Christian Unity

The Book of Mark

“But Is He with Us?” Section 1

Theme: How We View Other Disciples
 
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
 
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
 
Discipleship is personal, but it is not personalistic. It always involves our relationships to others who also profess to be disciples. But are they disciples?

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The Book of Mark

“But Is He with Us?” Section 2

Theme: The Problem Explored
 
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
 
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
 
In the incident we are studying, the exorcist not only did what he did in Christ’s name and therefore in open allegiance to Christ. He was also effective in what he did, for he was actually casting out demons.

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The Book of Mark

“But Is He with Us?” Section 3

Theme: Cause of Dissension
 
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
 
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
 
I suppose that in the entire history of the church there has never been a division, however unnecessary or sordid, that has not been justified by some persons on spiritual grounds.

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The Book of Mark

“But Is He with Us?” Section 4

Theme: One Body, Many Gifts
 
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
 
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
 
There is only one way we will ever defeat this tendency to an improper narrowness in our view of Christian work, and that is to recover a vision of the greatness of the church as Christ’s body.

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The Book of Mark

“But Is He with Us?” Section 5

Theme: Are They with Us?
 
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
 
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
 
Yesterday we looked at the first three varieties within the church. Today we look at the last two.
 
4. There is a variety of methods. When I wrote of “styles” a moment ago I was approaching this area.

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How to Get Along with Other Questions

Monday: How to Get Along with Other Christians

Have you ever had trouble getting along with another Christian? Perhaps you found it difficult because the other person was unwilling to respond to you, or because of what you suspected was a failure in yourself. Many Christians have the same problem. In fact, even in the New Testament church at Philippi, two good friends of the Apostle Paul were having similar problems. And Paul gave them some good advice. I’m sure that his advice will be helpful to you, too.

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How to Get Along with Other Questions

Tuesday: Christian Doctrine and Life

Bishop Handley Moule, who is one of the great commentators on the book of Philippians, has written some wonderful words on this point of having the mind of Christ. He lived in the last century, and some of his language is a bit archaic. But he is so good and this is so practical that I want to share his thoughts with you.

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How to Get Along with Other Questions

Wednesday: Christian Unity

To be humble, you need to stop thinking about yourself all the time. That’s what it means. You need to stop comparing yourself with your boss, the secretary who sits next to you, the other Sunday school teacher, or whoever it is who rubs you the wrong way. Instead, you need to think of what you can do to help that person, just as the Lord Jesus Christ did.

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How to Get Along with Other Questions

Thursday: Rejoicing Always

The third step in getting along with other Christians is to rejoice in the Lord. Paul says this in Philippians 4:4: “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” Paul knew that if a Christian is rejoicing in God’s mercy and goodness to him, he is not so likely to be nit-picking with his fellow Christians. If your thoughts are filled with God, you will not be seeing another’s bad temper, laziness or unreliability, at least to the degree that you would if you were not doing this.

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How to Get Along with Other Questions

Friday: Surrendering Yourself

Have you ever noticed how many times he speaks of being “in the Lord Jesus Christ” in the first four verses of this chapter? Three times! And once he reminds the Philippians that “the Lord is at hand.” The solution is the Lord Jesus Christ. It is He who will do in the lives of yielded Christians what they might judge impossible. You can learn to get along with other Christians only as you surrender yourself to Christ and seek His will, as His Holy Spirit enters your life and begins to make you into the man or woman that he would have you be.

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How to Defeat Temptation

Tuesday: Temptations of the Flesh

Now I’ve looked at these different verses from James because through them we can summarize the different teachings that the Bible has about temptation. When we summarize them, we see that there are two basic kinds of temptation: temptations from God, which are good (and it’s not even good to use that word; “testing” is a better word). And then there are temptations to sin, which are evil. This second kind of temptation, the temptation to sin, may be divided into temptations of the flesh, the world, and Satan. It is over these temptations that every believer must triumph. And therefore it’s these we must talk about in this study.

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One Body in Christ

Monday: The Church as Christ’s Body

Anyone who is interested in the doctrine of the church and senses its importance must be a bit surprised to notice how little the word “church” actually occurs in the Bible. The word is not found in the Old Testament at all. The first time it occurs is in Matthew 16:18, then again in Matthew 18:17. But it is not in the other gospels. It is scattered throughout Acts, of course (about eighteen times), but it is only found five times in Romans, all in chapter 16 (vv. 1, 3, 5, 16, 23). There are quite a few instances in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians (eighteen and nine times respectively), but then the references become infrequent again.

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One Body in Christ

Tuesday: Called by God

Paul’s image is very helpful at this point. For when he speaks of the body of Christ, obviously he is speaking of those who belong to Christ, who are joined to Him in exactly the sense in which he speaks about our being joined to Christ in Romans 5 and elsewhere. This is a spiritual reality, invisible but supremely real.

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One Body in Christ

Wednesday: One Church

There is a second important truth about the Church taught by Paul’s image of it as Christ’s body. Not only does that image define the Church as the community of those who have been joined to Christ. It also teaches that there is but one Church. That is, there are not multiple churches, even less mutually competing churches. There is but one Church, because Jesus has but one body.

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One Body in Christ

Friday: Working for Unity

Since we are part of a body with many members, what is the challenge we face in an individualistic age like ours? Well, the answer is not the ecumenical movement. Our task is not to create the unity of the body, above all not from the top down. The unity of the body is a given for those who are “in Christ.”

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