are the center of the universe, then division and disunity are the result. The only thing that can hold believers together is to be caught up into the life of God Himself. As we focus on Him we draw life, shared life, from Him.

Look around you, regardless of your differences, diversity, individuality or uniqueness, if that person is a Christian then you are one. You share the life of God together.

2. Our unity has a purpose. The purpose of our unity for which Jesus prays is that our unity would impact our world. (John 17:21b-23)

Jesus said, "May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me." That sentence means that the world may have the opportunity to keep on believing. It includes the generations that come and go until the return of Jesus. It means those that first heard the gospel from the lips of early disciples to those who will believe today and all the tomorrows into the future. That world is impacted to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior of the world based on our realization of our unity as Christians.

How does the church convince the world of the reality of the greatness of Jesus? Is a person in Jonesboro impressed about the reality of the saving power of Jesus because of a 1.4 million dollar budget? No, they probably wonder, like most of our church members, "What do you need all that money for?" Is a person in Jonesboro impressed of their need of Christ because of the buildings and size of our facility? Will they be overwhelmed by their sin because of the size of our membership> Will they care what we average in Sunday School or how many we baptize? Does a person lost to Christ’s love and grace really have an interest in what mission agency we send our money to? Is a lost person affected by those things? Eventually, yes, but are those things the things that Jesus said will create faith in a person searching for eternal life? No! It is our unity as believers that impacts an unbelieving world to become a believing world.

Author Gilbert Bilezikian writes in his book Community 101, "This concern for the survival of the church down through the ages provides the explanation for the anguished tones of Jesus’ prayer. He knew that if the church should fail to demonstrate community to the world, it would fail to accomplish its mission because the world would have reason to disbelieve the gospel (John 17: 21,23). According to that prayer, the most convincing proof of the truth of the gospel is the perceptible oneness of his followers.

"In our day, whenever the church is ineffective and its witness remains unproductive, the first questions that must be raised are whether the church functions as authentic community and whether it lives out the reality of its oneness. In a community-starved world, the most potent means of witness to the truth of the gospel is the magnetic power of the oneness that was committed by Christ to his new community at the center of history."

The unity of our church is the primary witness that Jesus is God’s only way of salvation. A unity of this magnitude is only something God can do. The early church found itself free of the barriers between people of all kinds (Gal. 3:23). The differences of class, race and gender were lost in the oneness of new life in Christ.

By what means, though, is this unity achieved? How does it happen? Listen to what Jesus said: "I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you are in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (John 17:22-23). How does it happen? When we share the glory. The word glory means brightness or light. The glory is the expression of the life of Jesus Christ through you and me. That life, His life, cannot be overlooked, avoided or ignored. When all believers look at Him, they are united into one. To be drawn loser to the Light draws us close together.

My friends, we have no reason to point our finger at the Senate of the United States as SBC President Paige Patterson did and say that the demise of the nation will rest at the feet of the United State Senate because of their decision concerning the articles of impeachment against the president. Since when did the future of the world for which Jesus died rest in the hands of the Republicans or the Democrats? The fingers that need pointing are to the pews and pulpits of our churches. We cannot blame the world for not believing the message. We cannot point at the world and shame the world for not heeding. If we were more perfectly one, the world would be more perfectly believing. Jesus is saying to us that people will be saved when we live out our oneness.

3. These last words of our Lord tell us of our destiny as Christians: We are going to be with Jesus. So Jesus prays that our unity now would be a reflection of our destiny in eternity. (John 17:24-26).

As Jesus prays, our Lord makes a specific request: "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am" (v. 24). He looks ahead to our presence in heaven with Him. Remember He said that He was going to prepare a place for us. He had a specific reason for wanting us to be there.

The reason for the request is so that we might see His glory (v. 24). He wants us to behold, gaze at, and share in His perfect glory in the presence of the Father. You see, even now we are being changed more and more into reflecting the glory of God. Paul said, "And all of us have had that veil removed so that we can be mirrors that brightly reflect the glory of the Lord. And as the Spirit of the Lord works within us, we become more and more like him and reflect his glory even more" (II Cor. 3:18). The more we understand the more we become like Him. That knowledge and understanding will finally be complete when He returns. John said, "Yes, dear friends, we are already God’s children, and we can’t even imagine what we will be like when Christ returns. But we do know that when he comes we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is" (I John 3:2). But that transformation will go on forever as we stand in Christ’s presence forever and ever! (Rev. 21:22-22:5).

What this says to us now is this: We are going to be united in heaven so start practicing it now! This means there will be no segregation of any kind in heaven. There will not be sections marked off for those with different expressions of their faith now. For we will all be so focused on Him that whatever divides us now will be meaningless then.

Conclusion: I read this week about 150 churches in England that have banded together against a common enemy that threatens their survival as churches. The enemy is so ominous that it has brought churches of a variety of beliefs and differences together. What is this enemy? Is it some heresy or moral outrage? No, it’s bats! That’s right, the furry, winged, nocturnal mammal.

It seems that bats like to live in the older churches of England up in the rafters. Then the little fellows relieve themselves all over the place when they fly. The problem is that the bats are strictly protected by British law. So the churches have banded together despite their religious differences to change the law and rid themselves of a common enemy. One author said, "It is time for a religious crusade to drive the bats out of our churches."

Isn’t that interesting? When the church shares a common focus or a common foe, the divisions are meaningless. If the churches in England can band together to get rid of bats, what could they do together to influence their world for Christ? What could we do as First Baptist Church of Jonesboro, Arkansas if we really believed these words of Jesus? What would the communities of our world look like if we shared a common focus and saw our common enemy as Satan instead of each other? Is this unity easy? No, that’s why it is supernatural. The world is waiting to believe. Jesus is waiting for us to realize we are one. That’s His prayer for First Baptist Church.

Sunday, March 7, 1999

Dr. Bruce Tippit, Pastor

First Baptist Church

Jonesboro, Arkansas