I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Ephesians 4:1-3
We’ve already seen that unity isn’t about identicality, it’s about like-heartedness. So how do we cooperate with God to live in unity and how is it maintained? It depends a lot on our character in Jesus. Paul lists 5 characteristics that Christian unity depends on: humility, gentleness, patience, mutual forbearance, and love.
No big surprise that he begins with humility. Humility is essential to unity. Pride almost always results in discord and discord is almost always the result of pride at some level. Humility is the attitude that Jesus displayed in becoming a human being in the first place (Phil 2:3-8). In fact the word Paul used here is actually “humility of mind”—Humble-minded. That it’s an attitude that recognizes the worth and value of other people and allows for their diverse opinions.
Think about it for a moment. The people we tend to like to be around are people who show us respect even though they may not agree with us in many areas. The ones we don’t like to be with are the ones we sense disrespect or feel smug superiority from. Rather than maneuvering for the respect or esteem of others (which is the nature of pride), if we give them our respect, because we recognize their inherent God-given worth (which is the nature of this humility of mind that Ephesians is talking about), then we’ll be promoting harmony in our relationships; and result will probably be that they’ll respond to us with the same respect they’ve received.
Gentleness is a tricky word. It’s often misunderstood as weakness when it’s really a kind of strength. Paul uses the words in his instructions in 2 Tim 2:24,25 about how we should treat those who oppose the gospel, where he says: “And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness.”
Notice that humility and gentleness go together. Jesus used them together to describe Himself “I am gentle and lowly of heart” (Matt 11:29).
The next two characteristics also go together. Patience is a forbearing attitude towards people we come in contact with: the sort of attitude that God has t00, a mutual acceptance without which no group of human beings could ever live together in peace for any length of time.
The final characteristic in today’s verses is love, which is more of an overarching quality that takes in all the other four and enables them to be expressed. It’s the all-encompassing force for everything else we do.
So these 5 traits make or break our efforts to live in unity: humility, gentleness, patience, mutual forbearance, and love. Look at them again. Don’t think about anyone else. Just think about yourself. If we find that we fail to live out one or more of those characteristics in our relationships then we need to repent of it. We each need God to change us, to make us more like Jesus, as we more and more demonstrate the new creation power of God within us.