Kingdom Offerings
Exploring the offerings of scripture concerning the Kingdom of God and becoming aware of the handwriting of Jesus Christ across all of history.
Unity or Separation?
May 13, 2024
Transcript
Hello again. This is Dave Scherrer and this is also One Hundred-Fold Ministries and this is also Kingdom Offerings. This is the podcast environment of the ministry that’s all about the Gospel of the Kingdom.
I’m wondering today whether you remember this moment. I’m wondering if you recognize this voice. I bet you do.
It’s recorded in the Bible as Jesus praying for us, for our unity as believers. And one of the things I’m imagining that will be remarkable about Heaven is that all of Heaven will be united. There’ll be unity. You might even be able to generalize that Heaven itself is kind of all about unity. Maybe that’s one way of thinking about it. It’s going to be a place where we are finally able to live at peace with one another.
We’ll be at perfect peace with God. And maybe most importantly, we’ll be at perfect peace with ourselves. A kind of a tri-fold unity that, well, we don’t have any hope, it seems, of capturing that here on Earth. And the sentiment of President Biden is that the conflict that we’re feeling now in our country has much of its roots in this lack of unity idea.
And I guess, indeed, we are feeling the effects of sin and this disunity that we feel in our nation these days is for real. We largely hate it. So, let’s go unpack this a little bit because we’ll remember that Jesus did in fact pray for us in the upper room before He was betrayed and that we would be united.
In John, Chapter 17, Jesus talking, Jesus talking to the Father, He says this, “Father that they may all be one just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also 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, you and 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.”
Well, that’s pretty clear. In Jesus’ mind, in the mind of the triune God, that we would be at peace one to another, at peace with God, that’s what we’re living for.
Jesus’s good friend, the disciple Peter, he writes in a similar fashion in his old age in the first letter of Peter. In chapter three, it says, “Finally, all of you, have unity of mind.” Then he goes on to build on that. “Unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart and a humble mind.” You can see how Peter in his old age kind of softened up. And in his mind and heart is this idea of unity.
I want to pull us back for a second because before we can experience this spiritual heavenly unity, God has some work to do. God has some separating to do. And actually, when you think about it, there’s quite a bit of teaching in the Bible by Jesus and with others about separating. In fact, maybe more so than these unity themes that we spoke about just a moment ago.
God has some separating to do in order to make all things right, to the glory of the King and to his soon to be completed kingdom. So let’s refresh our memory with some passages about some separating or sifting that Jesus is pretty clear about. Because the truth of the matter is, is that before unity can happen, truth must have its full day in court. So, I’m going to rip through some Bible verses here for a minute to help us see the full picture.
I’m going to start in Matthew chapter three. And this is John the Baptist talking, but he’s going to make it clear. John says this. He says, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I’m not even worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gather his weed into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” That sounds like some separating going on.
Matthew 25 – this is a long passage – I’m just going to tell the first part of it. But what we read is Jesus talking about some judging in the end times. He says, “When the Son of Man comes to His glory” in Matthew 25, this is verse 31, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. And he will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”
And he will go on to describe how the sheep are welcome in His community and how the goats are not – won’t be invited to the Kingdom. He tells a story, Jesus does, that has some separating, some winnowing in it. Matthew 13, we read another parable he put forth to them, saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man.” And I love it when he’s doing this.
It’s so clear that Jesus is trying to press the point of what the Kingdom of Heaven is like and what are the non-negotiable truths associated with the Kingdom of Heaven. So in Matthew 13, he tells his story, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares (weeds) among the wheat and went his way. When the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.
So, the servants of the owner came and said to him, “Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares? How does it have these weeds?” And he said to them, “Well, an enemy has done this.” And the servant said to him, “Do you want us then to go in and gather them up?” And he said, “No, lest while you gather up the tares, you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of the harvest, I will say to the reapers, ‘First gather together the tares and bind them in the bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.”
And now this final vision of separation from Revelation, this powerful moment of the King on His throne, Revelation chapter 20.
“Then I saw” (John speaking of his revelation) “a great white throne and him who was seated on it. And from his presence, earth and sky fled away and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. And then another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done.”
It turns out that God is, indeed, about the business of separating. We might say purifying. Maybe even more primarily than that idea of unity. The idea of unity, I think, stands on the foundation of this idea of purity.
