Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, he who accuses them before our God day and night. – Revelation 12:10

My spirit is stirred up about all the division in the body of Christ. In particular, the tearing and breaking caused by the politics of our day.

God gave me a word that I first gave during a New Year’s Eve service one year ago. It came from Ephesians 2:11-22 where Paul tells us that Jesus, through His blood shed for us, broke down the wall of separation. He did this so we would no longer be in factions, but we could be one body, one temple, one dwelling place for Him.

And yet, today, I find the church is more divided than ever, and we are letting the politics of this present age define our unity, rather than the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

As I pondered this, I was thinking about the New Testament word “devil” which means “accuser.” So I looked up the place in Revelation where the devil is called the accuser of the brethren and found that it’s a different word.

Devil is diabolos, but in Revelation John uses the word whose root is katēgoros. This is the root of our word category.

This reveals one of the schemes our enemy, our accuser, uses. He breaks us into categories. If he can convince us what we are of one category, he can separate us from others who are in Christ, effectively re-building walls Christ shed His blood to demolish.

In the early church, it was circumcision. Today it may be Donald Trump. But either way, this fracturing, this categorization, is the work of satan, and pleases him no end. He doesn’t have to worry about us preaching the gospel if he can get us to put up these dense filters. Our words of life need to be pressed through such dense cultural filters that it’s unintelligible to the hearer.

We can’t win the world to Christ if we hate our brothers. In the category of “Things Jesus never said,” there is this beauty: “They will know you are Christians by your vote.” Or how about, “They will know you are Christians by your hate one for another.”

It’s more likely that Jesus looks at our fighting and doesn’t recognize His own body. “I never knew you…”

All the time you spend listening to the talking heads, on either side, you are feeding and watering the thorns in the garden of your soul, and it renders you and the Church unfruitful.

We must get back to loving our neighbors, especially those of the household of faith. We must stop fighting about what doesn’t matter and begin obeying the one thing Jesus asked us (commanded us) to do. Love one another. Just for the record, the command to love one another is in the New Testament twenty-five times–25 times!!!

Rant over.

Thanks for listening.

I love you,

Ben