“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians 3:27-28

One of my favorite gifts to receive (and to give to others) is a gift card to a nice restaurant. Food is definitely a love language of mine in case you haven’t figured that out yet. At the same time, one of the most frustrating moments of my life is when I show up at a restaurant that I have a gift card to, enjoy my meal, only to realize at the end that I left the gift card at home. In one sense, that meal was already paid for, but I’m not reaping the benefits of that reality at that moment because I didn’t bring the gift card with me.

I think that’s really similar to how many of us try to approach unity and peace within the body of Christ. Jesus, through His blood and sacrificial death, has purchased our salvation and broken down all walls of partiality and hostility that exist. And yet, we sometimes decide to leave the Gospel ‘at home’ (figuratively speaking) and try to pursue man-made and culturally constructed methods of peace and reconciliation. We are trying to create a unity that Jesus has already made possible through His blood.

Because we are “in Christ", we have also been perfectly united with our brothers and sisters who are also in Him. Jesus prayed this way in John 17:

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”
John 17:20-23

This is yet another case where God has empowered us to do the very thing He calls us to; we are called to live in unity and peace with one another and we are empowered by the Spirit of Christ in us to do so. This is why sins such as racism or any other form of partiality must be confronted and repented of. It’s not just that we need to apologize and seek to find ‘common ground.’ After all, these sins don’t rise up simply because we can’t find enough common ground and get along - James says they happen because our “passions are at war within us” (James 4:1-3). So to get rid of hostility, anger, bitterness, wrath, etc, we must repent and seek Christ. He is our peace. He is our unity.

This also ties back to the conversation about seeking justice because James says, “a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace” (James 3:18). We saw in the last blog post that righteousness and justice are the same word in the original languages of Scripture. If you want to truly see justice, sow the peace of God that was made available to you through the sacrificial death and atoning work of Jesus Christ.

Once again we find that the answer to the problems we see in our world and in our own hearts is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Let us lay aside the secondary and powerless systems for unity that our world offers and pursue the peace that only Jesus can provide through repentance and faith in the Gospel.