PLENTY TOO MUCH UNITY
Jesus’ primary prayer for His church was that we would be unified so that He could pour out all of His blessings on and through His church. Unity takes a different kind of thinking than most of us were raised on. I know I grew up thinking very competitively. It seemed almost every day as a child I was competing with siblings or someone to “beat” them. Certainly, it was mostly just fun, but it framed a way of looking at thing someone called a “zero sum” mentality. This means I usually thought that for me to win you have to lose and for you to win means I lost. It caused me to look at so many things in terms of “them” verses “us” instead of just us and us and thinking our job as helping every win because when they win I win too. This wrong mindset easily led to drawing lines and moving towards division.
Some of the disciples demonstrated this one day when they saw someone who wasn’t in their group casting out demons and ministering. They wanted Jesus to rebuke him because he wasn’t of our bunch.
The Plenty Too Much mindset tells us to think exactly the opposite. Instead of drawing little circles of “us four and no more” we want to draw the biggest circles we can to include everyone we can in the vision of being super blessed. We know that as members of the “Body” of Christ we all win together and lose together. If my hand reaches the food, my stomach gets to eat and so forth.
In my book, I tell how sad it was that the church that was the most successful in winning people to Jesus in our city was also the most criticized and ostracized by other pastors. My Dad went out of the way to build a relationship and show great love and appreciation for this Pastor and praying for the success of their church, even though he didn’t agree with everything that church was teaching.
Jack Hayford tells the story of getting started and praying for revival in his little Foursquare church in Los Angeles. He prayed and prayed. One day the Lord told him that He was going to bring revival, but it would be through the Baptist church down the street. At first he felt disappointed, but then he saw that there is only one church, Jesus’ church and revival for one is revival for all. He began to lead his church to pray and fast for revival for that church as well as the city. Eventually, revival did come to that church but right after that it came to his church as well, it exploded to more than 10,000 members and has been a center of revival ever since.