The Means to Spiritual Unity

And that's where you have to start, getting rid of that consuming and destructive pride that is rooted deep in our fallen flesh that makes us want to push our own way and our own course, personal ambition with the idea of focusing mostly on our own agenda. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. As much as frustrated fans like to use the word, it's hard to justify calling a professional sports team bad. After all, these players are the world's best, as are the coaches. So what is it that makes one team better than another? Often it has to do with a selfless attitude among the players, a fervent commitment to a common goal rather than just personal glory. In a word, great teams have unity. Well today on Grace To You, John MacArthur considers the unity God calls for in his church. It's the next installment of John's series, A Plea for Unity.

And now with today's lesson, here's John MacArthur. Paul writes, if therefore there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in Spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind, let each of you regard one another as more important than himself.

Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Now in verse 1, we remember in this passage the Apostle Paul in speaking on the formula for spiritual unity gives us the motives for unity. He answers the question, why? Why unity? And he says, because Christ has given us so much encouragement, because Christ has given us the comfort of love, because the Holy Spirit has come to fellowship with us, because the Holy Spirit has dispensed to us affection and compassion, for those four surpassing reasons we ought to honor Christ and the Holy Spirit by fulfilling a very deep desire of their heart and that is the unity of the church. Christ prayed for that unity. The Spirit produces that unity because of all that Christ and the Spirit have done for us. We certainly should be of the same mind, maintaining that same love, united in Spirit and intent on one purpose. We should manifest unity motivated by the goodness of Christ and the goodness of the Holy Spirit on our behalf. And then he adds that other motive, verse 2, make my joy complete not only for the sake of Christ and the Spirit, but for the joy of the shepherd, the pastor who's given so much of his life to them.

That's the motive. Then last time we looked at the marks. What are the defining characteristics of unity? He says them in verse 2, being of the same mind, thinking alike, being spiritually minded, knowing the mind of Christ, the mind of God, the mind of the Spirit as revealed in the Word. And then he says, maintaining the same love. It is not just what we know, it is how we conduct ourselves with one another and having the same love means equal sacrificial service to those in need no matter who they are and no matter what personal human emotion we might have toward them or not have. We are to love each other the same. Then he says we are to be united in Spirit, one-souled. God means having one compelling, driving desire and passion. We are to live for the kingdom. We are to be consumed by the kingdom and the Lord of the kingdom. And then intent on one purpose and that is that God would fulfill His will and be glorified. And where we think alike and love each other the same and have that one driving passion, intending to fulfill that one great purpose of glorifying God, we will have the marks of unity. That's the question what. That describes what unity is.

Now we come to the third point in verses 3 and 4 and the question is how. How do we get that unity? What is the means of unity, the motives, the marks, and the means? What is the means to unity?

How does it practically come about? There are five practical principles given here. They are interrelated and interconnected but we can sort of pull out five points.

Three of them are negative and two of them are positive. There are some things to exclude and some to include. Obedience always has a negative and a positive side, what we must not do and what we must do. And here's where we can do personal inventory in our lives. Here's where we examine our internal process of thinking and motivation, alright?

Let's look at these five. Number one, and these are the means to unity. First one, do nothing from selfishness. Stop at that point. Do nothing from selfishness. Eliminate that from your motives. Do nothing from selfishness. There's no verb here in the original but nonetheless the form of it takes the force of a negative command.

He's saying, never act out of Arethaeon. Now that word means selfish ambition, selfish ambition. It refers in some uses to strife because that's tied in. As soon as you become selfish, you are literally at war with everybody else. It can be used to refer to a party spirit, factions, rivalry, partisanship.

That's the idea. It's the kind of self-seeking that leads to quarreling, hassling, haggling, fighting, arguing, contending. And by the way, it is listed in Galatians 5.20 as a work of the flesh.

It is not a work of the spirit, it is a work of the flesh. It is egotism. Egotism that is intent on advancing itself. Egotism driven by personal desire which is always destructive and disruptive. And that's where you have to start with slaying the giant of selfishness, getting rid of that consuming and destructive pride that is rooted deep in our fallen flesh that makes us want to push our own way and our own course, personal ambition with the idea of focusing mostly on our own agenda. The next word focuses a little more on self than this one. This is my cause, my faction, my group, my objective.

