Audio Transcript

The church is fractured. Over the past couple years, we have experienced a lot of division among Christians at the levels of networks and denominations, but also inside local churches and among friends, too. So is all this division a good thing? Is it only a bad thing? Will division work for the church’s greater purity and final good? Or will division work to the church’s final detriment and the lessening of her testimony in the world today?

It’s a relevant question, and it comes from a listener named Connor. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this encouraging podcast! I have heard a lot from fellow Christians recently about the sadness of the church being so divided with all its disagreements splitting local churches and denominations and even old friends. Division is everywhere. While there is much to be sad about in much of this, especially given Jesus’s emphasis on his desire that his disciples be unified in love, I have been wondering whether some of the divisions in the church today are good, even necessary as a means to distinguish the sheep from the wolves, something Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 11:19. But can we distinguish healthy from unhealthy divisions in the church? Some ‘big-issue’ divisions seem obvious and good. But other divisions seem petty and insignificant. What do you think of the disagreements in the church today?”

Well, there are so many ways to come at this, let me come at it like this. The point that I would like to emphasize about the divisions in the church is this: Don’t make light of it, and don’t make death of it. It is tragic, but it is ordained.

Don’t Make Light of Divisions

It is possible to speak about disunity and division as though they were a small thing, which would be a mistake. Making light of it is a mistake. Just listen to John 13:34–35: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

That’s a very convicting text. Lovelessness among Christians is not a light thing.

In John 17:21, Jesus prays “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
Ephesians 4:1–3: “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
1 Corinthians 1:10: “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.”

“Lovelessness among Christians is not a light thing.”

So, just a few texts — and there are so many more. We simply must not make light of our divisions, especially those that are unnecessary for the sake of truth or that are maintained with unloving attitudes and actions. Three things stand out from those passages of Scripture.

Spirit-Wrought Unity

The deepest unity among God’s elect is a given. It’s a given. We don’t create unity. Man doesn’t make it happen. When we come to Christ, we are grafted in by the Spirit to one body, Jesus Christ, and members one of another, so that the command in Ephesians 4 is to “maintain the unity.” Don’t create it — show it to the world.

Relational Unity

A second thing that stands out from those passages I just read is that the public effectiveness of our unity is not at the level of institutional oneness or collaboration, as though the absence of denominations would be a compelling witness to the world. Rather, the public effectiveness of our unity is when unbelievers see on the ground attitudes and acts of love among believers.

This is where the energy for unity should be mainly expended, I think. “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:31–32). That’s the level at which the miracle happens. That’s the level at which the unbeliever sees and says, “I’d like to be part of that kind of community.”

Truth-Grounded Unity

The third thing that all these texts either say or assume is that the only kind of unity that glorifies God is unity in the truth. He’s a God of truth. “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). Paul says in Ephesians 4:15, “speaking the truth in love.” For Christ and his apostles, it was inconceivable that one could love another person by throwing away truth for the sake of peace.

“The only kind of unity that glorifies God is unity in the truth.”

Listen to Jeremiah: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). The only peace that matters is truth-based peace. So, when I pray for unity in the church, which I do regularly — little church, big church — I pray, “O God, grant us unity in the truth.” So Francis Schaeffer, at the end of his life, said that what the world needs to see is not the Christian church tearing down every fence that was built for the sake of truth — protecting truth, declaring truth. Rather, what we should do is stop throwing hate bombs over the fences, and instead love each other across genuine disagreements, genuine fences.

I don’t think the world stumbles mainly over doctrinal disagreement among Christians. It stumbles mainly over the way we treat each other in the light of those disagreements. So, all of that to say that we should not make light of the contentions and divisions in the church. But now let me say that we should not make death of these divisions either.

Don’t Make Death of Divisions

Don’t make light of them, don’t make death of them. That is, we should not have an unbiblical, Pollyanna view of what Jesus and his apostles said would actually come to pass as time goes by in the church. It’s not a rosy picture. Now, to be sure, “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). There will be a completion of the Great Commission, and God will gather his elect from the peoples of the world. That is the triumph of this age before Christ comes.

But the conditions of the church, and of the world in which the church finds itself, while that mission is happening successfully, is not a pretty picture. One of the texts that Connor mentioned when he asked his question is 1 Corinthians 11:18–19: “I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.”

Now, that is a startling statement. It assumes that there is underlying disunity in the church that needs to be exposed. He just seems to assume it. Why would Paul assume such a thing? I think that assumption goes back to Jesus.

