You weren't intended to bear the burdens of life or navigate your faith on your own. God wants His people to support one another in unity. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah takes a closer look at what Christian unity looks like and acts like in his special message from the Book of Ephesians. To introduce the captivating conclusion of the oneness of our faith, here's David.
You know, we hear stories all the time about arguments that go on in churches, and there's a term called a church split, and that's a terrible thing to go through. We have people in our church who came to Shadow Mountain after the awful experience of going through a divisive, terribly Disunified situation in their former church, and it hurts, and often hurts for a long time. Almighty God never intended that to be. Jesus Christ died that we might be one in Him, and in the Book of Ephesians, He makes it clear that unity in the faith is important.
So today we finish up what we started yesterday in a discussion of the oneness of faith. Hey, want to give a shout out to our friends in Canada? You know, Turning Point is on the radio and on television in many countries around the world, and in many languages around the world. But we have a special affinity with our friends in Canada. They're so close by, and they're so faithful to the Word of God.
So many wonderful followers of the Lord in Canada, and I just want to let all of you know that it's important for us to communicate to you. That when you give to Turning Point, you're giving to Turning Point Canada, and that your money stays in Canada to support the many stations that carry Turning Point throughout your nation. The money doesn't come across the border to help us. In fact, on many occasions, we have helped Canada get started in some of the marketplaces where Turning Point now is doing so well. We love the Canadian brethren.
We know sometimes there's a misunderstanding about that.
So periodically. I'm just going to mention it to you, so you know that you can give with confidence in Canada, knowing that your money stays there to help the Canadian people learn the Word of God and follow Jesus Christ. Here is part two of the oneness of our faith. If you go to Rome today, one of the buildings that still is pretty much intact is the. Pantheon.
Now, let me take that apart. The word "pan" means all, and "theos" means God. The Pantheon is a place for all gods, and if you walked into that building, you would see shelves where the different pagan gods have been placed. And when the Romans would go and fight against another nation, they would bring back captives when they won, but they would also bring back all of their gods. Guess what they did with them?
They put them in their pantheon. The Romans had this deal: if you get enough gods, there's going to be one there for everybody and for everything you're going through. Go find the god for this and god for that. The problem is, there's only one god.
Now, let me ask you this question: Do you know why the Christians were killed by the Romans? Romans were angry at Christians because they were Christians. In fact, the Romans were very accepting of other religions based upon their pantheon, but the Romans came to the Christians who said Jesus Christ is our Lord, and they wanted to put their Lord in the pantheon. And the Christians said, "We're not putting our God on the same shelf with Jupiter and Juno. No, He's one Lord.
He's not among many lords. He's not going in the pantheon." And they fed the Christians to the lions. They fed the Christians not because they were Christians, but because they said there is one Lord. I need to tell you that's a hard saying today. Everybody wants to be you know kind and let's all get along and all that.
And your God is as good as my no. I mean I hate to say this, but the Bible doesn't teach that. The Bible says that there's one Lord, one Lord. That's it. The Bible says there's one man between God and us, and that man is Christ Jesus.
And Jesus himself said this. He said, "I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life." Now, in case you don't understand that, he added another sentence: "No man comes to the Father except through me." You say, "Isn't that kind of hard line?" Well, I just want to be what the Bible says I should be. The Bible says that's true. There are not many religions that lead to the same place. If you want to go to heaven, you have to find Jesus Christ and accept Him as your Savior.
He is the only way to heaven. And the Bible says when you're a Christian and you come to grips with that, now you can celebrate the fact that you're in one body with all the other Christians. You got one Holy Spirit living in your heart. You got one hope that heaven is coming, and you have one Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ. Who is the Bible says one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
We have one Lord, Amen.
So then He says, "We have one faith." Oh, you say, Pastor? There are many faiths. No, that's nobody's talking about. He's saying, as Christians, we have one faith. What is our faith?
