10 I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,[a] in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.
I used to struggle with division that we had within our church. When I was on Governing Board I wondered out loud why if we all believe in Jesus and we are all seeking his will why would we have such different opinions on the vision/mission for our church? Why would we differ on social issues like gay marriage? God doesn't have multiple wills. He doesn't have multiple opinions on social issues, there is a right and wrong in his mind.
But in the end all I could come up with is that we are imperfect humans. We have differences because we are not all perfectly connected to God, we have gaps in our understanding. I think Paul was addressing this in the early church, but its obvious that even so close to the time of Jesus humans were far from having a complete understanding.
So its not to say give up trying, but I guess just to recognize that we probably will not ever be perfectly aligned in our understanding of God until we are with him. But don't let our differences in understanding be so black and white that we lose our direction and stop loving God and loving others.
knut
I think that's a great comment. And you're right. We will never fully agree with each other, on the things we are supposing about God. I like to think of it like this....imagine a crowd of people all looking directly at the person of Jesus. As long as we are all looking at him, we are fine. The minute we take our eyes off of him, and start looking at each other...then conflict arises. We start to see the differences among us, and it causes issues. If we all stay focused on Jesus, the conflict loses it power.
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