It can be such a disruptive thing. It happened in Corinth, 1 Corinthians 1 verse 10. Paul exhorts the Corinthian brethren by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to all agree and says there should be no division among you. Now there was division among them and it was basically over this kind of faction orientation.

He says, each one of you is saying in verse 12, I am of Paul, I have Apollos, I have Cephas, I have Christ. They divided themselves into little factions. Well, we're the Paul group, we're the Peter group. Ah, well, we're the Apollos group. Well, we're the Christ group. I don't know particularly what divided them up. You could speculate on what the significant issues in the teaching of Paul, Peter, Apollos, and Christ were on which they sort of camped with their isolationist mentality.

But the point is they had divided into little factions. He says to them in chapter 3, you're men of flesh. I have to speak to you as to men of flesh.

You're not spiritual. As I said in Galatians 5, 20, this is one of the works of the flesh. You're fleshy and it all stems out of the flesh and he says in verse 3, jealousy and strife. And that's why you're saying I'm of Paul and I'm of Apollos and so forth. The flesh produces selfishness and one becomes consumed with his own little enterprise.

It may in itself be a good one, certainly nothing wrong with Paul, Paul, Peter, or Christ. The agenda in itself may be valid. But once selfishness takes over the agenda, then jealousy rises and out of jealousy comes strife and out of strife comes conflict and the loss of unity. So you have to start with selfishness, personal ambition for your cause. Your cause isn't all there is. And so he says, look, first of all, do nothing with that kind of motive, absolutely nothing.

Eliminate it from your life. Secondly, he adds to it and there's really a lot of overlap in the two, but he says, do nothing from selfishness and then says in the Greek text, nor according to vainglory, kenadoxia, according to empty conceit is a good way to translate that. By the way, it's used only here.

It is used in the Greek Old Testament, but never in the New Testament. It is a state of mind that seeks personal glory. The first word, ambition, ties a person in with an enterprise where this is purely personal glory being emphasized.

As I said, there's an overlap. But I would just like to draw out the idea here that this seems to focus on personal glory. If you look at the word more deeply, you see here a person who assertively, arrogantly claims to have the right opinion, who is in fact in error.

That's Kenos. He has erroneous opinion. He has an erroneous opinion of himself. He is conceited without reason. He is deluded. He seeks self-promotion and self-glory.

He will fight to prove himself supreme. And wherever you have that kind of attitude, you have discord. This is personal vanity. The first word is the factionalism that comes from an enterprise that is selfishly held, and this is that personal self-advancement emphasis. So you eliminate both those things. Then the third principle is a positive one. But, with humility of mind, let each of you regard one another as more important than himself.

In a sense, this is the corrective for the two negative ones. Instead of being personally ambitious and personally vain, on the other hand, rather than being proud, which both of those things reflect, maintain humility of mind. That's where unity always begins.

We've said it over and over and over again. Unity is born out of humility. Humility of mind is one word in the Greek, and apparently, as best we can tell, it is not found in any Greek writing before the New Testament, which means that the New Testament, really the New Testament writers invent this word.

The adjective form, tapenas, was often used to describe the mentality of a slave, to convey the idea of being base, shabby, unfit, low, common, valueless, useless. So it wasn't a virtue. It was a term of derision. Humility was never seen in the pre-New Testament pagan world as a virtue.

It was always seen as something ugly, never to be sought, certainly never to be admired. In the Old Testament, God did hail the virtue of humility. If you read the Old Testament, you find that He chose the insignificant and the humble for His work. You read that He saved the lowly and He saved the meek and He saved the humble and He heard the prayers of the downcast and He gave grace to the lowly. So it was there all the time in the Old Testament, but paganism never picked it up. And in paganism, to be humble was to be base, common, useless, valueless, worthless.

And all of a sudden when you come to the New Testament, it gets turned into a virtue and He defines it. Humility of mind here is regarding one another as more important than yourself. That's it. Very simple. More important could be translated superior, superior.

You say, how can I do that? How can I think of others superior to myself? I mean, we don't do that very often. In fact, we usually think of others as less than ourselves. We gloat, don't we, over talking about other people's failures.

How can you consider, from Hegel, oh my, how can you consider others superior to yourself? I mean, honestly, how can you do that? How can you deal with that issue?

Let me give you a suggestion. Do you know the heart of any other person? Do you know what's in any other person's heart? Do you? No. Do you think you do?

