One

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Mexican Summer Soccer Service, four congregations plus migrant workers, a sure sign of being one with God and with one another.

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Jesus prays for His disciples and Us

How cool is it to think that Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took time to pray for his disciples. He knew what they would experience. He knew they would be afraid. He knew they would run away and hide. He knew they would mourn and weep. He knew they would face hardship and difficulty. He knew that even after he rose from the dead, after they believed and rejoiced, they would face difficult days. So he prayed for them. That shows us the depth of Jesus’ love for them!
But Jesus also prayed for us! Jesus prayed for those who will believe in him through the disciples message. The disciple’s message is the New Testament. Because they and others recorded their eyewitness testimony of Jesus, we have faith, we belive. And because we believe, we are disciples along with them. We are part of the oneness of God.

Oneness

What does that oneness look like? Many people believe that the number of denominations, the arguments and fights between Christians prove that we’re not one. It seems like we’d rather focus on the 2% where we differ than the 98% we have in agreement.
But when Jesus prayed that we’d be one, he wasn’t praying that we’d be all the same, all identical in every doctrine, in every practice, in every language. The oneness he is describing is the closeness, the relationship we have with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is the oneness of being family. No one chooses the family they are born into. All human beings are made, fashioned by God in the womb. God chooses who are in his spiritual family. And God wants us to know that because he has chosen, and not us, that’s what makes us one!

Complete Unity

That oneness in Christ has implications for us. It means that we are no longer separated from God by our sin. Christ’s death on the cross paid for all our sins. We receive forgiveness when we trust that Jesus died for us, paying the penalty we could never afford to pay. And that trust, that faith unites us with God. It makes us one with him. It makes us part of God’s family.
It also makes it possible for us to use the glory Jesus gives us. Glory in this sense is not radiance or a glowing aura. Glory is defined by us in , Christ in us, the hope of glory, and also in , for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Glory in these two passages refer to God’s perfect moral character. That’s what human beings were created in God’s image to do: reflect his moral character, perfectly. But sin messed that up.
Oneness with God, with Christ means that we can now live in obedience, being filled with Christ, the hope of glory, that is, the hope of God’s perfect moral character.

Father’s Love in Us

Have you ever wondered what motivated Jesus to go to the cross? It wasn’t just our sin that held him there, until it was accomplished. Rather, it was also Jesus’ love for the Father, and Jesus’ love for us. Yes, the sin was the reason for the cross, the cross being the only way to justly deal with God’s wrath. But Jesus’ love for the Father, his desire to glorify the Father through his obedience, through his expression of love, held him on the cross.
That same love is in all of us. The Father’s love for the Son, the Son’s love for the Father is in us. That’s the reality. That is the fact of the matter. That’s what unites us. That’s what makes us one. Not our getting along, not our theology, our orthodoxy or orthopraxy (true doctrine, true standard of living). It’s a separate reality apart from us—the reality of the Father and the Son’s oneness, generated in us.
So let’s show one another Christ’s love. Let’s put ourselves aside, and appreciate the gifts we have in each other! I’m grateful for Andrew, for Kobie, for Richard, for Sonia and Elisceo, for Martha and Porfirio, for our brothers and sisters in Christ from Mexico and Canada, from all four churches. Let us never forget that our oneness comes from Christ. Amen.
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