We have this book that instructs us to do what we need to do. This book will tell you how to get to heaven, and it will also tell you how to get along on your way to heaven. This is God's book of instruction. You want to know how to live the Christian life? You got to read this book.
You want to know how to be successful and prosperous as a Christian businessman? You got to read this book. You want to be a good, godly Christian parent? You'll find some great things in this book. All the things you need to be a Christian is in your book, the Bible, and that's your faith.
And there's only one. I mean, there's a lot of different versions of the Bible, like the King James and the New King James and the New International. I preach. From the New King James, and people ask me why do I do that. I tell them because I want to.
This is the Bible I read. I grew up on the King James, and when my father was in the last years of his life, he was on the committee that drafted the New King James, getting rid of some of the words that antiquity has lost meaning for. And I've loved this translation of the Bible. I don't say there aren't any others, but this is what I study when I am trying to figure out what is my faith. And Jude tells us that our faith has been once for all delivered to the saints.
What does that mean? We have everything God wants us to know. If somebody comes along and says to you, "I know this is not in the Bible, Pastor." Whoa! If it's new, it's not true. When it comes to your faith, because God has said everything He's going to say about our faith in between the two covers of this book we call the Bible.
So he says, "There's one body. If you're a Christian, you're in this universal church. There's one Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, that lives within your heart. If you're a Christian, there's one hope. If you believe what God says, you know that one day you're going to go to heaven.
If He comes back before you die, you're going up in the rapture. If He comes back after you die, you're going up in the resurrection. And He says, 'There's one Lord, not many, just one.'" And there's one faith—that's the Bible—and there's one baptism. And boy, I'm going to stop here and talk to you for a minute. You're probably thinking there's many kinds of baptisms.
Maybe you come from a different tradition. You know, I know of several kinds of baptisms.
Some people get sprinkled, and some people get poured—they actually pour water on them—and some people are dunked. That's what they call our baptism, and you know what? Back in the Midwest, there are some churches that practice this doctrine, triune immersion. You know what that is? Triune means three.
When you get baptized, once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Spirit, you come out dried as a prune, but you get baptized.
Now, baptism is a very important thing, and I am not making light of it at all. I remember when I first started in the ministry, I discovered that there are a lot of things I needed to know that they didn't teach me in seminary. Nobody ever taught me to baptize anybody. I mean, I feel sorry for the first people I baptized.
Well, I want to tell you about this woman who was the first lady I ever baptized. I don't think she'd get mad at me because we joke about this now since we still know each other. She was the thinnest woman I ever met in my life. I mean, she was absolutely almost not there. (Laughter) But I didn't understand.
When you put people in the in the water, you got to bring them back up. And her feet wouldn't go down; they floated. On, ladies and gentlemen, I floated her out of the baptistry to the other side. She'll never let me forget that ever. I remember baptizing a guy that I had led to Christ.
He was a former, a football player. He weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. When I put him in the water, the water displacement baptized the whole choir. I mean, it was unbelievable.
So I've been through some baptism experiences.
Now, baptism is so important in the Bible because it's the first command that is given to every person who becomes a Christian, and it is also command that when you preach, go into all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing those who believe. That's what the Scripture says. When I was growing up in my daddy's church, here's what they did. When it was time for a baptism, somebody would come in for this way. They had two ways, and when they got in the baptism, my father would say, "Do you believe in Jesus?
Yeah. Are you trusting him for eternal life? Yes. I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." They're gone. They never said a word.
But here's what I found out, ladies and gentlemen: when you got baptized in the New Testament, it was the line of demarcation for your faith. If you were just a Christian, you wouldn't get in trouble. But if you were a baptized Christian, you were a target, because in baptism in the New Testament, they didn't baptize in a warm pool with a bunch of Christians watching. Their baptisms took place in the center of town, in a creek or a river or whatever's there, and they stood before their whole pagan culture, telling them that they had become a Christian in one Lord. They had put their faith, and from that moment on, they were targeted.
