Saved, Together

There we are. So, that is a little taste of the movie Migration, which we’ll be showing as our community outdoor movie here coming up in a couple weeks. Yeah, just a little something for us to be able to invite our friends and neighbors and co-workers and other folks from the community to be able to come and join and just yeah, get to meet some of us and get to see some of the charm of this church that God has placed here and established and continued here.

So, yeah, we want to invite you to be praying for that, praying for that evening, that there’d be some connections made particularly with folks that may may not actually have a church home and that we get to kind of step in and come alongside them and help them come to know Christ a little more deeply.

So, yeah, right now though, we want to go to our time of congregational prayer. So, we do this every Sunday. We just want to be a church that is a praying church, not just a church that does prayer sometimes. So we’re going to continue the same prayer prompts that we started last week. We’re going to continue these throughout the month of April.

So the first one is who’s your one? Everybody, I would hope in this room, everybody has somebody in their life that is far from the Lord. That’s their one. I met my one at a coffee shop and I’ve had countless conversations with him about Jesus and the church and all that, but he’s far away from the Lord. So I pray about him about every day and he’s my one. I’m want to invite you to pray for your one, the family member, the co-worker, the neighbor, whoever it is in your life that is far from the Lord.

We also want to pray for Easter Sunday at other local churches. That God would do there what we’re hoping He does here. That God would fill the sanctuaries of Adam’s Run and Calvary and Charleston Baptist and First Baptist Ravenel, Harbor City, and Hopewell as well. That God would give them a really evangelistically fruitful Sunday morning.

So, as we go into this time of congregational prayer, I just invite you to pray for that person, that one that’s far from the Lord, or pray for one of these churches or both. And I’ll come back up and put a bow on it here in a second. Y’all take it away. Pray with the neighbor. And yeah, I will put an end on it in just a second.

Heavenly Father, thank You for today. God, thank You for the opportunity that we have to gather here and celebrate You ultimately. God, we do it through our financial gifts. We do it through singing songs of worship. Lord, I’m about to celebrate You by teaching Your word and the church is going to celebrate You by receiving it. God, we also celebrate You in our prayers.

Father, I pray for the folks that we’re connected to, God, all of our ones that don’t know You yet. And God, I use that word yet intentionally. I fully believe, Lord, that You are going to draw my one to Yourself. God, I believe You’re going to save him and You’re going to help him to see how he has been pursuing what only You can provide, but in all the wrong places.

God, I pray the same thing for the ones that are in this room, the friends and the family members, God, the co-workers and the neighbors, God, the the people that we come into here that are heavy on our hearts because we know they don’t know You. God, I pray for them and I’m begging that You would save them. God, I I beg that You would bring a lot of those ones to a church next Sunday. God, whether it be with Pastor Naveen out at Hopewell or Kevin at Charleston Baptist, God, I pray that You would fill our sanctuaries, not for our pride, God, not for what we can to put on a stat sheet, but Lord, ultimately because we’re going to open up Your word and declare the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But we trust that it is the gospel that is Your power for salvation. So God, save a lot of people next Sunday on Easter Sunday.

Please, Lord, right now it’s a whole host of people in here. We’re all coming in with different baggage from this week, different hopes and fears, frustrations, and God, I pray that You would meet each and every one of us and all those things. God, that we’ll be able to lay aside a few of our distractions for a few minutes, and that we would just drink from Your Word. Holy Spirit, I pray You get a hold of me and that You would use this for something, that You would move the spiritual needle in our lives just a little bit more. Please, God, we do love You, and it’s in Your great name we pray. Amen. Amen.

Well, this morning we are going to continue our series across the book of Ephesians. If you will, if you have a copy of God’s Word with you, go ahead and open up to Ephesians chapter 2, verse 11. I’ll meet you there here in a second.

Last week we looked at Ephesians 2:1-10, which is this incredible passage that really all it does, Paul is just explaining what does it mean to be saved. We are lost in our sin, but God, who is rich in mercy, does something for us we can’t do for ourselves, and then God starts creating something in us that we could never create in ourselves, and the fruit of that, the outward display of that, are the good works that we do back for Him.

