Ephesians 4:5

This verse sits in the middle of a list Paul gives of seven shared foundations that define all Christians: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father. Paul was writing to a church in Ephesus where people from very different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds — Jewish and Gentile, wealthy and poor — were struggling to stay unified. These three "ones" in this verse represent bedrock shared by every follower of Jesus regardless of background. In the early church, baptism was the public act of declaring allegiance to Jesus and joining his community of people. The point is not that differences disappear, but that something deeper than difference already binds every believer together.

Lord, you are one, and you called us into that oneness before we ever earned it. Forgive me for the ways I have used our differences to avoid the harder work of love. Remind me today what we share before I start rehearsing what divides us. Amen.

Christians have found an almost impressive number of things to divide over. Worship styles. End-times theology. Which translation is the real Bible. Whether the coffee in the lobby is good enough. And underneath most of those arguments is a quiet assumption: that unity requires agreement, that we will finally be one when everyone else gets it right. Paul writes from a prison cell to a fractured church and says something that should stop us cold — you already have more in common than you think. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. Three declarations of shared ground — not aspirational, but actual. Before the denomination, before the theological debate, before the Sunday morning preference war, there is this. The Christian who drives you crazy, who votes differently, who worships in a style you would never choose, shares something with you that goes deeper than all of it. That shared ground is not a reason to paper over real differences or pretend disagreements do not matter. But it is a serious reason to refuse to let those differences be the first or the final word between you.