Weeds Among the Wheat

Jesus did not paint a rosy picture of the climax of history. In God’s strange providence, Jesus stated a principle like this: “Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation [the stumbling, the traps, the deceptions] comes” (Matthew 18:7). That’s amazing. This is divine necessity. When he says, “It is necessary,” he’s talking about the way God has ordained for the world to come to its climax. God has willed these kinds of troubles.

Jesus pictured this kind of inevitable trouble in the parables of the fishing net and the parable of the wheat and the weeds:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate evil from the righteous. (Matthew 13:47–49)

So, the kingdom, the visible church, draws into itself unconverted people that the angels will separate out in the day of Christ’s second coming. Same thing in the parable of the wheat and the weeds. The workers, they wonder if they should go out and pull up the weeds that are growing among the wheat — false brothers. And Jesus says, “Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30).

In other words, Jesus predicted that disunity and conflict would be built into the church from the beginning. It is necessary that such temptations come. These weeds are not going to keep their mouths shut. They’re not going to keep their opinions and attitudes to themselves as time goes by.

Love Grown Cold

Then, in Matthew 24, when the disciples ask Jesus about the signs of the end, Jesus says over and over in that chapter how torn the church is going to be with betrayals and apostasy. Listen to these words (I’ll start reading at verse 4 of Matthew 24):

Jesus answered them, “See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name [these are people in the church, in the name of Jesus], saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray. . . . Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death [these are ‘Christians’ putting Christians to death], and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another [this is not just trouble from outside the church]. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:4–5, 9–13)

So, we’re talking about Christians’ love growing cold and not enduring to the end. Now that’s a horrible description of the condition of the church. This is what the church will do to each other. Incredible. And the apostle Paul joined this bleak description of the condition of the church in the last days — and remember the last days began in the first century. First Timothy 4:1: “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits.”

So, it’s part of prophetic wisdom in the first century that things are not going to end well on the earth. It’s going to be bleak. The mission will be done. There will be white-hot Christians to the end, risking their lives and laying down their lives to get the gospel to the ends.

Tragic and Predicted

So, I conclude, don’t make light of divisions, and don’t make death — that is, the death of the church — of divisions. They are tragic. We should give our lives for the sake of the unity of the church. They are tragic, and they are predicted. It is necessary that stumbling blocks come, but woe to those by whom they come.

What’s the point of it all? The inquiry does not relent. Resist it for a time — fill your days with noise, stare hard at the patch of life before you — but you cannot always avoid the silence, cannot always avoid looking up.

The question catches up to most of us halfway to the grave. What else is a midlife crisis? When nests begin to empty, the chirping quiets and memories take their place, her interrogation loudens. Contemplation stares from the corner of the room. We can hurry off to a new distraction, or stare back.

Midlife. Halfway to somewhere, but to where? Away. To death — and to more — to whatever lies beyond, to that “undiscovered country” that

puzzles the will,And makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of. (Hamlet, 3.1.87–90)

Half of your life (at best) is gone. You map where you have been, where you are now, and the limits you can yet travel. You begin to feel the gravity of time. You look back. The distance behind is greater than the distance left ahead, and the rapids seem to quicken toward the falls. But to what end? Anxieties paw within, looking for an escape.

Young dreams have grown up. Some hopes, along with some friends, have died. Ideals have given way to reality. What ifs have cocooned into What was and What actually is. The butterfly, so perfect in the mind’s eye, is not as beautiful as expected. Regrets mingle with misplaced joys. The questions that youthful optimism brushed off will no longer be dismissed: What was the point of it all?

Unhappy Wisdom

Many today would call midlife reflections of this kind cynical, jaded. Some interpret their intrusion as signs that they haven’t found the spouse, the adventure, the career that they were truly made for. They try another. But the wisest man ever born of men, a man who touched the ends of the earth’s delights, called such contemplations wisdom. Wisdom that agitates our joy. A frustration at the futility we face in this fallen world.

In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

We might imagine a hypothetical alternative: one where Adam and Eve waited to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in God’s timing upon God’s invitation. But the unlawful bites into forbidden knowledge demanded God thrust futility and curse upon the world. We have knowledge of good and evil, but mostly evil.

“Life extends beyond the grave, as the ocean extends beyond the shore.”