This morning, we’re going to look at a very interesting good work that Paul connects to the gospel. But before we look at that, I want to share a couple cool stories of some good works done by some members of our church the past couple weeks that I just get to hear about. I want to protect anonymity here because none of these folks said that they wanted these stories shared publicly. So, I’m going to change some names.

Shawn told me a couple weeks ago—Shawn is one of the members here at our church, just not his real name. Shawn told me the other week he had had lunch with a buddy of his, someone else from the community. And Shawn was telling his friend some of the struggles that he’s been experiencing. And the friend looked at him and said, “Well, man, I can’t explain all of why God’s done this, but apparently you needed this to get closer to the Lord. God gave you this struggle so that you would come to know Him deeper.”

Shawn takes that little nugget and he’s talking with one of his employees a couple days later. This is a bit of a problem employee, from what I understand—usually late to work, unprepared, those types of things. And Shawn is talking with this employee, and once again, one of those stories: “Sorry, I couldn’t make it to work on time because of this and that.” But this time, it seemed like some of the stories had a little more meat to them, and Shawn was able to look at them and say, “You know, you might be going through this hard thing because God gave this to you. It’s the only way you could come to know Him a little more deeply.”

As it turned out, Shawn has a Bible on the back seat of his work truck. So, the employee looks at Shawn and says, “You got a good book in here?” And Shawn’s like, “Yeah, man.” And Shawn got to share more of his story with this employee and the hope that he has in Jesus. I think that’s awesome.

I think about Maggie. Maggie is another one of our church members who rolls up to Walmart recently and just going to get groceries or all the things that you buy at Walmart, and feels the nudge of the Holy Spirit to go park by a particular car. So Maggie parks by that car and she gets out, she sees that I think it’s one of the employees at Walmart, and she’s on a smoke break. Maggie, feeling very apostolic, very strong in her spirit, says, “You know, it’s time, it’s time to quit, quit that smoking.” All right. And the person says, “I’m not sure that I can.” Maggie looks at them and says, “Well, do you know the Lord?” And the person says, “Yes.” Maggie says, “Well, do you know the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives us?” “What do you mean, Maggie?” Maggie says, “Well, self-control is a gift of the Spirit. You may not be able to do this, but God can help you quit.”

So, she kind of just says that, I think just kind of vomits that truth on her, and goes back later to Walmart on another day, sees that same car, parks by that same car, and checks up on her friend. And Maggie has one of the devotionals that we have on the back table that she’s about to give to this lady.

And the lady said, “Hey, hold on. I’ve already got one.” She’s been reading it and she had been smoke free for a week since Maggie’s conversation with her. Isn’t that incredible, man? What God wants to do, God wants to unleash you, man. All the fun of Christianity. Like, this is a this is a cool moment. We get to celebrate and we get to come together. We get to orient together. We get to help each other for a few minutes on Sunday mornings. But, man, the the action of Christianity, man, it’s out there. It’s at Walmart. It’s at your workplace. It’s in your neighborhood. It’s at the restaurants you go to. That’s where God releases us for the good works that He has planned for us.

There’s good things to do here. Don’t get me wrong. This morning, Paul is going to address a pretty major good work that we do here. It’s the good work of pursuing unity. You know, we live in a world that is constantly divided and filled with rivalries. I grew up rooting for the University of South Carolina. And some of y’all vomited just a little bit in your mouth. In fact, I remember when my younger brother, who had been raised to be a to be a Gamecock, he knew he wanted to go into chemical engineering. So, he went to the Superior School for chemical engineering. And he had to tell my parents who met at Carolina, who were lifelong Carolina fans themselves and raised us the right way to also root for Carolina, and the amount of anxiety and trepidation that my younger brother felt about that because he knew there’s a deep rivalry. USC, South Carolina, that sort of thing.

Let’s take it a little more serious, okay? If you will just humor me. Other rivalries we experience, Republican, Democrat, North, South, maybe just America verse the world, come here verse been here. And that division and that rivalry even comes into the local church. And Paul is going to talk this morning as we are just reading continuing through this passage about a good work that we all do.

