The Unity of the Spirit.
I. What is to be kept: "the unity of the Spirit." That unity may be regarded as twofold. It may be viewed in two lights: as outwardly manifested and as inwardly wrought. In either view it is the unity of the Spirit.
II. This unity is to be kept. (1) There must be an endeavour to keep it. (2) There is a bond provided for keeping it: it is the bond of peace; it is the peace of reconciliation to God.
R. S. Candlish, Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians,p. 70.
The Basis of Communion.
I. It seems to me that there are two streams of influence which are pressing some, and those by no means the feeblest and least thoughtful, of our ministers, towards the conclusion that the Church of the future will take comparatively slight heed of doctrinal agreements and differences, and will base its fellowship on vital sympathy in the work of teaching, helping, and saving society. First, there is the weariness of the narrow doctrinal basis which has been accepted as orthodox, which has made exclusion rather than inclusion the watchword of the kingdom of heaven. There is the certainty that many others within the Church who are distinguished by no loftiness of spiritual nature, but who are proud of their soundness in the faith, would be found practically, if they were examined, to be in much confusion as to the true nature and bearings of even such truths as the Incarnation and the Atonement; while outside the orthodox pale there are equally a large number who seem to be laden with all the fruits of the Spirit, to live in love, and to spend themselves in ministry to mankind. This is one stream of influence, and it is pressing men strongly in this direction, to this issue: a communion independent of doctrine and based purely on fellowship of spirit, sympathetic views of Christian activities, Christian endeavour and aspiration, Christian methods, aims, and ends.
II. There is another stream of influence tending towards the same result. There are those who are not impatient of the doctrinal barriers which are raised between those who, it is affirmed, ought to be in communion, but who are in doubt of the doctrines themselves. They hold reverently, tenaciously, to the spiritual element in Christianity. The Cross represents to them the highest and most sacred power which can be brought to bear on the development and elevation of mankind, but they have no hold on the realities outside the sphere of the human which revelation makes known to us. They see the historic basis of the Church, as they think, vanishing; they find no longer credible the facts and judgments on which for eighteen centuries Christendom has nourished its life. They dread lest those whose faith in the great Christian verities is shaken or shattered should drift away into blank atheism and sensualism, and they would gladly create for them a haven of Christian fellowship in a non-sectarian, undoctrinal, and free-thinking Church.
III. Sound doctrine is in the long run as needful to healthy, vigorous, productive Christian life as bone is to flesh in the order of the human frame; but I do not hesitate to say that I see considerable force in what is urged by this latter party, and I entertain not a shadow of doubt that in this direction the larger and more loving recognition of the unity which may underlie wide doctrinal divergences lies the next great expansion of the visible kingdom of heaven.
J. B. Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xii., p. 401.
I. The more the heavenly and spiritual union of all Christians in one body is out of sight and above understanding, the more necessary it is that we should be continually put in mind of it. Having once learned it, we should never allow ourselves to forget it, else we shall be often doing many things, in carelessness or in ignorance, most contrary to this Divine unity. Therefore the Apostle lays such stress on the word "endeavouring "in our text: "Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," that is, making a serious object of it, looking to Church union and communion distinctly as one great purpose of our lives. Do Christians in general, do we ourselves, attend as we ought to this precept of the Holy Ghost? The bond of peace we understand and perceive the benefits of, but the unity of the Spirit is a matter of faith, not of sight; we either never think of it at all, or dismiss it at once out of our minds, saying it is above us, and all we can do is to live quietly among our neighbours of all sorts.
II. What can private Christians do towards so great an object as this of keeping the Church at unity in itself? In answer to this, I would remind you of those many Scriptures in which the Church of Christ is represented as a holy building or temple, whereof the materials are not earthly stones, but the sanctified and regenerated souls and bodies of Christians, living stones, as St. Peter entitled us all, forming one spiritual household. The layman or the child has so far the same duty as the Apostle, that is, to maintain his post in the building, and not to loosen it, as the withdrawing of any stone must do. We may never see what the early Christians saw on earth, the Church universal of one accord, of one mind, but we may hope to see in heaven that of which even the first and best Church was but a faint shadow and emblem: the unity of the Spirit kept perfectly in the bond of everlasting peace.
Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. i, p. 206.
Life and Peace.
I. "The Spirit bloweth where it listeth.'' The influences which we recognise as coming to us from above, and which mould our individual being, are often presented to us partially in fitful succession, and their first effect seems rather to disturb us than to control. And yet it is out of such struggling and discordant elements that the growth towards the ideal life is to be won. For in all human life and movement that is not merely a sinking downwards there is something which without irreverence may be called a breathing of the Spirit. And the Spirit must be there, striving with human infirmity, before the first upward step can be taken. It is not from the complacent, satisfied, unaspiring temper that the unity of the Spirit is to be wrought. There may be unity in such a life, but it is not the unity of the Spirit; there may be a sort of peace, but it is the peace of apathy. That is not the peace which reflects the image of the early Christian ideal.
II. But when we look back on the struggle after it is over, and the peace is won, we may see the evidence of the working of something higher still, and a unifying, harmonising power that was less apparent to us at the time; and we cannot claim that power to have been our own. "When I said, My foot hath slipped, Thy mercy, O Lord, held me up." This is a strength which knows its dependence upon a higher strength, and which rejoices in the belief that it may be privileged to strengthen others with the might wherewith it has itself been strengthened from above.
III. For the Divinity that shapes our ends is no blind destiny descending on us from without and compelling us we know not whither, nor yet can we admit that character is fate in the sense that weakness predetermines men to ruin. There is a Spirit witnessing to our spirit that we are the children of God.
IV. And in this belief and consciousness the life is at last girded with the bond of peace. Life without peace is weakness and chaos; peace without life is nothingness. It is when the two are united, when self-control is not mere self-repression, but the enlightened guidance of an ardent will, that the individual has realised for himself, and will assist his brethren in realising individually, the ideal which the Apostle sets collectively before the early Church: the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
L. Campbell, Some Aspects of the Christian Ideal,p. 123.
References: Ephesians 4:3. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xi., No. 607; T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. i., p. 56; A. Mackennal, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 328; J. Baldwin Brown, Ibid.,vol. xiii., p. 9; F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 155; J. Edmunds, Sixty Sermons,p. 383.Ephesians 4:3-6. Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. ix., p. 186; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 205; vol. iv., p. 31.