So, from the ruins, we pluck the rose of wisdom, and feel her thorns and thistles. We enjoy wisdom, when we enjoy her, wincing. While she must be preferred above all alternatives (Proverbs 3:13–15), she casts a shadow for those inhabiting a world under the sun. She will not flatter us. She lives near reality — too near — and she is too honest. She clarifies and she saddens. She guides and she wounds. She points out many perplexities this side of eternity.

Perennial Pointlessness

What did wisdom reveal to turn the king into the unhappy philosopher we find in the book of Ecclesiastes? She shows him a world full of vanity. A world that cannot bear our deepest hopes, or satisfy our inmost longings, or gratify our great exertions.

A sampling from the first chapter.

Wisdom shows him a meaningless shore where generations come, and generations go, washing back and forth. Wisdom lifts his chin — the sun rises, falls, and hastens to rise again — for what? He begins to notice how the wind can’t make up its mind, blowing north then south only to return to the same place it started (Ecclesiastes 1:4–6). And for man, the hamster wheel spins until the hamster dies, and another scurries in his place. Perennial pointlessness.

He looks out at the calm waters and savors no peace:

All streams run to the sea,      but the sea is not full;to the place where the streams flow,      there they flow again. (Ecclesiastes 1:7)

Where will his soul find fullness? His eyes have seen great things. His ears have heard marvels. He tested his heart with all manner of delight (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He found pleasure in them for a season, yet in the end, he discovered his blisses were not loadbearing.

All things are full of weariness;      a man cannot utter it;the eye is not satisfied with seeing,      nor the ear filled with hearing. (Ecclesiastes 1:8)

What, then, is the point?

Sad Soliloquy

Through the spectacles of wisdom, he beholds a good world (with beauty and laughter and love), but a cursed world still. He longs for fruit from Eden, and cannot find the like below. As the richest king of Israel, he feasts on the delights we still chase today, yet without finding a way past the fiery sword guarding the tree of life now denied us (Genesis 3:24).

Days begin to blend; routine squeezes the zest from life; wisdom points past the momentary pleasure out into the fog, wondering where this is all going. The sad conclusions begin to mount.

Nothing is new; only hand-me-downs passed down the generations. What came before, came and went; what we know as the momentary now will pass, soon to be forgotten. The historic present falls with the consequence of a snowflake — dazzling, glittering, melting. Death comes for the wise and the foolish alike (Ecclesiastes 1:9–11). The walls were closing in.

“I hated life. . . . I hated all my labor,” the wise man sighs (see Ecclesiastes 2:17–18). His was a sad soliloquy. He turns to us, the audience of his one-man play,

A bird within a shallow cage,Ink written on a burning page,Calloused hands without a wage,The musing of a dying sage.

With eyes not to be satisfied,I saw all is absurdity.My heart was never gratified,For what could fill eternity?

Banquets of laughter, food, and drink,Feasts of different women’s thrills,Life caressing Canaan’s brink,Streams to seas that never fill.

At midlife (for some before, some after), we taste a piece of the Preacher’s grief. Vanity of vanities! An unhappy business. A striving after the wind. Life under the curse.

Recalculating Midlife

Demons hatch when good is god,When life is sought in tombs of men.When Joy is taught as a facade.And death is thought to be the end.

Midlife crisis, for anyone feeling its stress, is not really midlife at all. It lands us (should the Lord provide another half) mid-page in the mere preface of life. The first chapter of eternity has not yet begun. We are all immortal beings, babies even on our deathbeds.

Yet life after this life, in answer to the question of futility, does not render earth’s life span of little consequence. This life ripples into forever, and this truth returns to our Preacher some clarity, some sanity. He concludes,

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14)

Life extends beyond the grave, as the ocean extends beyond the shore. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die” — and a time to rise again and face our God (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2).

Fly away to God

To the next world we go. To God we go. To Jesus Christ — a Savior, a Lord, a Judge. A God whose justice will publish our story’s destiny — eternal life or eternal death. Our whole duty in this life, is to fear him, obey him, and if we may add his greatest command, love him.

I wonder if the Preacher’s hundred perplexities would have been assuaged by testing his heart one more time with one true glimpse of Jesus Christ on the cross. Would the eternity in his heart not burst with praise? It did for Charles Spurgeon as he quotes:

The cords that bound my heart to earthAre broken by his hand;Before his cross I find myself,A stranger in the land.

