4 Keys to Unity

4 Keys to Unity

 Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.  Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.  And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

[Col 3:12-14 NIV]

Have you ever wanted to know the secret to developing unity with others?  It doesn’t matter if it is your friend or enemy, God desires us to live in unity with those around us.  In his letter to the Colossians, Paul gives us some wonderful keys to developing and maintaining unity with those that we deal with every day.

The first step is to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.  Notice the instruction to “clothe yourselves”.  That means you have to make a conscious effort to put on those qualities every day, just like you would your shirt, pants, and shoes.  And just like your clothing, you need to wear these five qualities all day long.  These five things:  compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, all deal with our treatment of others.  Jesus summed it up best in Matthew chapter 7 when he said, “treat others exactly how you want to be treated”.  Notice, also, that scripture uses these words to describe how God is toward us.  The first step in developing and maintaining unity is to make a purposeful effort to treat others the way that Christ treats you.

The second step in developing unity is support.  Paul said, “bear with each other”.  That literally means to hold them up, support them, and suffer with them.  How do we do that?  First, we can hold them up through prayer, but then as we pray for them we can be there for them, encourage them, and even cry with them.  You’ll find that it is much harder to keep up a wall of division when you are suffering with them.

Step number three is sometimes the hardest:  forgiveness.  The thing that we have to remember when it comes to forgiveness is that you are not alone.  How can you have the power to forgive someone?  Because Christ has already forgiven you.  When you remember that you are a sinner who is continually forgiven, it is much easier to forgive others.  You will also find that as you live your life clothed in compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, and as you learn to be a rock that people can lean on, it is not as hard to forgive.  As you live and treat others in a Godly manner, you will notice fewer occasions where forgiveness is needed.

The final step in developing unity is love.  The King James Version says that love is the “perfect bond of unity”.  That word for “bond of unity” is also used to describe the ligaments and tissues that hold our physical bodies together and keep our body working as one unit.  Love fuses all of the members of the body of Christ together so that they can now work as one unit.  Even though everyone has his own personality and characteristics it is still possible to live and move together as one.  When you put on love, you are putting on Christ, and the bible says that Christ is our peace who breaks down the walls.

Maybe there is someone at your work whom it is impossible to get along with.  Maybe there is someone at your church that you avoid every Sunday.  Remember these four steps to unity and begin to treat that person the way Christ treats you every day determine that you are going to become one with them.