Jesus Only, Part Six
I sat at a table once with people who never should have been in the same room.
It was after a funeral, the way the South does it, with folding tables and too much food and paper plates going soft under the weight of casseroles. And I looked down the length of that table and did the math on who was sitting there. A Pentecostal aunt who prayed in tongues over her sweet tea. A Presbyterian cousin who could have told you the five points before he could ride a bike. A Baptist deacon who was quietly certain about the end times. A young couple who had wandered in from a nondenominational church with a coffee bar and a fog machine. A lifelong Methodist. A man who had not darkened a church door in thirty years and came anyway because he loved the woman we buried.
On paper, those people could not agree on baptism, or communion, or the gifts, or predestination, or music, or the rapture, or the drinking question. Put them in a business meeting and they would have split a congregation by sundown.
But there was grief in the room, and there was a Name that had carried every one of them through their own hard nights, and for one afternoon the fences just came down. They passed the cornbread. They told stories about the same Jesus. They wept and then they laughed, which is the strange grammar of a Christian funeral. And I thought, this. This is the thing He prayed for. Not that they would agree. That they would be one.
We have spent this whole series pulling down fences, and I want to be careful as we finish, because somebody is going to hear all of this as, none of it matters, believe whatever you want, truth is a buffet. That is not what I have said and it is not what I believe. Post two of this series planted a stake in the ground and I am not pulling it up. The person and work of Christ, salvation by grace through faith, Jesus alone and Jesus enough. That is not a fence. That is the foundation, and a man who knocks that out is not lowering a wall, he is burning the house.
But almost everything we fight about is not the foundation. It is the paint color of rooms in a house we all already live in. And the night before He died, with the cross in front of Him and every reason to pray for Himself, Jesus prayed about us. About this. About whether His people would be one.
Listen to what He actually asked for, because it is more than we usually let it be.
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word, that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” (John 17:20-21)
Read the pattern of it. He does not say, make them one the way a club is one, everybody agreeing on the bylaws. He says, make them one the way the Father and the Son are one. That is a staggering thing to ask. The oneness of the Trinity, poured out onto arguing, fence-building, casserole-carrying people like us. The little word for one there is hen (ἓν), and He keeps hammering it. One, as We are one. I in them and You in Me, that they may be made perfect in one. (John 17:23)
And notice the reason He gives, because it will change how you carry your convictions. So “that the world may believe.” The witness of the church to a watching world is tied, by the mouth of Jesus Himself, to whether His people can love each other across their differences. When we split over the disputable things, we are not just being petty. We are undercutting the very thing He said would make the world believe. The fences do not only wound us. They lie to the lost about who Jesus is.
Paul had a church that was already doing it, already splitting into fan clubs, and he went at it hard. They were saying, I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas. Picking teams. Naming their tribe and sharpening it against the others. And Paul asks them three questions that ought to hang over every denominational quarrel we have ever had.
“Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Corinthians 1:13)
Is Christ divided. That is the whole thing in three words. When you make your tribe the point, you are trying to cut Christ into pieces and take home the slice you like best. But He does not come in slices. There is, Paul says elsewhere, “one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.” (Ephesians 4:4-6) Count the ones in that sentence. Seven of them, stacked up like hammer blows. One, one, one, one, one, one, one. Paul is not describing a goal we are working toward. He is describing a fact we keep denying. You are already one. Stop acting divided about a thing that is already true.
So here is where the whole series lands, and I will say it as plainly as I know how.
Jesus only will cost you something. That is the part the bumper sticker leaves off. It sounds warm until you realize what it asks. It asks you to lay down the quiet pleasure of being right in a way that keeps you separate. It asks the Calvinist and the Arminian to pass the same bread. It asks the tongues-speaker and the skeptic to call each other brother and mean it. It asks you to want the person across the fence at your table more than you want to win the argument. It asks you to believe that the blood of Christ makes a stronger bond than your doctrine of secondary things makes a division.
We will not agree on everything this side of glory. Hear me, we were never asked to. There is not a verse where Jesus prays that we would all reach the same conclusion about the end times. There is a verse where He prays that we would be one. Agreement was never the assignment. Love was. Unity was. Belonging to each other because we belong to Him was.
The table is set. It was set by a Man who paid it all, who opened the door and tore down the veil and prayed with the cross in His eyes that we would be one. The only people who miss the meal are the ones who stay outside keeping score, and He is out there right now in the dark, the way the father was, pleading with the older brother to come in.
Come in. Sit down. Pass the bread to the one you were sure did not belong. There is one table, and there is one Lord, and there is room.
Jesus only. And Jesus for all of us.
This is the final post in the Jesus Only series. Thank you for walking it with me. If it did anything, I hope it lowered a fence, and set one more chair at the table.
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