Sometimes. You may be right, you may not. I mean, a wife may say to her husband, huh, I know what you're thinking. She may be right, she may not. If she's not, it's very frustrating for him.

If she's right, it's even more frustrating. But basically, we don't know what's in somebody's heart. The only sin that I know in another person is what I can see or hear.

That's all I'm going to know. So, I can't really know what's in their heart. I can't know what sin torments them.

I can't know what graces abound within them. But there is one heart that I do know, mine. And I know my own heart so very well that I know the sin of my own heart.

Now, think about it this way. You know more sin about your own heart than you do about anybody else's, right? So, if we're talking from the level of first-hand information, who is the worst sinner you have ever met?

Who is it? Come on, be honest. You.

I'm talking first-hand information. Who's got the most corrupt mind you know of? If you're honest, you're going to say me because you don't know what's in somebody else's heart. Now, what I'm saying to you, dear friend, is you've got enough personal information to put yourself in a position where you can consider others superior to you.

Did you get that? That's a pretty practical way to view it. Every man knows his own heart first. And every man who knows his own heart and every woman who knows her own heart knows what is there. And you have enough information to give yourself a low estimate of what you really are.

So do I. So it shouldn't be any major issue for me to look at someone else as superior to myself. We can assume people are superior to us spiritually if all we can see is what's on the outside. What makes Paul say the things that he says? You look at Paul and you say, oh, Paul, I mean, you're the greatest Christian to ever live.

This is what he said. I'm the least of all the apostles who I'm not fit to be called an apostle. He says, is that false humility?

No. That's because the person he knows best is whom? Paul. Now, why does he say this? 1 Timothy. It's a trustworthy statement. Chapter 1, verse 15, deserving full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners among whom I am chief, foremost, past tense, present tense. Now, how in the world can Paul say he's the worst sinner in the world? From personal information, he is. That's right. And from all that you know personally, so are you.

So am I. Now, that perspective ought to help us to look at others with a different view. Problems of discord and problems of division and faction end when we hold others as more worthy of respect and honor and a right to be heard and followed than we do ourselves. And you shouldn't have any problem doing that because of the information you have about your own heart. A fourth principle, verse 4, do not merely look out for your own personal interests.

Oh, what can we say about this? We live in a society where that's all anybody cares about their own personal interests. And Paul says, Do not merely look out for your own personal interests.

The opposite. You need to be responsible for the conditions and matters of your own life, but don't merely be concerned with that. The idea here of that verb look out for is to regard as your aim or your goal. Don't regard as your aim or goal or purpose in life to take care of only your own personal enterprises. How can we communicate how desperately important it is for us to get passionately involved in the causes of others? That's why we have conflict, even in the church, because we only own our own little piece of the pie. We don't see the big picture.

We don't even care about someone else's enterprise. Oh, and this fleshes out in such pitiable minutia in the church. You need to give attention to your own personal interests. And the idea here, I believe, has to do with legitimate interests, ministry interests, things that would honor the Lord, things that are part of our responsibility as Christians, but don't merely do that, but also for the interests of others. The word interest, by the way, is things, very generic, and there's a whole lot page after page of discussion and commentaries about what the things means. And if the Lord had been as generic as He has been here in inspiring Paul, we can assume that He wanted our understanding to be a bit generic, too. So it leads me to say that He isn't trying to be specific. He is just saying, while you're busy attending to the matters which are on your own heart and are your own responsibility, be equally concerned about the same matters in the lives of those around you.

That's the idea. You want to encompass their interests and their enterprises and their needs and their tasks and their goals and their gifts and their spiritual character and their ministries and their qualities and their strength and their significance to the Lord and to the body should be equally important to you as your own. Boy, this is a high standard, isn't it? You know, our fallenness has a difficult time in literally giving all of its energy, all of our energy, to a cause and pouring our soul into that cause and being equally concerned about everybody else's cause. That's not easy, but that's a high standard. I mean, I look at the Christian community and it is tragic to see all of the conflict and competition, really tragic, just unbelievable. And I see it every week of my life, competition, making sure that you don't horn in on their territory or talk to somebody who might be interested in their ministry rather than your ministry and tremendous conflict at the highest levels and all the way down to the even personal matters in the church. Simple principles, aren't they?

High standard. Eliminate selfishness. That's that personal ambition that ties you into your little piece of turf. Eliminate empty conceit.