You see in Ephesians 2:1-10, Paul talks about how individuals are united to our heavenly Father through the work of Jesus. In verses 11-22, he talks about how individuals are united to one another through the work of Jesus. So, we’re going to take a couple weeks to walk through this. We’re going to take a couple weeks to see how divided people can become family. Specifically in the context of Ephesians, the people that Paul was writing to in the city of Ephesus, these divided people are the Gentiles and the Jews. We as Americans today, we need to see how enemies can become family because the world, our flesh and the devil would love to divide us, would love to stoke infighting instead of us walking together in unity and purpose and power. And we are not going to let that happen. We are going to be a unified people together that pursues God’s mission. Amen. Amen.

If you’re taking notes this morning, if you need a little pebble to walk out of here with, it would be this. Jesus transforms enemies into family. Jesus transforms enemies into family. Ephesians 2:11 and 12 paint the picture for us. So then, remember that at one time you were Gentiles in the flesh. All right, we got some mature words coming up. Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcised by those called the circumcised which is done in the flesh by human hands. At that time you the Ephesians Gentiles, you were without Christ, excluded from the citizenship of Israel and foreigners to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.

Right off the bat, we need to recognize a pretty stark reality, and it’s this. Gentiles were the past enemies with the Jews. Gentiles were past enemies with the Jews. Paul addresses it right off the cuff. He says, “You were Gentiles, which in the flesh y’all were called the uncircumcised by those called the circumcised. Y’all were known by your physical difference with the Jews.” That’s how it was. We have to remind ourselves because we’re in 2025 low country, South Carolina, who Paul was and who he was writing to. Indulge me for a second. The city of Ephesus was on the southwest coast of the country of modern-day Turkey. Southwest coast, it was a super busy port city. At least it had been at one point. So, it was filled with this diverse group of merchants. It was also an imperial capital of the region. So there’s tons of government employees that had been brought in. Tons of folks from the area of Greece and Rome now lived here. Other out-of-towners had made their shops here because there’s so much lucrative trade. What there was not in the city of Ephesus was a very strong historical Jewish presence. So this is an extremely ethnically diverse place without a whole lot of Jewish influence. So when Paul calls the Gentiles the uncircumcised, he’s referring to their non-Jewishness.

Let’s remember what circumcision was way back, way before Moses ever gave the people the law. Way before the people were ever delivered out of Egypt through the exile and the Exodus, God calls this man Abraham in Genesis 12. Israel is not a thing yet. But God wants to make a special family, a special tribe in the world, a group of people that would love Him devotedly and intimately. Those people He eventually would call the Israelites, the Jews. But He gave Abraham a special sign of His covenant that He was making with them, and it was circumcision.

Circumcision was not—it wasn’t special to the Jews in the sense that other cultures practice it. Other very old cultures do it, boys and girls. That’s not for us right now. What’s what’s for us right now is to know that circumcision for the Jews was a sign of national loyalty to God and a ceremonial boundary against the Jew or against the Gentiles. Circumcision very much so was like the fence that you would put up around your property, meant to keep outsiders out, keep insiders in, so you could do what you like to do. Circumcision created a natural barrier between Jews and all non-Jews, the Gentiles, the Ephesians, us Americans.

For Jews to enjoy the benefits of life with God, they had to either avoid Gentiles altogether or go through a rigorous and detailed process to achieve their baseline ceremonial cleanliness. Once again, I’ve given you a lot of mumbo jumbo. Let me help us see the heart of this. William Barclay, he is a Bible scholar and commentator reading the original works written by Jews about Jews and about Gentiles. He has this assessment for us. And we when I read this, I you need to hear me say I as a pastor here love Israel. I love our spiritual heritage in them. And the words I’m about to read, I’m sure, are not totally indicative of 100% of the people that grew up at the time that they were written about. Nevertheless, this is the general take.

The Jew had an immense contempt for the Gentile. The Gentiles, said the Jews, were created by God to be fuel for the fires of hell. God, the Jews said, loves only the Jews and all of out of all the nations that He had made. You see, it wasn’t even lawful to render help to a gentile mother in her hour of sorest need, for that would simply be to bring another Gentile into the world. Until Christ came, the Gentiles were an object of contempt to the Jews. The barrier between them was absolute. If a Jewish boy married a Gentile girl or if a Jewish girl married a Gentile boy, the funeral of that Jewish child was carried out. Such contact with a gentile was the equivalent of death.

