The World Is Watching

On the same night He gave the definition of eternal life, praying to the Father in the hearing of those He was about to die for, Jesus prayed one more thing. He prayed it four times, and each time He bound it to the same stake:

"I pray that they will all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me. The glory you gave to me I have given to them, that they may be one just as we are one – I in them and you in me – that they may be completely one, so that the world will know that you sent me, and you have loved them just as you have loved me." — John 17:21–23 (NET)

He did not ask for our argument. He did not ask for our program. He asked that we be one — and He asked it four times because the world's ability to believe depends on what it sees when it looks at us.

This prayer will be answered. The Son asked the Father. The Father hears His Son. The only question before every gathering of believers, in every city, every Sunday, is whether this congregation will be part of the answer or part of the delay.

In every generation something is exchanged. The knowing gives way to knowing about. The believing into collapses into believing that. Traditions multiply — not to serve the knowing but to guard themselves — and soon the divisions between Christians are real enough that those on the other side cannot be seen as brothers. Fellowship breaks. Christians refuse one another. The church argues over secondary things with a ferocity it never directs at the primary ones. And the world looks at the fragments and does not believe — not because the argument failed, but because the sign Christ promised the world would see was absent. He said they would believe when they saw His people as one. They are seeing something else.

There is a direct line from the flattening of the two words to the fracture. You cannot be one in Christ while neither of you actually knows Christ in the sense John 17:3 means. The unity is not organizational. It is not achieved by ecumenical committee. It is the natural fruit of the knowing — the same Spirit bearing witness in different bodies that they are God's children, the same Abba cry rising from different traditions, the same emptied hands opened toward the same Person. Where the knowing is real, the oneness has a root. Where the knowing has been replaced by assent to propositions, the oneness has nothing to stand on and the arguments fill the vacuum.

The words that predate the divisions are the path back. Not to a pre-institutional innocence that never existed — the apostolic churches had their own quarrels — but to the deposit that was there before any tradition had built its walls on top of it. When the whole body of Christ in every nation confesses these apostolic words together — in Lagos and Seoul and São Paulo and Orlando, in the fourth century and the twenty-second — something happens that no single tradition alone can produce. They are one. Not organizationally. One in the knowing the Lord prayed they would share, one in the words the apostles delivered before there was anything to divide them.

This is what corporate confession in worship can be: the voice of the whole church across time — the ancient and the yet to come, the missionary and the martyr, the suffering and the free — saying the same words because the same Spirit put them there. When a congregation lifts that voice, the unity Christ prayed for is present in the room. Briefly visible. And the world can see it.

Lay down every yoke heavier than the apostles laid.

Hold every tradition with open hands — not with contempt, but in poverty of spirit, knowing that even the inheritance can be gripped wrongly.

Return to the words that were enough for the first witnesses to turn the world upside down.

Step onto the bridge. Put all the weight on it.

Stay connected to the vine.

Know.

"Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God." — 1 John 4:7 (NET)

Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus. Make us one as You prayed.

Soli Deo Gloria

The Michlaude Discipleship Project