Dennis Abernathy

Many feel that religious unity is impossible today, some thinking that one religion is as good as another. Let’s think about this a little bit.

George Dehoff told the following story “I took a package to the post office at Murfreesboro and had the clerk weigh it. He consulted his map to find the zone to which it was going. He turned to his guidebook and told me the amount of the package. I took the same package to a neighboring town of Woodbury and went into the post office. The clerk gave me the amount of the package, and it was the same. This same package I then took to a little country post office in the back of a store in one of our rural districts. There the postmaster weighed it. With some degree of slowness, he consulted his postal rate book and came up with the same answer. These postal employees had not met in convention and decided to charge me a certain amount for the mailing of this package. They probably did not know one another. They all had one official guidebook and went by it. They had unity.”

What is the point of this story as it relates to religion? So long as men insist on using their creeds and opinions in religion, there will be division. When people use the official guidebook-the BIBLE- there will be UNITY! Unity cannot be achieved apart from God’s Word. Christ said to His apostles: “Neither pray I for these (the apostles) alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word; that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us; that the world may believe that thou hast sent Me” (Jn. 17: 20-21). The unity for which Christ prayed is rooted and grounded in Scripture. It is not some type of man-made union that all agree on in spite of their differences. The reality of religious division is tragic. Denominationalism and the idea of “attend the church of your choice” and “one church is as good as another” comes from the mind of man, and not from God. First Corinthians 1: 10 says: “Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” Disunity prevails when people do not speak the same thing (2 Tim. 4: 1-4). Think on these things.