Talk about divided. Talk about enemies. That’s who the Ephesians were to the Jews. You see, the Ephesians were without Christ. They were excluded from the citizenship of Israel. They were foreigners to the covenants of promise. It’s fascinating that Paul when he’s writing about the Ephesians uses the term Christ and not Jesus. You see, Christ isn’t Jesus’s last name like I’m Jeremy Simmons. Christ refers to the role that Jesus played. Christ was a title for Jesus. Christ is the Greek version of Messiah. That is the Hebrew language of the Jews which means promised one. So the Gentiles, the Ephesians are without the promised one.

So to be outside of Israel meant to be outside of the blessings of Israel and God’s promises to Israel, namely His promise to save Israel. And remember, America is not Israel. We are naturally aliens and foreigners to the blessings and the promises that God made to His covenant tribe, Israel. We inhabit a wonderful country, but we are foreigners to God’s kingdom and God’s promises of salvation. That’s who we are. We are naturally without Christ. We are excluded from the citizenship of Israel. We are foreigners to God’s covenants of promise.

To be a gentile means that the Ephesians then and us today are without hope, without God. Man, there’s a lot of things you could be with, but if you aren’t with God, you have no hope. You could have finances out your ears, so comfortable in your 401k, so comfortable in your investment accounts, have made so much money. You could be incredibly successful, have all the accomplishments you’d ever want to have. You could have the picture perfect family, a spouse that you never fight with, kids that never disobey you, that always listen to you, an extended family that you love being around. You could be the picture of health. You could be the standard by which other people look at and say, “Man, if I looked like that at their age, I’ll be happy.” Man, you could have power and influence and control. You could be a person that other people look to, they respect and they defer to. But Paul is saying if you don’t have Christ, you are without hope. There is nothing in this world that can provide hope that you need and you were created for that I think in your heart you crave. Nothing in this world can provide that type of hope outside of Jesus Christ.

What you need is not a new car. It’s not a better marriage. It’s not a higher paying job. What you need is peace with God. And Paul to us this morning is saying in our natural state, none of us have that. None of us have the peace of God naturally. Is that why you’re here today? Did you come today hoping to hear something to give you some hope and some peace? Man, did you drag yourself out of bed, out of the driveway, coming just hoping to hear something you’ve heard about before? Or maybe you’ve never heard about this before, and you’re just praying and begging whoever is out there to to satisfy you.

I heard someone say one time that nothing in this world can satisfy us at the soul level. Success, money, family, careers, jobs, houses, whatever it is. And if nothing in this world can satisfy you, that must mean that you’ve been created for another world. Or as Augustine said it, our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God. God has brought you here this morning to give you the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, which is steadier than any anchor you could ever attach the ship of your life to. Because here’s the deal. At some point, the tsunami of life is going to take your ship down. And you’re going to have to be able to hold on to something. Or rather, someone’s got to be able to hold on to you and buoy you and hold you and secure you in that moment. And it can’t be your finances. It can’t be a relationship. It can’t be an accolade or an accomplishment or some sort of success. It can’t be any of those things because those things pass away. Don’t make your treasure here where moth and rust destroy. But make your treasure in heaven where nothing can steal, nothing can take away, nothing can mess with those things. If our treasure is here, then at the end of our life, we will be found desperate and wanting because those things can’t give us the satisfaction and the hope and the peace that we crave. the reason you’re here.

But God is an all or nothing sort of God. He’s not content to get half of you. God wants all of you. God wants to completely satisfy and fill you up with Himself. But as I’ve said to mix my metaphors, the your heart, it’s like it’s got hands. And those hands only have space for one thing. God or something else. And what God might be asking you right now is that you would you would open your hands and you would let Him switch out that family. You would let Him switch out that career. You would let Him switch out that promise of a anniversary and that God would put Himself into that.

In fact, if you don’t know the Lord as your if you don’t know Jesus Christ as your master and your rescuer, I would invite you to stop listening to me for the next few minutes and that you’d be really honest with Him. He said, “Christ, I I’m not sure I’ve ever heard about You this way, but I know that I need some peace in my life, and I’m far away from You. I am a foreigner and an alien to You. Would You please bring me close? Bring me into Your family so I could have joy and peace.” That’s a prayer that God would love to for you this morning.