But there is no reason for us not to get baptized when it's God's first word to us. You say, if I don't get baptized, am I going to heaven? Absolutely. The thief on the cross was saved, he didn't get baptized, and he went right to paradise. Baptism doesn't save you; it's the outward expression of your faith.
But it's important, and we have somehow allowed it to get pushed down. I'll tell you the truth: I'd rather have one baptism in every service, where a man or woman, young man or young woman, gets up and says, "This is how I became a Christian, and I've come here to be baptized." Than to have fifty people running through the water as fast as they can just to say they were baptized. Ladies and gentlemen, baptism is important. If you're not baptized, doesn't mean you're a lesser quality of Christian.
Some of you aren't baptized because you didn't know it was important, but the Bible says it is. If the early Christians could stand in the middle of their town and preach the gospel with their testimony in front of all the pagan people who didn't like them and ultimately wanted to kill them, by the grace of God, we can stand up in front of a bunch of our friends in the Christian church and say, "I'm being baptized to tell you I am a Christian." Amen. He says, "There's one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism." And the final of the seven is one God. We are monotheists, not polytheists. We're monotheists.
That means we believe in one God. Paul started his seven points with this statement: "There's a body of Christ," and he ends his statement by saying, "Because there's a body of Christ, there's one God." Have you ever noticed as you study these lists of unity? What's not there? There's nothing in here about our worship style. There's nothing in here about the kind of seats we sit in.
There's nothing in here about the color of carpet in the auditorium. There's nothing in here about the ethnicity of the pastor who's preaching. Here's the one I love. There's nothing in here about the age you have to be when you quit preaching. There's nothing in here about that.
All of these things are incidental. We aren't going to agree about all of these things, but Paul says, "Here's what you need to agree about. Listen to me. You need to agree that there's one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God. Stay unified on those things.
Disagree about everything else if you want to, but never disagree about the things which are the unity of the body of Christ, the points of unity." Now. We're almost done here, but let me not quit this until I give you some practical things that Paul wants us to know. I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called. And how do you do that? Watch this: with all lowliness and gentleness and longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
Now. Paul gives us some really practical things to help us understand. If you want to have unity in a body, or if you want to have unity with your staff where you work, even in the secular environment, humility has to be a little bit a part of what you do. He says, "Do this with all lowliness." It's a phrase for humility. And the first thing we need to do to retain unity in the church is humble ourselves, get over ourselves.
Quit thinking we're the whole package. How do you like to work in a situation where somebody thinks they're the whole package? Unity starts with humility. We can't be filled with ourselves and maintain unity. We can't be puffed up.
We can't think of ourselves as better than others, without causing separation and discord. The Lord Jesus, we are told, humbled Himself and became one of us, so that He could be our leader and take us to heaven. We need to practice humility. Humility is necessary for unity in the church. One of my favorite stories, which I've shared with you before, what is so appropriate here.
People have asked me on occasion, "Who worked for you for the shortest time since you've been a pastor?" And when I tell them I had a guy that worked for me for 15 minutes, they look at me like, "You kidding me?" No. Here's how it happened. Before we built this building and the other buildings here, these big buildings, we had just the buildings that were here when we got this campus.
So all of our buildings were multi-use buildings. When we had Sunday school, we set chairs up this way. Then we had to take them down because a college class met in there the next day. I mean, everybody here had to be willing to work, and we made it work, but it was really hard. When we brought this guy to campus, who we thought was going to be our small group leader, and we had a meeting with him with all of our staff to sort of verify that we knew who he was.
And it was over in the ad building, and we had to make the chairs in a separate way.
So I told everybody, "Everybody, grab a chair. Let's get this room set up." And I looked over, and my candidate was sitting over there in a chair, watching. And I went over and I said, "Can you give us a hand?" And he said, "I don't do chairs." I said, "Come on." I told him, "I said you can't work here if you don't do chairs." So I'm going to get somebody else. He said, "What?" I said, "You know that's such a spirit of." You're too proud to do chairs. If you work here, nothing's beneath your dignity if it's for the Lord of Heaven.