That's the driving passion to see your name exalted and your person lifted up. The corrective for that is the third principle. Look at others as superior to yourself and that'll allow you to give to them more attention than you give yourself, more trust, more confidence, and to think more highly of them. And then the fourth principle in verse four, again, a negative one, don't merely look out for your own personal interests.

Don't get caught in that particular trap where your life is consumed with your own things. Finally, the fifth, but also be concerned with the interests of others who have every right to your concern and your prayers. As I said, this is a tremendously high standard and we would expect it.

Would we expect anything less? If we can live out these things, we can eliminate competition and we can eliminate collisions in the church and in the body of Christ. There's one more point and I close with this, the model. Who do we look to to show us how to do this? Verse five, Paul says, what I'm asking for is this attitude that was in Christ Jesus. Christ is our model. He says, have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus. He had it. Really?

Yes. He did nothing from selfishness. Everything he did really was fulfilling the father's will and the father's will was being expressed for our sake. He did nothing for empty conceit, not hardly.

They spit on him and killed him with humility of mind. He regarded others as more important than himself. You say, did he really do that? Yes, he did. He regarded others more important than himself.

In what sense? Verse six, although he existed in the form of God, he didn't regard equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a bond servant being made in the likeness of man being found in appearance as a man. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. He did not look on his own things, on his own interests, but on the things of others, and he set aside his own importance and looked at others as superior in the sense that he died to give them life. He is the living model of the principles in verses three and four. He is our model.

So I said the standard is high. The only one who ever lived it to perfection was Jesus Christ, but it is ours to pursue. Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, showed you how to do your part to build unity as he continued his study called A Plea for Unity. John, I think we understand that it's hard to find a church that is as unified as it should be. Maybe no such church exists, but some people would be grateful simply to find a church that they can call home. We had a woman named Candace who called our Q&A line with a question along those lines, and so let me have you listen to what Candace says, and then you give your response. You and your family follow Jesus Christ, and you have no church family where you are, because of false teachings. What do you suggest that a man of God, a woman of God, be in that situation when they have no support spiritually, nobody to pray for them, nobody to care for their souls? Oh, my, that's a painful reality, Candace, but I know it's not uncommon.

I mean, I hear your heart on that, and I know there are many like that because we hear that so very frequently. The obvious response to that is that's one of the reasons Grace to You is here. We don't want to be the church, but when there is no alternative, we will be whatever we need to be in your life, and we'll be that five days a week.

And even more than that, if you come on the website, the resources are endless. So I would say you need to be able to find, however possible, some other folks that you can build relationships with. And it may be that there are a few good people in a church that's not everything it should be, because that's exactly what you see in the book of Revelation. In the second and third chapter, the Lord sends letters to churches, and five of those churches were churches in severe decline. But the Lord identifies in those churches, even in decline, even unfaithful churches, even churches that He threatened to remove their witness, their lampstand, there were some who had not had their garments stained. There were some who were true and faithful, and He commends them. So I think you may find in a church where it's not all that you would want it to be, you may find others whose hearts are tight to the truth like yours is, and you may flourish in that situation more if you have that kind of fellowship than if you don't.

So it comes down to find the best you can, and the Lord understands that even if you're in a church that He is going to judge, those kinds of churches, like in the book of Revelation, had faithful people, and the Lord protected and blessed them in that environment. Thank you, Jon. And friend, if you have never called our Q&A line, I encourage you to do so. You can leave a question, and you may hear Jon answer it on a future broadcast.

Get in touch with us today. The Q&A line number is 661-295-6288. Again, that's 661-295-6288. You can just leave a message with your question, and you may hear Jon's answer on a future broadcast.

That number one more time for questions, 661-295-6288. You'll find it also on our website, gty.org. And if you have a question you want answered right away, our website has multiple resources to help you understand God's Word. The most effective, Jon's sermon archive, has 3500 messages that cover every verse in the New Testament, and many in the Old. Or check out the Grace To You blog. You can read practical articles on subjects like salvation, spiritual growth, spiritual gifts. The website also has daily devotionals written by Jon, or you can follow along with the reading plan in the MacArthur Daily Bible. All of those resources are available for free at gty.org. Now for Jon MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to join us tomorrow when Jon looks at how you can serve your church the way Christ desires. Jon is continuing his series, A Plea for Unity, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.