That’s where the Ephesians were. The gentile Ephesians were separated from God. They were separated from His family. They did not have the hope of salvation, and they were without hope in the world. And that’s exactly where we are too. We naturally are separated from God. We are separated from His people. But in Christ, past enemies and strangers to God become His family. We become family with God and with each other because of the work of Jesus Christ. See, we become a present family with the Jews through the gospel. Look at verses 13 and 14 of chapter 2 with me again. But now, that was all true then. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He is our peace, who made both groups one, and He tore down the dividing wall of hostility. We’ll catch the rest of that next week. Christ brings us near. Man, we were far from God. We’re far from His family. We are separated from God, separated from His family. But one came and crossed that chasm between us and God. And it wasn’t us through the good things we do. It was Jesus through the God things that only God can do. Jesus brings us into His family. I mean, I tell you, being brought near to God happens through Jesus. And nothing and no one can give us the type of unity that God wants to give us.

Not just as co-members here at Sauldam Baptist Church, but even just unity with people in the community. Like there’s a couple things that we look at, I think, to create some common associations and some unity, some friendship, like a common heritage. You’re here or you’re from here, I’m from here. We can just kind of rally around the fact that we’re all from the same place. Or maybe you’re not from here, I’m also not from here. Let’s rally around the fact that we’re not from here but we live here. Like a heritage that can’t really give us unity because the nature of a place changes over time. Or like work and hobbies, the things that you do Monday through Friday or on the weekends. Like we associate around that stuff. Like you might like working on trucks and hunting. I might like reading books and making coffee, but that’s not like the deepest type. And that might be true. It might not be true of me. But that type of stuff, like fads fade, and like the types of ways you enjoy spending your time, that changes. It might be like, “Hey, your enemy is so and so, my enemy is so and so, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Like, man, that stuff changes. And that’s all middle school stuff. Like, let’s not be middle schoolers. Like, or even bloodlines, your family that you come from, it’s like, “Hey, your last name is this, my last name is this, or our last names are different, but we come from the same last name.” But we all have some family members that we don’t exactly love being around sometimes that can’t provide us the unity that we need.

God wants to give us unity. He wants to bring us together. He wants to make us a family that is strong and that’s tight. But nothing in this world can do that. Only Jesus can do that. It says that Jesus made Jews and Gentiles one. As far apart as you could possibly be. God takes that and brings them together. He doesn’t just say that He makes them live in the same space. He doesn’t say that God makes Jews and Gentiles tolerate each other. What it says is God makes Jews and Gentiles into one, something better and more beautiful together than they ever could have been separate. And when He does that, He tears down the dividing wall of hostility. Let me break some things down. You see, when Christ died on the cross as our sacrifice, and He rose from the grave like Seth was praying about earlier, Jesus did not just create a way for individuals to be saved. Jesus also, when He was stretching His arms out wide, it’s like He was looking at people on the right, people on the left, Americans, non-Americans, Jews, Gentiles, religious folks, dregs of society. I bring them all together in Me because now I’m the most important thing anybody could ever be associated with. Not your past, not what you’ve used to live for, not your church background, not your future accomplishments. Jesus was creating a new family. Jesus in the cross and in His resurrection creates a true way of unity and peace between Jews and Gentiles. So Now in Christ, there’s neither Jew nor Greek. There’s neither rich nor poor. There is neither black nor white, but there is Christ follower and Christ refuser. The dividing wall of hostility that stands in society between the Jews and the Gentiles. When Jesus rose from the grave, He tore that down. When Paul wrote these words, the Jewish educated or the few Jewish background people of Ephesus would have had a picture in their mind of a literal dividing wall that stood. You see, the temple in Jerusalem had multiple sections in it. We all, I think, know about the Holy of Holies. That’s kind of where the priestly action happened. It’s where the yearly sacrifice of atonement was made. And then you had like it was kind of like I forget the technical word for it. Yeah. The Holy Holies right in the very middle. You go out just a little bit bigger. You have a room that only the priests could go into. You get out a little bit bigger. Then you have a place where most of the Jews could go. You get out a little bit bigger. And then you have a place where the Jewish women could go. And then the extremes of the temple, the outer periphery, the edge barely inside, that’s where the Gentiles could be. You see that little wall or that fence going from bottom left to top right on that picture? That was the literal dividing wall. The Gentiles were not allowed to proceed any further into the heart of the temple than that wall. There was a sign that was posted every so often along the wall. No Gentiles enter lest you be executed. Various reasons behind all that and I don’t have space to tackle all that. What we need to hear right now is that when Jesus rose from the grave, the dividing wall that lives in the hearts of Jews and Gentiles was torn down. Eventually, the temple would be torn down as well. But like Jesus said, “Tear this temple down and in three days I will rise myself up again.” Jesus is our new temple. And in Christ, there is no division. There is no black or white. There’s no Jew or Gentile. There is no churched unchurched. But in Christ, we are all one.