And He didn't work here. I don't know what He's doing, but I promise you, He's not doing chairs someplace. But He's not coming back here. I think that's kind of a silly little story. I kind of like it because nobody works for anybody for 15 minutes.
But I had a short-term employee. But it's a good reminder to us, isn't it? If you're in the body of Christ, you're not looking at whether this is something that's. A part of where you are in your stratus of life, we're servants. Servant, serve.
Do you want to know how to tell whether or not you're a servant? Let me help you. By how you act when somebody treats you like one. As soon as you do that, you'll find out: Am I a servant, or am I just prating around here like some big shot? Humility is critical for unity.
And then he says, meekness. What is meekness? Meekness is power under control. Meekness is having it all that you could just blow somebody away, but you don't. Meekness is having power that you don't always use.
One time Jesus was accosted by his enemies, and in the midst of that time, he said, "I could call the angels of heaven to come down here, as many as I want." But aren't you glad he didn't? Because if he'd called the angels down here to rescue him, we wouldn't be Christians. We wouldn't be saved. Meekness is having all the power. But not always feeling like you gotta demonstrate that you have all the power.
Listen, somebody once told me this: if you have to keep telling everybody you're the leader, you're not. You have to be the leader by who you are and how you function with humility and meekness. Have this power from God and use it sparingly, when the time comes. Humility with all lowliness, patience. Is the next one with all long suffering.
If you've been a part of a church for any length of time, you know that it takes some patience because we're all different. We come from every different background, and we think about things differently, especially those ancillary things. We need to be patient with one another. Don't think, "Oh, I got this," and you jump off and tell everybody why they're wrong and you're right. The one I like the best in this list is the last one: forbearance.
Forbearance is a word that means literally putting up with one another. Isn't that great? When you're in a body of church or organization, there has to be a certain amount of just being willing to put up with one another. I mean, some of y'all do some crazy things, but I put up with you, and I know I say some crazy things, and you put up with me. We put up with each other because, way beyond all of that.
Are the oneness things of who we are in Christ? We are one. Oh, hallelujah!
Somebody says, "How hard is it to do this?" Well, look at verse three in Ephesians four. It says, "Endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." Unity is hard to maintain. It takes work on the part of leadership and people in the church. You have to endeavor to do it.
Sometimes I've thought during periods of my time here that endeavoring to keep the unity was the hardest thing I was doing. It was the hardest work I did, but I'm so thankful I did it, because to have unity you have to work at it. How many of you know we don't just naturally get along with each other? We didn't wake up one day we're Christians and we just oh yes we're all fine. No, unity takes effort on our part.
We have to work at it. I usually read a lot of books when I'm on summer break, and this book was recommended to me. It was on the New York Times bestseller list. It's a secular book, but man, was it ever a fun read! It's called Boys in the Boat, and it's the story of the 1936 University of Washington crew team.
This crew team. Won a gold medal in the Olympics in 1936, and they were from the backwoods of Washington State. Author Daniel James Brown shows how the University of Washington built this team from kids who were raised on farms, logging towns near shipyards, and when they started to work together, they blew away their California rivals. And they finally went and started to play the Ivy League schools known for their crew teams. One by one, they beat the Ivy League teams.
And when they got to the Olympics, everybody laughed, wondered how that ever happened, and said they would never ever win anything. But they won the Olympics in 1936. One of the most unusual things ever happened, and the book is filled with chapters about what they had to do to do this, and the stories of the battles they fought to win this thing. Truly a motivational book if you want to read something. It's a good book.
