Not Uniformity

How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!
- Psalm 133:1

“Unity” is a very important word in today’s passage. And it’s desperately needed if we are going to live life together as God’s people.

An imposter has stolen Unity’s identity and attempted to pass himself off in her stead. He’s run up her credit cards and signed her name to bad checks. All around our world and our country people get sucked in by this imposter, become disappointed, and fall disillusioned.

The imposter is named Uniformity. Uniformity claims that we’re all pretty much the same. God’s diverse creation is plucked and sanded and scraped until nothing unique remains. What’s left in Uniformity’s wake has no sharp edges and so feels safe. We find the least common denominator between us and rally around that. The melting pot replaces the salad bowl. Any attempt to point out differences, discrimination, or mistreatment get shouted down in the name of Unity.

That liar Uniformity will try to stop up your ears to keep you from hearing stories and will smack your mouth to keep you from telling them. As tears fill your eyes, for a moment, everyone might look the same: blurry. But when those tears are wiped away one day, we’ll see Uniformity unmasked and will see all of our brothers and sisters – God’s people in all our diversity – worshiping God in unity.

But, until then, we need call out to God and reach out to him and the people around us. Despite our blurry, tear-stained vision, God leads us to clasp hands with our brothers and sisters. We’ll discover that some of those hands are different from our own. Some might be rougher than others. They’ll come in different shapes, sizes and colors. We might not always feel comfortable holding the hands that we find. That’s okay.

As we join hands and link arms around the world, we’ll also raise our voices in praise to God. And those voices, like those hands, will differ from each other too. But that just makes the song we sing even more beautiful. If God is glorified by one person or group of people praising him, how much more is he glorified by diverse peoples lifting up their voices in unity, a unity that only he could make possible.

Where do you see Uniformity posing as Unity? What steps can you take to unmask Uniformity and move toward Unity? How do you think that move will impact the way you connect with God?

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