In last week’s post, I shared a snippet of a note to a fellow Kairos Prison Ministries volunteer, a response to his warm holiday message to me. “Throughout the past year, the word that keeps coming to me is ‘unity,’” I wrote. Here is another excerpt from my reply: “The older I get, the more I value and enjoy each person’s uniqueness. It’s like a symphony: each instrument sounds different than the others, yet they all blend together into something more beautiful than if they were all the same. God is so incredibly wise, building His Church this way.” The Bible depicts the Church as a building and as a body, but in our focus on unity, let’s begin with “a people.”
Sin separates us. It separates us from God and from each other. To the ancient Jews, Isaiah prophesied, “your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God,”1 and through the prophet Hosea, God declared of wayward Israel, “you are not my people, and I am not your God.”2 Of the Gentiles, Paul likewise wrote, “remember that you were . . . separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise.”3 And between Jews and Gentiles stood a “dividing wall of hostility.”4
But God has done what only He can do: create something from nothing. Peter proclaims to the Church, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”5 We are a people — a people made one in Christ —and our differences divide us no longer, for as Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”6 And again, “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all and in all.”7 Our ethnicities, genders, and other differences remain, of course, but they no longer divide us, for united in Christ we are one with each other. We are a people, God’s people.
So Peter points us forward in new identity, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God’s] own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”8 Christ Jesus has made us to be a people, a people with a purpose.
Father, in grace You have made us to be a people united with You in and through Christ Jesus. May we live, move, and breathe as one, Your people in Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.
1 Isaiah 59:2 ESV
2 Hosea 1:9 ESV
3 Ephesians 2:12 ESV
4 Ephesians 2:14 ESV
5 1 Peter 2:10 ESV
6 Galatians 3:28 ESV
7 Colossians 3:11 ESV
8 1 Peter 2:9 ESV
Categories
Paul Nordman—Author 