God, we can see, is separating based on a person’s convictions on who this Jesus really is. The question is, indeed, is he merely a good moral teacher? Maybe he’s a political revolutionary. Some see him as a nice but misguided teacher. Who is he? Or is he who he actually claimed who he was?
He’s the Son of the living God, the Messiah, the incarnation of God Himself. He’s the crucified and resurrected ransom for sinners slain. And at the same time, he is the King of kings and He is destined to rule his Kingdom people. So here’s the rub as I see it as we pursue this idea of unity in the face of this profound separation that God is about. We have wrongly seen unity as merely the absence of conflict.
If we look at it that way, then it follows that to have peace, some would say we have to make compromises. Today as I record this, there is an effort underway to secure promises from Israel and the Hamas in order to have a ceasefire in that war that’s tearing the world apart really right now. They’re looking for a temporary peace so that humanitarian aid can be offered and maybe we can secure the release of the hostages.
But the difficulty has been finding those compromises in order to secure a peace. That’s been hard. As we move forward in these podcasts, I want to speak a little bit more about the basic truths of the Gospel of the Kingdom that we must not compromise on for the sake of unity. The Scriptures give us this rule.
It’s our friend Peter again who said, “We must obey God rather than men” as he’s facing the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees really in a court of law. And he goes on to say, “The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree, God exalted him at his right hand as King and Savior to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”
I feel like Peter is making his case that truth is supreme over unity. You know, Jesus quite famously said that the world will hate us as His disciples because they hated Himself first.
If it becomes our intent as the 21st Century Church to promote peace at the compromise of the truth, we will find that we, in fact, have neither. We must look at the culture through the lens of the eternal scriptures and not look at the scriptures through today’s lens of a passing culture. All right, so check in again in a couple of weeks.
We’re going to continue on in this conversation because I believe it is a vital conversation as we look at our culture and we look at the church’s response to the culture. If we compromise on the truth of the Gospel of the Kingdom in the hope of appeasing conflict and then calling that state “peace”, well, we’ve now officially lost everything.
So, this is Dave Scherrer and this is One Hundred-Fold Ministries. Come back and visit us at our website, 100foldministries.org and there’s a blog and some other resources there as well. Peace to you.
I’m wondering today whether you remember this moment. I’m wondering if you recognize this voice. I bet you do.
We can see each other, not as adversaries, but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces – stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress – only exhausting outrage. No nation – only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. And unity is the path forward.
It’s recorded in the Bible as Jesus praying for us, for our unity as believers. And one of the things I’m imagining that will be remarkable about Heaven is that all of Heaven will be united. There’ll be unity. You might even be able to generalize that Heaven itself is kind of all about unity. Maybe that’s one way of thinking about it. It’s going to be a place where we are finally able to live at peace with one another.
We’ll be at perfect peace with God. And maybe most importantly, we’ll be at perfect peace with ourselves. A kind of a tri-fold unity that, well, we don’t have any hope, it seems, of capturing that here on Earth. And the sentiment of President Biden is that the conflict that we’re feeling now in our country has much of its roots in this lack of unity idea.
And I guess, indeed, we are feeling the effects of sin and this disunity that we feel in our nation these days is for real. We largely hate it. So, let’s go unpack this a little bit because we’ll remember that Jesus did in fact pray for us in the upper room before He was betrayed and that we would be united.
In John, Chapter 17, Jesus talking, Jesus talking to the Father, He says this, “Father that they may all be one just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also 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, you and 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.”
Well, that’s pretty clear. In Jesus’ mind, in the mind of the triune God, that we would be at peace one to another, at peace with God, that’s what we’re living for.
Jesus’s good friend, the disciple Peter, he writes in a similar fashion in his old age in the first letter of Peter. In chapter three, it says, “Finally, all of you, have unity of mind.” Then he goes on to build on that. “Unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart and a humble mind.” You can see how Peter in his old age kind of softened up. And in his mind and heart is this idea of unity.
I want to pull us back for a second because before we can experience this spiritual heavenly unity, God has some work to do. God has some separating to do. And actually, when you think about it, there’s quite a bit of teaching in the Bible by Jesus and with others about separating. In fact, maybe more so than these unity themes that we spoke about just a moment ago.
