United in Christ

In The Beginning

Last week we talked about how life is a story, the Bible is the history of our faith and how we connect with God through our faith. As with any good story it has to have a beginning and we get that from Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The beginning of creation is where our story starts and we will continue to follow and see where it leads us.

In the beginning things were great, the creation story shows the love of God in the world, of how He created all things and how they all exist for the people that He created. We had all we needed in the beginning, there was no sickness, no death, war, fighting, broken relationships, no hate and God looks at all He created and He said that it was very good.

Can we imagine a life like that today? Where all is good, we have no worries, no trips to the doctor, all the bills are paid, money in the bank, we have no enemies and most of all, we have a great relationship with God.

In the beginning all things were good but they couldn’t stay that way because of something else that God created us, humankind. All of creation existed together with no issues, no hatred or fear, only with unity and there was a reason for this. Genesis says that we were created in God’s image and that applies to nature as well, everything on the earth was united and we can’t even imagine what that looks like much less would feel like. Things were great for a while but then, here we come to destroy everything God had created.

The fall of man contaminated all that God gave us, not only did we defile it, we turned against God. Now, Adam and Eve had no idea what they were doing by eating the fruit, there was no way for them to fully understand the consequences of their action, the sheer magnitude of their actions that would ripple across time for all eternity. We often think of this as the fall of man but for our purposes today let’s look at it as separation, because that is what the result was, it separated Adam from Eve and both of them from God.

Today we still deal with separation that they began, not only from God but from each other still today. We experience this today in the forms such as racism, rich from poor, republican vs democrat, young vs old and many more. The point is that we have been separated from each other since not long after God created us. The division that started then hasn’t slowed down, in fact it speeds up, we continue to open the divide between us as a people and the result of this more hatred and less love, assuming we have any love left or truly loved each other at all. Despite all of this things, there exists in us a

Primal Longing for Unity and Oneness

Why is this? It is how we were created. God says, “it is not good for man to be alone.” We were created to be in community with each other and I’ll show you how we know this.

There exists in nearly every tribe, nations and religion throughout history a similar story of the fall, a time where we were once good, a paradise lost, a time without evil and suffering. We all have a desire for happiness, yet no one is perfectly happy. We all want wisdom yet no one is perfectly wise. But that doesn’t stop us from reaching for these things because it’s almost like we can remember Eden and can’t recapture it, like kings and queens dressed in rags who are wandering the the world in search for their thrones. If we had never had any of these things, then why would we constantly be searching for them?

If we had always been beggars, why would we be discontent today?? The fact that we have something in us that tells us that we do not except ourselves as we are, that we irrationally disobey the great commandment to love our God and also each other, tells us that we must on some level not obvious to us desire and somehow remember, a better state, a better us. Once we lost Eden we have spent lifetimes trying to reclaim it.

We have seen times in recent memory where we the people have longed for unity among us because God created us to live in community with each other, to live in harmony with Him and each other. Think about these things:

MLK’s speech, “I have a dream”. It’s difficult to listen to this speech and not be moved by emotion. I have it in my phone and have listened to it hundreds of times. He is speaking during a very divisive time to a divided country and it moves us to believe in unity. Some say that this is truly “just a dream”, but it’s the right dream to have because it’s the dream that God has, it’s the plan that God put into place in the beginning. It’s what the prophets of the OT speak about, of people coming together and loving God first and letting that love overflow onto one another.

John Lennon’s song “Imagine”: No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people. Sharing all the world. You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one.”

Now John Lennon from what we know, didn’t know Christ the way he should have, never realized that Christ was the answer that came in the form of the love, peace, unity can only be found through our faith in Jesus Christ. He outright denied that Christ was the only way these things could be found, yet, he still wrote songs about it, and that comes from somewhere and that somewhere is Christ and he, like many others have been so misled by the world today that we never see it and we never see the truth that is Jesus Christ. Have we become so disillusioned that today we fail to see this also? Not teaching and living the ways of Christ and His plan for the world?

