As a prisoner of the Lord, I beg you to live in a way that is worthy of the people God has chosen to be his own. Always be humble and gentle. Patiently put up with each other and love each other. Try your best to let God’s Spirit keep your hearts united. Do this by living at peace. (Ephesians 4:1-3 CEV)

Eph 4:3

(ASV) giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

(CEV) Try your best to let God’s Spirit keep your hearts united. Do this by living at peace.

(DRB) Careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

(EMTV) being diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

(ESV) eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

(GNB) Do your best to preserve the unity which the Spirit gives by means of the peace that binds you together.

How can the church maintain the unity that the Holy Spirit has created by baptizing us into the body of Christ? How can we live in guietness and rest with each other. How can we keep our relationships right?

None of this is easy. Sin’s first impact was to divide the man and the woman in shame from each other. Christians have struggled to have emotionally healthy relationships since the first century. So how can we strive to obey this command? How can we move in the direction of preserving the unity and peace of the body of Christ?

I believe that the first step is prayer. We must really pray for each other. If I am praying for my brother or sister sincerely then it is less likely that I will say or do things to hurt them. Now, the prayer has to be an honest prayer and not a self righteous judgment in the form of a prayer. I have to actually be praying the Lord will bless my brother or sister. I also have to pray that God will restore and reconcile our relationship.

I also have to remind myself of the common ground that I have with every other Christian. We all have the same heavenly Father. We all have the same Savior. The Holy Spirit is in both of us. We share a common faith and the common goal of the kingdom of God. We are forever family. This bond is actually stronger that that of blood from God’s perspective.

I need to grant the judgment of charity, love, mercy, and grace to my brother or sister when they do or say something wrong, foolish, or confusing. What would be the best motivation my brother or sister could have had for doing or saying this? We must not demonize each other or think that our brother or sister only had the darkest and most vile motivations when they did something. Our emotions are controlled by the story we tell ourselves. If we tell ourselves a horror story then our feelings will become filled with fear and anger. We must tell ourselves the best story we can about what has happened since only God knows the heart. When I make my brother or sister a monster this is most likely not God’s view of my brother or sister.

Judge thyself with the judgment of sincerity, and thou will judge others with the judgment of charity. — John Mitchell Mason

We must follow Matthew 18

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
(Matthew 18:15-17 ESV)

We must understand that while gossip, rumor spreading, and murmuring come naturally to us this has never helped to protect the unity of the church or promote peace. We must face the self rightous roots of all such behavior and dedicate ourselves to going to people one on one when we have conflicts or have been hurt. If we cannot find reconcilation we must press on and get counseling with people where there is division. Some things may not be able to be fixed but we need to know that we have really attempted in every way humanly to find reconcilation. Whenever we do not have reconcilation in a relationship we have fallen short of God’s perfect will. As much as it relies upon us we need to seek to have peace (Rom 12:18).

I find this hard to do. I think we all do. I think I have not sought for outside counsel when I should have in order to find reconciation when my own efforts failed. I have left to many things half fixed or unfixed simply because I did not know how to make them any better. I am challenged to work harder to solve these problems and not think they will just go away. We must strive to have a real unity in the body and one free of unhealthy division. We must be an emotionally healthy church.

I do think that good relationships are helped by good structures. Human beings in community do not do well when there are not an agreed upon set of rules. When everyone does what is right in their own eyes then people get hurt. If I know we are playing football I am not surprised when you tackle me. However if you tackle me in the middle of a game of chess I am greatly surprised.

The key to all of this is to desire to be reconciled more than to be right. We have to want peace more than we want to “win”. That is hard. But it is the only road to peace.

To actually be sane, stable, and spiritual is not easy.

To be sane one must be dedicated to face reality at every level. This means that one must be able to look into the mirror and really see themselves for who they really are and get past all self defense mechanisms. To know oneself is the key. Without self knowledge then everything else is built on sand. If our vision of ourselves, others, and the world is an illussion then nothing will be stable in our lives. Yet, such knowledge is rare for our we love our illussions more than we love the truth. Sanity also requires that we be able to think clearly about how we should respond to the true state of reality. In light of what really exist how would a mature and logically thinking person respond.

Stability would be the ability to keep in the truth and begin to adapt to the truth on a daily basis. It would mean that we are able to compensate for our swings in biological stability and waves of difficult circumstances. We would have the determination to keep to the path outlined by our most mature self and use this as the compass of our soul and our actions. Stability is a hunger adn thirt to live a sane life regardless of the cost.

Spirituality is really the key. Only by being actually touched by the Spirit of God can we see and accept reality. Normally our pride will keep us from seeing ourselves as we really do exist. The Spirit of the Lord must give us humility in order for us to be sane. It is so easy for us to substitute in a “religious spirit” one filled with self righteousness that has been baptized in a false humility instead of actually being naked before the face of God in truth. To be a simple disciple of Messiah Jesus is not simple. So on the one hand we can only be sane if we have been given spirituality and we can only experience spirituality if we have been given the gift of sanity.

So one reality we must face is that this is not easy. To be sane, stable, and spiritual is a narrow path and few will find it. May God have mercy on us and let us be encouraged by the truth that all who seek will find. So let us seek it with all our hearts.

To say no to illusions is hard. Illusion often feel better than reality. But when one depends on an illusion to be real that is when the real pain comes. That is when we feel our worlds collapse.

For this reason one must have a commitment to the real world. To seek to know and accept what really exists and not the dreams that we would wish exist. We must have expectations based on what actually does exist.

Yet, we need to be careful to not limit reality. If we do we may never invent airplanes or computers. Sometimes our vision of what is real is far to small. There is greater potential in reality than some of us would ever dream.

So part of being sane is to open to all that is real and strive to discern what is from what is illusion. We must get rid of illusionarythinking and strive for realistic thinking. But we must in this process remember that reality has great God given potentials beyond what we would normally think. Therefore part of facing reality is to be creative and imaginative in our search for what actually exists.