That dividing wall which very physically existed back in that temple in that day lives inside of us. We have dividing walls of hostilities in our hearts toward others and we put up that fence and we say you may not come any closer to me. Back away or I will kill you. Usually happens in our minds. Sometimes it happens with our words. Every now and then it happens with our physical actions. But it’s something that springs out of our hearts. You see Jesus’s mission was not just to save you personally from your individual sin. Jesus came to unite you to others in His kingdom as a display that He can conquer anything. Not just our sin which put Him on the cross, but even our divisions and our rivalries which would divide us from each other. And tell me, what more beautiful thing can a watching world see than a group of people that are not uniform in their appearance all be united around the throne of Jesus Christ? You see, the church is not supposed to be a place where we are all the exact same cookie cutter people. You’ve got the same taste. We wear the same clothes. We’re all from the same place, same background. God never intended church to work that way. What God intended in the church was for a group of diverse people to come together and for them to not disregard their differences, but to cherish the differences between them and one another so that God, who is the difference creator, would be glorified. We are not all supposed to look like the same paper of same piece of construction paper that the kids are playing with right now. We’re not all just this 11 by 17 piece of orange paper. What God wants to do is make us more like a stained glass window where we have different colors, different shapes, different shadings, but all pointing to the one who is standing victorious over sin and death. Jesus gets no credit with a church that looks the exact same, that operates the exact same, that all the people like all the same exact things because that’s not hard to create. You go anywhere and you see that in a room this size, as God has continued to grow us and bring more and more different type people together, Satan would love to get in the middle of all this and create little dividing walls. You’re not from here, therefore you can’t serve in this role. You’re not from here, therefore your opinion on this is not valid. I am from here, therefore I need to have a mount of deference or things like that. Like that’s not the point of this. What God wants to do is create us and pull us together. That’s that’s what God is after.

Just to press the issue a little bit further. Can you be honest with yourself and with the Lord in your heart and answer this question? Who do you have a dividing wall against here? Is there somebody in the room or not in the room that you’ve put the fence up against? And you said, “I’m going to like A, B, and C, but man, whenever Q crosses my path, I’m walking the other way.”

Charles Spurgeon said this, “The Lord Jesus is the great cause of peace between people. As soon as we become Christians, we cannot hate anybody. It is utterly inconsistent with grace in the heart to harbor malice against others. Through our weaknesses, we may be and sometimes are quick of temper and sharp. And this we ought to regret and mourn over. But to carry in our soul any enmity, any warfare against others is contrary to the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

You see, because of what Jesus did in saving us, we ought to strive for true peace with everybody in this room right now. If Jesus is Lord enough to rescue you from your sin, then He is Lord enough to rule over how you treat others. He is Lord enough over bringing us together.

If you want a tool into how do I do that, I just want to offer something to you. Beck and I are overseas a couple years ago serving with the IMB and the main reason that IMB personnel leave the field it’s not spiritual warfare is not the difficulties of the task it’s usually not even health the main reason that missionaries leave the field is because of conflict with other team members and their bosses and Amanda would know you’ve served for 15 years something like that I’m sure they’ve seen a mount an amount of people come and go from the fields that probably would still be there if it had not been for a few crosswords and some unsettled disagreements.

