The Importance of Seeing God over People. - A Unified Church

I have noticed in our current Christian environment, that some of us as believer’s have gotten so caught up in how we see spiritual wrong in others that we misrepresent the presence of God in our actions.  The world calls this kind of behavior, “Cancel Culture.”  What we see, interpret, and think to be right or wrong has become the final authority as opposed to what the word of God really says about something.  Our seeing, interpreting, and thinking have become externally driven by the world and not internally driven by the Holy Spirit or the word of God.  We have become multiple groups within a group, where each group has pitted itself against the other.  I don’t know about you, but where I am from, I call this a gang mentality.  I have never seen anything positive come out of such a mentality; especially nothing that will build up the Kingdom of God.

In Mark 9:38, John, one of Jesus’ disciples, comes up to Jesus and tells Him that he and the others saw someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name and they tried to stop him because he was not one of them.  Jesus stops John dead in his tracks and says to him, “Do not hinder him, for there is no one who will perform a miracle in My name, and be able soon afterward to speak evil of Me.  For he who is not against us is for us.”

I see in this verse that Jesus did not focus on what He thought the man was doing wrong, but rather on what He knew the man did right.  The man may or may not have had the purest of motives, but he did have the right solution in Jesus Christ.  Even in Jesus’ response to John, He implied that even if the man had evil motives, he might come to believe just by seeing a miracle happen in the name of Jesus.

Let’s let the belief in the power of the name of Jesus be what unites us as the solution for the world, as opposed to the many man-made nuances that we have allowed to divide us for so long.  Like the world, the church will always have differences that we could debate.  However, the world needs to see a unified church, speaking of a unified truth about a unified solution found in Jesus Christ.

It would be an amazing thing if we could all accept the example of Jesus.  When we see someone attempting to cast out the ills of this world in the name of Jesus, let’s not hinder them simply because they don’t belong to our group.  Let’s rest in the fact that if they are not against us, they are for us because we know that Jesus is the solution for our hurting world.

Be blessed