“Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all.”
Ephesians 4:1-6 NLT
Any statement that begins with, “therefore,” is a call to heed a connection being made. Here Paul draws a connection that Christians are not simply different. In their newness, they are noble. Paul calls Christians to that nobility. He calls Christians to want to live up to that nobility and be worthy of it. This sense of nobility is a “oneness.” This sense of polity is the gathering of unlikely pairs to live in harmony with each other. Not to live, merely outside of conflict as neighbors, but to live through conflict as brothers. According to him, this is the defining factor for the nobility of the new creature in Christ. Christ himself noted that how we love each other will be the determining factor in our successful transmission of the gospel message. This runs in contrast to the daily rhetoric of westernized Christianity which seems to tout a gospel of sanctifying displays of godly accolades. Paul flies counter-culture and demands that we lean into our noble quality of polity. He demands that we, not only remember the clever work of Christ to bring us together, but that we conform to it. It is who we are now. Just as living against the image of God condemned us before Christ, we must ask ourselves what the wages of sinning against him in this might produce, after we have known him. Paul posits elsewhere that it would be better to have never known him than to find out.
JOSH McGARY. COM 