¹¹ Don’t for­get that you Gen­tiles used to be out­siders. You were called “uncir­cum­cised hea­thens” by the Jews, who were proud of their cir­cum­ci­sion, even though it affected only their bod­ies and not their hearts. ¹² In those days you were liv­ing apart from Christ. You were excluded from cit­i­zen­ship among the peo­ple of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world with­out God and with­out hope.¹³ But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ.¹⁴ For Christ him­self has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gen­tiles into one peo­ple when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hos­til­ity that sep­a­rated us. ¹⁵ He did this by end­ing the sys­tem of law with its com­mand­ments and reg­u­la­tions. He made peace between Jews and Gen­tiles by cre­at­ing in him­self one new peo­ple from the two groups. ¹⁶ Together as one body, Christ rec­on­ciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hos­til­ity toward each other was put to death.

¹⁷ He brought this Good News of peace to you Gen­tiles who were far away from him, and peace to the Jews who were near. ¹⁸ Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us.

We Are One

In his final prayer time, Jesus prayed that we would be one. That all believ­ers would be united. Each of the Apos­tles car­ried on that theme. God has called us to put aside our dif­fer­ences and come together under one ban­ner. Paul reminds the Jews and Gen­tiles of this truth in this passage.

I think it’s hard for us to com­pre­hend how dif­fi­cult it was for the early church. Two groups that had been at odds for their entire his­tory, sud­denly invited to come together. Jews who saw them­selves as far supe­rior than Gen­tiles. After all, they were God’s cho­sen peo­ple. The Gen­tiles were sim­ply dogs who should be grate­ful for what­ever God offered them. Gen­tiles who saw the Jews are reli­gious elit­ists. They were close-minded, arro­gant, judgemental.

And yet, the early church lead­ers sim­ply would not allow the divi­sion to con­tinue. The mes­sage of grace was for all, and that meant that these two groups needed to put aside their dif­fer­ences and come together. It must have been incred­i­bly hard.

Some­times God calls us to do dif­fi­cult things. In those moments, we must decide: is he God or isn’t he? Is it his will and way or do we take that back when he chal­lenges us? It’s easy to come up with an excuse and jus­tify why we can’t do it God’s way, but in the end, he wont change.

Per­haps that’s where you are today. God has called you to do some­thing dif­fi­cult. You’re debat­ing whether or not you should fol­low his direc­tion or stay in your com­fort zone. Let me encour­age you: he really does always know best. Trust him.

My prayer: Lord, whether it’s unity with other believ­ers, or some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent, I know that your way really is the right way. Help me to always trust you, even when it means the path might be uncom­fort­able or dif­fi­cult. Give me the strength to con­tinue when I want to sim­ply hide in the crowd. Amen.

Until tomor­row.

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