My heart is with him on his throne,And ill can brook delay;Each moment listening for the voice,“Make haste, and come away.”(cited in Alas for Us, If Thou Were All)

“Our whole duty in this life, is to fear him, obey him, and if we may add his greatest command, love him.”

The Point of it All, our Wisdom, took on human flesh and dwelt with us under the sun — to live, to teach, and (beyond belief) to die, that he might redeem us from the curse by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). Labor, life, wisdom, death — the rising and setting of the sun — find their purpose in him. Where streams empty into our insatiable seas, he cries out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37).

Passing Shadows and Forever Beauty

While Christ is our all in all, our Bread of Life, our Joy eternal, we are still perplexed in seasons, even as believers (2 Corinthians 4:8). We “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit” still groan inwardly — but not nihilistically — since we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons. And creation still pants “in the pains of childbirth,” having been subjected to vanity, not willingly, but in hope by its Creator. We know that the bondage of corruption shall yet be finally broken when all becomes new, when the sons and daughters of God are revealed (Romans 8:18–25).

For those in Christ, all futility, all senseless wonder, all burdensome enigmas in a fallen world will be finally, utterly “swallowed up by life” in the resurrection and the coming of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:4). Until then, we may become distressed in our waiting, yet acknowledge with Samwise that “in the end the shadow was just a small and passing thing. There is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach” (The Return of the King, 186). Midlife is midway home.

It was a rousing mid-sermon rebuke — the kind to make you sit up in your pew.

“Jesus, being made perfect,” the preacher continued, “became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him. And this Jesus, was, of course, designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. . . .”

The congregation doesn’t hide puzzled expressions. He pauses.

Melchize-who? Their sleepy faces wondered.

“Order of Melchizedek. . . .

. . . The King of Salem . . . “King of Righteousness”?

. . . Priest of the Most High who blesses Abram?

. . . In whose line the Messiah will serve as priest forever?

Maybe if he said, “Order of the Phoenix,” some might have recollected better, but “Melkitsadek” garnered little familiarity.

At this, he departs from his manuscript, walks around his pulpit, and looks them in the eye:

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food. (Hebrews 5:11–14)

These grown men and women, Christians for some time now, started off well (Hebrews 10:32–34), yet still needed doctrinal milk, and not solid food. Although by now they should have been sharp on how the Christian should read the Old Testament, their dull ears (literally “sluggish”) made them perpetual students taking the same courses over and over. The author of Hebrews expected them to uncover Messianic treasures, pointing irreversibly to Jesus, in the deeps of God’s word; instead, they were still treading water on the surface.

Believers on the Bottle

Do texts like Hebrews 5:11–14 not vindicate for all time the careful study of God’s word, a hearty adherence to the whole counsel of God, a glad obedience to the fullness of its teaching? If the specifics of an enigmatic figure in Genesis 14 and Psalm 110 — one who many today might be tempted to deem obscure or irrelevant — has its proper place in the Christian mind, how much more the more conspicuous points?

Yet how many small groups or Sunday schools or Bible studies around the Western world today know much (if anything) about Psalm 110:4 and the priestly order of Melchizedek? Of its significance compared to the Aaronic order? The question grows sharpest, however, when we ask, How many want to know? How many of us, through disobedience and stagnancy, become “dull of hearing”?

Some modern minds seem to enshrine ignorance of finer points of Christian thought and doctrine as a Christian virtue. Particulars of Christian dogma they see as only useful to fracture, puff up, or make one useless in this world. Seminaries, in their view, are better called “cemeteries,” for higher education is where passion and love go to die.

God’s truth — that stubborn and imperishable reality that shall outlive the stars — has fallen on hard times with them. They do not wish to draw unwelcome lines, and what’s more, they believe this to be a very charitable and beautiful thing in the world. They seem altogether proud of their non-denominational, non-doctrinal, non-distinctive, and non-divisive faith. This, they say, is Christianity at its finest. Death, they cry, to circling round and round in endless debate over texts and theological jargon. Back to what Jesus gave us: a religion of love.

So much fighting exists already; they preach unity. Everywhere they see bitterness and rage; why should they argue? The most expedient thing to do, in a world of conflicting opinions — especially about religion — is to cast particularities of Christian interpretation, and in some cases, religion itself, overboard.