God has some separating to do in order to make all things right, to the glory of the King and to his soon to be completed kingdom. So let’s refresh our memory with some passages about some separating or sifting that Jesus is pretty clear about. Because the truth of the matter is, is that before unity can happen, truth must have its full day in court. So, I’m going to rip through some Bible verses here for a minute to help us see the full picture.
I’m going to start in Matthew chapter three. And this is John the Baptist talking, but he’s going to make it clear. John says this. He says, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I’m not even worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gather his weed into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” That sounds like some separating going on.
Matthew 25 – this is a long passage – I’m just going to tell the first part of it. But what we read is Jesus talking about some judging in the end times. He says, “When the Son of Man comes to His glory” in Matthew 25, this is verse 31, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. And he will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”
And he will go on to describe how the sheep are welcome in His community and how the goats are not – won’t be invited to the Kingdom. He tells a story, Jesus does, that has some separating, some winnowing in it. Matthew 13, we read another parable he put forth to them, saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man.” And I love it when he’s doing this.
It’s so clear that Jesus is trying to press the point of what the Kingdom of Heaven is like and what are the non-negotiable truths associated with the Kingdom of Heaven. So in Matthew 13, he tells his story, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares (weeds) among the wheat and went his way. When the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.
So, the servants of the owner came and said to him, “Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares? How does it have these weeds?” And he said to them, “Well, an enemy has done this.” And the servant said to him, “Do you want us then to go in and gather them up?” And he said, “No, lest while you gather up the tares, you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of the harvest, I will say to the reapers, ‘First gather together the tares and bind them in the bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.”
And now this final vision of separation from Revelation, this powerful moment of the King on His throne, Revelation chapter 20.
“Then I saw” (John speaking of his revelation) “a great white throne and him who was seated on it. And from his presence, earth and sky fled away and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. And then another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done.”
It turns out that God is, indeed, about the business of separating. We might say purifying. Maybe even more primarily than that idea of unity. The idea of unity, I think, stands on the foundation of this idea of purity.
God, we can see, is separating based on a person’s convictions on who this Jesus really is. The question is, indeed, is he merely a good moral teacher? Maybe he’s a political revolutionary. Some see him as a nice but misguided teacher. Who is he? Or is he who he actually claimed who he was?
He’s the Son of the living God, the Messiah, the incarnation of God Himself. He’s the crucified and resurrected ransom for sinners slain. And at the same time, he is the King of kings and He is destined to rule his Kingdom people. So here’s the rub as I see it as we pursue this idea of unity in the face of this profound separation that God is about. We have wrongly seen unity as merely the absence of conflict.
If we look at it that way, then it follows that to have peace, some would say we have to make compromises. Today as I record this, there is an effort underway to secure promises from Israel and the Hamas in order to have a ceasefire in that war that’s tearing the world apart really right now. They’re looking for a temporary peace so that humanitarian aid can be offered and maybe we can secure the release of the hostages.
But the difficulty has been finding those compromises in order to secure a peace. That’s been hard. As we move forward in these podcasts, I want to speak a little bit more about the basic truths of the Gospel of the Kingdom that we must not compromise on for the sake of unity. The Scriptures give us this rule.
It’s our friend Peter again who said, “We must obey God rather than men” as he’s facing the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees really in a court of law. And he goes on to say, “The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree, God exalted him at his right hand as King and Savior to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”
I feel like Peter is making his case that truth is supreme over unity. You know, Jesus quite famously said that the world will hate us as His disciples because they hated Himself first.
If it becomes our intent as the 21st Century Church to promote peace at the compromise of the truth, we will find that we, in fact, have neither. We must look at the culture through the lens of the eternal scriptures and not look at the scriptures through today’s lens of a passing culture. All right, so check in again in a couple of weeks.
We’re going to continue on in this conversation because I believe it is a vital conversation as we look at our culture and we look at the church’s response to the culture. If we compromise on the truth of the Gospel of the Kingdom in the hope of appeasing conflict and then calling that state “peace”, well, we’ve now officially lost everything.
So, this is Dave Scherrer and this is One Hundred-Fold Ministries. Come back and visit us at our website, 100foldministries.org and there’s a blog and some other resources there as well. Peace to you.