The Unity of Our Faith & Practice

Growing disciples are actively doing the things necessary to produce the growth they desire and are called to experience. If we are to glorify Christ through the lives that we live and point the way to Life, then we can only do so by growing into people who are empowered to do the work. We cannot hope to become powerful or effective without developing the practice essential to a life pleasing to God. If we fail to grow, then we in fact injure ourselves as well as those to whom we have been called to minister.

Each of us is called to ministry, some of us are called to an ordained ministry which serves the Church (God’s People), empowering them with knowledge and skills necessary to do the work of the Church. Most of us are called to live as disciples before a world separated from God by disobedience and ignorance. While some are called to a lifetime of ordained clergy, others are called to ministry where we serve people and do the work of the church. God tells us this in Ephesians 4:12&13

Their responsibility is to equip God's people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ.13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God's Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.

The Mark of A Maturing Disciple

The Unity in our Faith is the first mark of our maturing discipleship. The oneness of our faith may signify two different things for disciples.

1.It may suggest that the unity of all disciples in our personal profession of faith is essential to the process of maturity. There is no question that God calls the church to unity. The 1st Century Church always spoke of the Unity of Faith as being signified by the Cloak of Jesus Christ which was without seam as recorded in John 19:23&24.

23 Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. 24 They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which said, They parted my raiment among them, and for my clothing they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did.

There is some validity for this view of this scripture. We see earlier in Ephesians 4:4-6 the following words:

For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future.5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism,6 and one God and Father, who is over all and in all and living through all.

If the church is being called to Oneness of Faith as a profession of our collective belief, then we must ask the question, “Have we failed to fulfill the calling of Christ in our contemporary expression of Church?” Is unity of Faith a demand upon the Church as a community of believers worldwide or is it a call to the individual disciple as he/she matures and grows into the full stature of Christ?

2.The Scripture in Ephesians may also point to a truth that we as individual disciples must grow and develop into the full stature of Christ. Our hope in Christ and His saving work in our personal lives is just that; personal. Are we being called to live in Unity of Faith, being without divided allegiances? Are we being admonished to live by Faith and to discard Fear; which fragments our power as believers?

Perhaps God is calling for a unity of what we believe and what we do, so that our lives might be evidence of what we say we believe about Christ. James 1:5-8 calls for an oneness of faith and action in order to experience the real blessings God offers. It may in fact be both which God is calling His People to do and to be.