1) God’s truth does not change
There was a guy on a ship, and the ship was going down. It was foggy that day, and he saw a light coming at him. He shouted, “Go five miles north. We are going to collide.”
The voice echoed, “No! You go five miles south.”
The guy said, “I am an admiral in the United States Navy. Go five miles north or five degrees north.
The voice came back, saying, “Absolutely not. You go five degrees south. I am the lighthouse.”
The lighthouse does not move at all. God is not negotiating his truth just because we want to change the direction. If it is foggy in your life, you better agree with what God (lighthouse) says and not what you think and feel.
John 17:14: “I have given them your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.”
2) Disunity is the absence of God
God knows that there is a system at work to keep us from the truth, and that system is called the world. The world is defined as that system headed by Satan that leaves God out. It is that system orchestrated by the devil that wants to get God out of the conversation without getting rid of God’s name.
Satan does not mind God’s name as long as it is not God’s truth. So, he is a fan of religion. He is keeping God’s name, using it for invocations and benedictions, but would not let God’s truth be the determiner.
The devil sneaked into the Garden of Eden, twisted God’s word, and lured Adam and Eve into sin. He corrupted God’s truth. God said, “And the two shall become one.” The devil twisted God’s word so that the oneness could be destroyed.
The devil has a kingdom. His goal is to keep us from the truth. He knows that if he breaks the unity, he will keep God away since God cannot operate in disunity.
Romans 16:17-18: “Mark them out who cause disunity in the church. And if necessary, remove them”
Folk will go around gossiping and creating messes and factions in the church, point them out, and deal with them. Because you will lose God if you keep them. Disunity comes because of the absence of God, and the absence of God will always be with the loss of truth Because God cannot function in a lie.
3) The devil is a lair and father of all lairs
“The devil is a liar and a father of lies”
Do you know who a father is? It is a person who has children. So, the devil got children born from lies.
“A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand”
So, if I were the devil and I wanted to keep God out of your home, your church, and your country, then what I am going to do is create illegitimate disunity. Your home, company, and church are the kingdom. And a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. For the devil to disrupt the kingdom, he has to spread disunity everywhere.
Have you ever wondered why would couples divorce because the wife could not cook? Or why do we wind up, and throw clothes at each other because of TV shows? People pick up fights not even knowing how it all started. That is what the devil is after. He seeks to see us in pain of disunity.
1Peter 3:7: “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respects as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.”
4) Satan is the real guy behind all worldly conflicts
In order to keep God out of your house, Satan keeps you in conflict. Where there is disunity, the presence of God is no longer felt and the devil is free to sow seeds and make a little thing huge.
The devil is very good at disunity. He can create disunity even within your own very self or thoughts. The devil has set many people in conflict with their own selves. He makes “You” in conflict with “You.” Sometimes you talk to yourself but “You” don’t know which of “you” you are talking to. And if you do not know which of “You” you are talking to, then you will certainly confuse everybody else. He draws you from the truth and gets you fighting with yourself.
The devil functions like the fire ants. The ants would dig up anywhere around your home to set up their kingdom, even on your lawn. Do you know why they built up that kingdom? Because they serve a queen. They got a queen, and she called her workers to serve her in her kingdom. These fire ants would build up the castle in your kingdom, your lawn, and call it their kingdom.
And they keep growing and the mound gets bigger and bigger because they want to disrupt the beauty of your lawn with their kingdom. You do not have to have sympathy for their mound else they expand and destroy your yard.
Satan wants to build his kingdom in your life, in your home, in the church, and in the culture. And he builds it and gathers his folk in there a lot.
5) You cannot be unified outside of God for so long
Genesis 11, 1-9, Tower of Babel.
The Bible says, “All the world spoke with one voice.” They came up with one plan to build a civilization. With one religion, they built a ziggurat– that is, a tower. And they said, “This tower is going to take us all the way to heaven.”
That was real humanism. They wanted to get to heaven by man. They did not see the need for God. They thought they needed just men to come together and hold hands and work in oneness.
The Bible says, “And God came down and disrupted the assembly.” No matter how high we get, God must have to come down before we succeed. No matter what degree you have, the money, or the cars you drive, God must come down into your life and give meaning.
So, God came down to see what the sons of men have built. And when God saw that they wanted to build a civilization without him, he said, “Let us” because he is talking to the Trinity. God came down and spit it up. God said, “The reason we are going to divide them is because if we let them stay unified, there is nothing that they will not be able to pull off on earth because of the power of unity.”
You leave God out, and you will be unified, but not for so long. If we try to have legitimate unity that is not based on God and his truth, he will not allow it. God rejects unity apart from him. When you have legitimate unity as defined biblically, the world will see something it has not seen. The world will see you love them like you loved me.
To love is to compassionately and righteously seek the well-being of another. He says, “If you will be perfected in unity, God will manifest his commitment to you.” Where there is unity, you get to see God show up. You get to see God invade your circumstances, invade your situation.
If we are unified based on the truth, then we will see the glory of God. Jesus said that the glory which the Father has given to him, he also gives them to us. Glory is where God shows off. Glory is where the invisible God becomes visible. Jesus’ goal is for everyone to see God.
1 Corinthians 7:5: “Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”
6) God will command blessings if we dwell in unity
There was a couple who had a rebellious son. He was a rascal and always on bad drugs. It was causing disruption in the home, and they had to put him out. Every Wednesday, the couple came together for fasting and prayers. They fasted, gave up the food, and spent that 30 minutes, 45 minutes in fasting and prayer, either by phone or in person.
Six months later, they got a call from their son. God had delivered their son from drug addiction. He called his mother, “Mother, can I come home? God answered their prayers because of the unity the couple had. Today, their son works with them in the ministry.
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to pray with your maids sometimes, to pray with your kids, or to pray with your loved ones? Sometimes, it gets boring to have family devotion or prayers. It keeps getting interrupted or uncomfortable, and you just think that is personality or emotions. No way! That is Satan wanting to keep you being disunified so that God does not show up in your family.
He wants to keep us from contact with God so that God does not feel comfortable showing up where we are. That is why Jesus’ prayer is so big on unity that the glory of God may be revealed.
Psalms 133:1-3: “How God loves the unity of his people. How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. for it is out of that unity he will command a blessing.”
That is the only place in the Bible that I am aware of that God talks about commanding a blessing. A command means you don’t have an option. God will command blessing into our lives if we dwell in unity, and blessing has no choice other than to obey the voice of God.
We fight all the time, and we do not know why. It is the tricks of the devil so that God does not command a thing in our life and in our circumstances.
When there is legitimate unity under the authority of God, there is power, and that power commands a blessing.
That is why the Bible says in Ephesians 4, “Preserve the unity of the spirit in the belt bond. The belt of peace. Preserving your fight for that unity.” You do not let the devil have his way in your life or your family because once he gets a lie in there and expands, he drives you into chaos.