The 1971 commercial, the most popular one ever made: I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love grow apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I’d like to buy the world a coke and keep it company. The ad showed people of all races and nationalities holding a bottle of coke while singing this song. The longing was there also.

We long to be a part of something larger than ourselves, to be in community together, we thrive on it while maybe never understanding why we do this. Ever been to a concert, ball game, these bring us together. Even great trauma and tragedy bring us together if only for a moment, such at 9-11. What we are doing is substituting one thing for another, trying to find a temporary, mortal fix to a spiritual problem and so therefore the problem is never fixed but there must be a solution.

God gave us a solution.

Ephesians 2:1 “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,”

Ephesians 2:1 NKJV

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,

God knew that the only way we could unite again was through the blood of Jesus Christ. We separated ourselves from God and each other and because of that we are all spiritually dead from the separation from God. We alone make the choice to turn our back to God, to not love God as we should and because of that we are spiritually dead. Life comes from God, he breathed life into us and when we choose to leave a life with God, we choose death.

The solution to this is the resurrection of Jesus Christ and us being resurrected with Him. There is nothing that you can do to accomplish this on your own. This resurrection comes from the love of Christ

Ephesians 2:4–6 NKJV

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

God gives us life and then gives us work to do. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Eph 2:10.

God wants to use us to accomplish His work in the world and what work is that? It is to love God. When we can love God and have the relationship that we should have then everything that flows from us will be used for Him. We won’t be able to stop the work, it’ll flow from us and cover everything around us, touch every point in our lives, the lives of those around us, friends, family, the person that cuts us off in traffic, driving slow in the left lane, we will show this love not because we have to, not from obligation but from the light of Christ beaming from us and bringing light to the darkest parts of our soul, others and the world. What kind of world would we live in if that were to happen? We would possibly look like Eden again.

We would become one nation.

It would affect our nation. Verses 11-13 says that once we were in the flesh and without Christ, we were excluded, aliens and strangers,

The New King James Version (Chapter 2)

...having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Eph. 2:12-13

One people.

The New King James Version Chapter 2

14 For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation,

No longer Jew and Gentile, black or white. We belong to one culture, one body and that is the body of Christ. We are no longer separated because God has removed the barriers that separate us and bring us into His body, raised us with Him to live in the unity and peace that was put in place when He laid the foundation of the world and that makes us all one family.

We are one household that is the household of God.

The New King James Version Chapter 2

19 Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God

We are the body of Christ, we are where Christ lives so using another song, and this is one of my favorites, Pink Floyd was right: All in all you are just another brick in the wall. But what a wall! We are part of the glorious dwelling place of God on earth!

Ephesians is telling us that we belong, we belong to something much bigger than ourselves, something our mind can’t even comprehend. We are part of something as big as time itself, we are those bricks that form the kingdom, the household of God. One brick on top of each other, surrounded by all the other bricks that support each other, defend each other against the evil of this world and together we light up the world with the love of God within us, if we choose to do so.

You were created, molded and designed with this light, it’s there but maybe you have to push everything that doesn’t look like Christ out of your life. The light of Christ is brighter than the deepest darkness of this world, the love of God is stronger than the deepest hate.

Paul us continuing to show us that we are part of a much bigger story, a story created by God, foretold by the prophets. With the love of God with us, our acceptance of Jesus Christ, we continue to move the story along as the Christian people God created.

We must live the life that God created and desires for us today and stop living the life we want, using whatever excuse we can to justify our actions. When Christ was crucified, what led to that? To give what may be a very simple explanation, He was crucified because those that charged and arrested Him had what they needed, through the life that Jesus lived, His actions, words and heart, they had enough evidence to convict him to prove He was who He said He was. That’s why they killed Him. What evidence is their in your life that Satan can use against you? What does your story tell about your life?