But Daniel Brown explained the secret to their success, and this is what he said: Races are won by crews. And great crews are carefully balanced blends of both physical and personality types. A crew, he said, that is composed entirely of eight amped up, overly aggressive oarsmen will often disintegrate into a dysfunctional brawl in the boat, or exhaust itself before the first leg of the race has been accomplished. And he said, similarly, a boatload of quiet but strong introverts may never find the common core of fiery resolve that causes the boat to explode past its competitors when all seems lost. He said, good crews are good blends of personalities.
Someone to lead the charge.
Someone to hold something in reserve.
Someone to pick a fight.
Someone to make peace.
Someone to think things through.
Someone to charge ahead without thinking.
Somehow, all of this has to mesh, and that's the steepest challenge. He said, "It's an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. You just might win the Olympics with a team like that." And that's a good illustration of biblical unity, isn't it? The Bible says we've all been given a gift. They're not the same.
There's at least 19 different gifts mentioned in the Scripture that God gives to those of us who are Christians. Whatever your gift is, you bring it to the table. I bring mine to the table. One more story to help you see how this fits together. The sequoia trees that are located in California are some of the biggest trees in the world.
When I go to Hume Lake, I go to this grove up there where these trees grow. You want to get on your knees and worship. It's such an amazing thing—the sequoia trees. The largest one is two hundred seventy-five feet tall, and it is twenty-five feet in diameter. It's approximately two thousand five hundred years old.
The General Sherman tree. Probably some of you have seen these trees are so large they've gone through and carved holes in them and driven cars through the middle of the tree. I have some pictures of that. The sequoia tree is an unbelievable evidence of God. But you see, it's so different than what you think.
You would think you know if this tree is going to survive, they must have roots that are forty feet in the ground holding it up. The interesting thing is, they don't have roots that go down more than six feet. They withstand strong winds, earthquakes, fires, storms, prolonged flooding. How can something that weighs 500 tons, reaches 350 feet in the air, and lived for so many centuries keep standing with roots that only go down six to ten feet? Here's the secret.
Beneath the surface of these humongous, tall, statuesque trees, are roots like an army of men who have joined their arms and interlocked them together. They are preventing the adversary of life from knocking them down. They don't grow by themselves; they grow in groves. The roots of a sequoia tree don't go down deep at all, but they intertwine and connect with the roots of the other trees nearby.
So, working together, all these incredibly tall sequoia trees create a great system of strength and stability that allows individual trees to withstand the storms of life. They join together in their root structure so that the trees. Are stable. I have to tell you, men and women, that's what the church is supposed to be: bring our unity, put it in the center, get together as God's people, interlock our arms. Say, bring it on, Satan!
We're ready to meet the challenge, to beat the war that's coming at us. We need to learn this. We need to learn it well, because the church as it is today will not be the church as it is today too much longer unless we have a revival in America.
So we better learn how to be strong for each other, to get our roots intertwined, and stand up for the unity that is ours in Jesus Christ. That is my prayer. Amen. What a note for us to strike as we end this month together, hey friends! In October we begin our series on the battle for your soul, and the first two days will be the interview that we did on that series with Sheila Walsh.
That's always a very popular show because it outlines the nature of the whole month of teaching.
So don't forget to be with us tomorrow as we begin this new series together. The battle for the soul is a brand new book that. Will be available on the sixth of October in all the major bookstores. Our campaign to advertise this will be on Fox News soon. You'll be able to see this book being prepared for you, and we hope you're prepared for the book.
It's a life-changing journey, thirty-one chapters on spiritual warfare like you've never read before. The battle for your soul. Coming up next on the radio, and coming up next in a brand new book. Thank you for joining us today. Have a great day.
Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note to let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, P.O. Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163.
Visit our website at davidjeremiah.org/radio or call 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of our 14-month 2027 calendar, The Light of the World. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also view over 1,200 of Dr. Jeremiah's sermons on any screen, anytime you like, on our Turning Point Plus streaming service.
Yours for a monthly gift of any amount. Visit TurningPointPlus.org for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as Sheila Walsh interviews Dr. Jeremiah about the battle for your soul here on Turning Point.