Lovers of First Grade

“Carried away by a fancied liberality and charity,” J.C. Ryle wrote in 1877, “they seem to think everybody is right and nobody is wrong, every clergyman is sound and none are unsound, everybody is going to be saved and nobody going to be lost. Their religion is made up of negatives; and the only positive thing about them is that they dislike distinctness and think all extreme and decided and positive views are very naughty and very wrong!” (Holiness, 278).

What it means that God predestines unto salvation, that Christ is the only way, that you must be born again, that by works of the law none will be justified, that God’s design entails differences between men and women — seem so small from their lofty perch. Faintly they hear the combatant chirping over particular views, but what is that to them? Catholic, Protestant, “spiritual, but not religious” — they see nothing really all that different in the end. Different shades of gray, they might call it.

They love doctrinal milk, love the first grade. Their vague creed of love sends them away from controversy, away from laborious study, away from loving God with “all their mind,” away from such “trivialities” as the order of Melchizedek, indeed, away from the Bible itself, beyond a favorite verse or two. And some take this to be more Christlike because it fosters unity better, or it is thought, than a religion filled with doctrinal detail.

Good Vibes Christianity

Christian teaching does divide. It separates “self-made religion” from heavenly, all other gospels from the true one, the proud from the humble, the false from the true, the goats from the sheep, the unsound from the sound, the passing away from the eternal, the teachings of demons and the teachings of Christ.

“Christian teaching separates the goats from the sheep, the unsound from the sound, the passing away from the eternal.”

Christians ought to be Berean, lovers of God’s word, lovers of steak. What is true of the nobler Jew has been true of the noble Christian throughout history: “they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).

But what of our unity? It is precious, “good and pleasant” (Psalm 133:1), a gift from above not based on vague spiritualism or good vibes; real unity does not seek to discover how little can be believed. No, we embrace and teach and love the whole counsel of God. Love for others is nourished by doctrinal meat; by Scripture, all of Scripture — without abridgment or apology. As we confess in the Desiring God Affirmation of Faith, “Our aim is to encourage a hearty adherence to the Bible, the fullness of its truth, and the glory of its Author” (15.2). This alone “stabilizes saints in the winds of confusion and strengthens the church in her mission to meet the great systems of false religion and secularism.”

We will not agree to a man on every point; some distinctions will separate some of us from the particulars of weekly fellowship. But even then, as the Church, our superseding oneness in Christ makes our unity stronger than it ever could have been in untruth, error, and apathy, in clawing for the least common denominator, rather than turning our souls to God’s word as supreme, and then finding who are our fellows.

Need of the Hour

Our souls need more than little-truth, little-light, little-belief. Our souls need a feast of pure meat and holy potatoes to gird us up for life’s hardships. Milk-and-water theological minimalism may sustain infants, but not for long.

“Our souls need more than little-truth, little-light, little-belief.”

“We must charge home into the consciences of these men of broad views,” as Ryle put it, “and demand a plain answer to some plain questions. We must ask them to lay their hands on their hearts, and tell us whether their favorite opinions comfort them in the day of sickness, in the hour of death, by the bedside of dying parents, by the grave of beloved wife or child. We must ask them whether a vague earnestness, without definite doctrine, gives them peace at seasons like these” (31).

And our neighbors, coworkers, and family members need to be met with weighty-truths, broad-shouldered beliefs, and a living faith in the living Savior. All of which give us reason to smile, not frown.

What Ryle calls that spiritual “colorblindness” that “fancied liberality,” that “boneless, nerveless, jellyfish condition of soul,” that “pestilence which walks in darkness . . . a destruction that kills at noonday” (328) — cannot be the religion that turned the world upside down.

Mark what I say. If you want to do good in these times, you must throw aside indecision, and take up a distinct, sharply-cut, doctrinal religion. . . . The victories of Christianity, wherever they have been won, have been won by distinct doctrinal theology; by telling men roundly of Christ’s vicarious death and sacrifice; by showing them Christ’s substitution on the cross, and his precious blood; by teaching them justification by faith, and bidding them believe on a crucified Savior; by preaching ruin by sin, redemption by Christ, regeneration by the Spirit; by lifting up the brazen serpent; by telling men to look and live — to believe, repent, and be converted. (328)

Dare then, Christian, to have decided beliefs in this world. Satan and his demons are decided. The world is concrete in its creed. False teachers are bold in their belief. Those attempting to uncreate God’s reality are firmly concluded. Will we not be?

And in such courage, we will not find ourselves alone but flanked — by real fellows, with whom we will then taste true unity.