So, the IMB flew out a person like some member care personnel to train our little cluster, our little group in this tool. It’s called Peace Pursuit. Peace Pursuit essentially is a flowchart of scripture where you get to examine. So there’s four little types of people in any type of conflict. Maybe I’ve created the conflict with you. Maybe you’ve created it with me. Maybe I sense something happens between us. Or maybe conflict happened and you were told about it. Peace Pursuit. It’s just a little document I could put in your hands and I could walk you through it in 10 minutes. But it’s just a flowchart. You just pray through various scriptures and you just ask the Lord to help you see where have I contributed to this conflict and what’s my role.

Like I said, Satan would love to get in here and divide us and make this not work. But what glorifies and magnifies the Lord is not us pursuing uniformity. It’s us pursuing unity. And for us to be unified, that means that the the friction of our relationships, we got to start smoothing that out. And we got to pursue real peace.

See, our dividing wall with God and with each other can only be torn down by the blood of Jesus. Like I said earlier, Jesus transforms enemies into family. Jesus transforms enemies into family. Isn’t that incredible? See, that’s why Paul says, “You who were far away have been brought near by the blood of Jesus.”

I’m making you a promise right now. Religion cannot bring anybody into God’s family. Only the blood sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf could bring us near to God and can bring us near to each other. You see, on the cross, Jesus did not just pay the debt of sin that we all owe against God. But Jesus also canceled out the demands of the Old Testament law, which means there are no religious works you must do for you to be saved by God.

I tell you, financial giving in a plate is awesome. Praying is great. Reading your Bible. Please read your Bible. Sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, you better be doing that. But none of those things makes you a Christian. Getting baptized on Easter Sunday doesn’t make You a Christian. Going overseas on a mission trip doesn’t make you a Christian. What makes you a Christian is you personally accepting the blood of Jesus shed on your behalf. Those are good things, but none of them saves you. Only the blood of Jesus Christ can transform you into a family member with God. And if God has made us family, then let’s live like family. Let’s do the good work of protecting unity and living like a family together.

I push the envelope just one more time. If Jesus transforms enemies into family, who are you treating as an enemy that Jesus died to make your family? Who are you treating as an enemy that Jesus died to make your family? As one of the older members of Sauldam told me a couple times now, he said, “Jeremy, your job occasionally is to step on our toes. I want to be faithful to the task of just preaching what God’s word says.”

In Jesus Christ, we who are far away could be brought near by the blood of Jesus. So why wouldn’t we protect that intimacy and that nearness? A world is out there that may or may not know that you go to church. They may or may not know that you tithe, that you might read your Bible occasionally. But honestly, if you call yourself a Christian, none of those things are very surprising. What is surprising to a watching world is when we battle through our differences and choose to love each other more than having our way. Said differently, if Jesus has saved you, then He wants to bring you close to your enemies.

I would invite you during this final song. If you need prayer to pursue that, if you want to know what your next step is, you just want to pray together about that, I’d be down front. I would love to pray with you. I’m not the expert. Don’t have a PhD in counseling or anything like that, but I know that God’s word has told us that God made us into a family. I would love to pray with you about that.

I’m going to pray over us right now as we center our hearts for this final song. And like I said, you want to begin praying about that, I’d be down front. If you want to pray about what it what does it mean to give your life to Jesus and become a member of God’s family, I would love to begin that and pray with you as well. If you will bow your heads and close your eyes with me.

Father, thank you, God. Thank you for bringing all of us here today. God, make us one as you and the Father are one. What an incredible prayer Jesus, you prayed in John 17. The design of the local church is supposed to reflect the perfect intimacy and mutual love of the Trinity. How in the world? But God, make that true of us. God, as we go out of here in a few minutes, I pray that we would carry the gospel of Jesus with us and that we would show a watching world that Jesus’s blood can conquer anything, our past, our present sin, even our disagreements with others. For the person in the room, Lord, who doesn’t know you as master and rescuer, God, please open the eyes of their heart right now. They would call on you as Lord. You would please bring them down front. I could lead them to professing their faith in you and confessing their need for you. Please, Lord, we love you. We give ourselves to you and it’s in your great name we pray.