God's plan for Christian unity: One in spirit, one in peace
On the night before He died, Jesus prayed for his disciples, and then He prayed for us. In John 17:21, He asked the Father "that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you… .” The unity of God's people was so important to Jesus that it was on his heart at the cross, and it ought to be on ours every day.
The Apostle Paul gives us God's blueprint for that unity in Ephesians 4:1–6. Christian unity rests on two essential elements: the unity of the Spirit (doctrinal unity rooted in God's word), and the bond of peace (the practical, day-to-day unity of people choosing to get along for the sake of something greater than themselves).
The bond of peace: walking worthily with one another
Paul opens this passage with a personal plea: "I therefore…urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Ephesians 4:1). To "walk" in the New Testament is to describe the whole of how we live. And the calling Paul has in mind is Christianity itself — the name we wear, the Lord we serve, and the mission we share.
Walking worthily, he tells us, means "bearing with one another in love" (Ephesians 4:2). We are tasked to put up with, or forbear, each other. And Paul is honest enough to know that it will be necessary. People are imperfect; irritations arise, and mistakes are made. The question is what we do with them.
The three qualities that make forbearance possible are lowliness, meekness, and longsuffering; in other words, humility, gentleness, and patience. None of these come naturally to proud or self-centered people. But Paul points us to the one who modeled them perfectly. In Philippians 2:5–8, he holds up Christ, who "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant" and "humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." That is the mindset we are called to have.
The mission of Christ in this world is simply too important to allow personal grievances to derail it. As Paul writes in Philippians 1:27, God's will is that we "[stand] firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.” The church is called to live as a unified body, working to achieve the same goal. Everything else is secondary.
The unity of the Spirit: standing together on God's word
Practical unity—people getting along—is essential, but it is not enough on its own. God's plan for unity also requires a shared doctrinal foundation, and that foundation is the teaching of the Holy Spirit revealed through the apostles and prophets in the New Testament (Ephesians 3:1–5).
Paul spells this out in seven great "ones" in Ephesians 4:4–6. “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” One body, the church for which Christ died and to which all the saved belong; one Spirit; one hope of an unperishable, undefiled, unfading inheritance in Heaven (1 Peter 1: 3-5); one Lord, Jesus Christ; one faith; one baptism; and one God, the father of all, whose plan this is from beginning to end.
True unity is not built on compromises or vagueness. It is built on the firm and shared conviction that we all are following the same Lord, the same Scripture, and the same hope. When God's people are genuinely unified in spirit and in peace, they become God’s hands and feet in the world, one body working toward a common goal. Satan knows this, which is why he works so hard to divide us. But the answer is not to give up on unity; it is to pursue it the way God designed, with humility toward one another and faithfulness to his word.
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