Us and Them - Really?!

 
Person 1
“They are so liberal; it is like they know so little about God.  They act like our great heritage means nothing and that our God-given rights have somehow been abolished.  It seems to me that they have no respect for the precedents that have been set.  I am not sure that I want to be in church that welcomes and embraces likes of them!”

Person 2
“They are nothing but pompous, ‘look-down-at-their-nose-at-us’ church-dividers!  They think they know God and  know His Word so well.  They flaunt their years of experience and act like they are the only ones who know  the truth.  Conservative is too good a  word for them. They are stuck in the  mud of their own reasoning. They have  so many rules for this and that, it is like  they want us to wear straitjackets. My opinion is as good as theirs! I just do  not think keeping my family in this  church will be good for us.  We are out of here.”

Person 1
“But before I leave, I will go and hear that letter read that our leaders just received.”

Person 2
"But I heard our leaders received an important letter. Before I pull my family away, we will go and listen to what it says.”
 

“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (from the letter to the Ephesians 3:14-22).
 
Sadly, divisions between believers are nothing new.  In the first century it was Jew versus Gentile, a divide that makes the squabbles of our day look insignificant.  If Christ was the peace that held these divergent groups together back then, ought we not allow Him to do the same today?  

We have access to the same Father. We have the same citizenship, members of the same household. We are built on the same foundation.  We have the same cornerstone that holds the whole temple together.  Let us be “built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”
 
-Gerhard deBock