This is part of a series on the habits of a Christian life. Read more at the link.

Wouldn't it be great if the world were such that you could simply assume others are always working for your good? Wouldn't that be wonderful? If someone actually lives their life as if that's true, though, we call them naive.

But you know, the church should be the place where we can assume that. It's not always true in practice—turns out other people are just as broken as we are—but if there is any space in the world where we could experience unity, a unity beyond us, supernatural, it should and can be here.

Life should be a series of trust falls. Instead, we are surrounded by trust fails. And if we're honest, we've contributed to our fair share of trust fails as well.

The Problem: Without Forgiveness, There Is No Unity

One of the biggest trust fails we commit is this: when we fail to forgive.

Forgiveness is a difficult practice. As much as we want life to be a series of trust falls and unity, without forgiveness there is no unity. And without a practice of unity, we are doomed to stay suspicious of each other.

And with all of that going on, Jesus walks into our lives. Thank God for God! Here's what He does: He heals our hearts by forgiving us first. And in our healed hearts, we get to forgive others and truly practise unity.

With Jesus at work in our healed hearts, we get to forgive others and truly practise unity.

Our text today comes from two passages. First, Hebrews 10:24-25:

"And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching."

And second, Colossians 3:13-14:

"Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity."

Being Present: The Foundation of Unity

Physical Presence Matters

How are we going to grow in love? How are we going to grow in being the kind of people we want to be? The author of Hebrews is clear: not by giving up meeting together. In fact, it doesn't really matter what else comes after this—if you aren't present with each other, don't expect to grow in love or good deeds. Our presence with each other is the foundation of the practice of unity.

First, it means being physically present. God had to say it then; He continues to need to say it now. We have constructed our world to make it really easy to not be present. A screen isn't presence. It can be good, it can be bad, but it can't be presence. A stream isn't presence, a podcast isn't presence, a book isn't presence. Those can all be good things, but they can never be a replacement for being present with each other.

At our church in Manchester, this means, at the very least, our Sunday worship gatherings and our Missional Communities. It's not very much—just a handful of hours in a week full of them. If you are a Christian, if you're investigating what being a Christian means, the very best thing you can do with your time is to be here for a few hours on Sunday and be with a smaller group of people for a couple of hours during the week. There are other things you can do, but this is the baseline practice.

God believes it's important, and He tells us to make it a priority. In fact, He tells us to commit to being present—not just when it's convenient. If the starting point of growing in love and good deeds is being present with others, then it is good for us to commit to a community. This runs counter to how the rest of the world lives: we do something insofar as we feel good or want to. But just being here, all together, is the starting point of growing in love and good deeds.

We all say we want to be a good person. This is where we get to start—together.

Bringing Your Whole Self

Being present means all of you. Not just showing up physically whilst leaving your head or heart behind. Not just being present with all the good parts of your life and none of the bad. Being present as you are, ready to serve and be served.

It's easy to drag your body somewhere. It's much more difficult to bring your heart, with all its hurts and bruises along with you. But that's what we are here for: all of God for all of you. And if you want those dark parts to be healed, to not be held back, to be "spurred on"—bring your whole self.

This is where we get to be who we really are. Strangely, people in the church often get really good at faking who they are. But this is the one place where you get to freely be who you are. It should alleviate the pressure, not add to it. We might be wearing a mask for so long that it feels like it becomes part of us. But here is where we get to be our true selves, so that we can be more of our true selves all the time.

A Forgiving Presence

Bear With One Another

A united community is one undergirded with forgiveness. Colossians 3:13-14 gives us two things: bear with and forgive.

I love that "bear with" is in the Bible. This shows us that yes, we are brothers and sisters—and no, that doesn't mean we will all be best friends all the time. If you have to "bear with" someone, that means there is a difficulty. Another way of putting it: in the church, we are called to "put up" with others.

And if you are present with your full self for any length of time, you know this to be true. There are people who grate on you, people you find difficult. And then it also turns out: people here are as sinful as you are! We sin and make mistakes! When those sins can be overlooked, we patiently bear with each other. To overlook someone else's sin in love is to not hold it against them, not bring it up in your head or in conversations later.

Proverbs 19:11: "A person's wisdom yields patience; it is to one's glory to overlook an offence."

How can we do this? Well, not by ourselves! As a Christian we have the Holy Spirit at work in us, and He bears His fruit, of which patience is one. Patience and kindness and gentleness to bear with others. If this is actually at work—not passively aggressive, not weaponised, but really at work—we can be united even with our difficulties and differences.

This is not something we just fall into. Unity may not be a verb, but it is an action word. We practise unity so that we can be unified. And sometimes that means we put up with people. That's maturity.

Forgive One Another

Other times it requires actual forgiveness. If someone has wronged you, it's not just a good idea to forgive them. If you are a Christian, we must! The Father sent the Son to die so that we would be forgiven. The Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit so that we would have the spirit of forgiveness. We've been given an endless supply—we can give a little to others. After all, if I have a million pounds in the bank, what's a few pence?!

And we're not called to do the human version of forgiveness—faux-forgiveness: "I'll forgive you, but will hold it against you." Or: "I'll pretend like it's nothing—EVEN THOUGH IT IS—so that I don't have to forgive you." No, we have these weighty words: "Forgive as the Lord forgave you."

Was there something so horrible I've done where God said, "Nope, that's too much"? No.

When God forgives me, does He weaponise it and use it against me? No.

Is God very honest about where I need to be forgiven? Yes.

It's the same concept of generosity we looked at last week: we can be freely generous because God has given us everything. And we can freely forgive because we Christians have been forgiven of everything!

If you are stingy with your forgiveness, you have a small view of your own sin and a small view of God's love.

The Difficult Conversations

Sometimes we can forgive without bringing it up. Sometimes we don't need to tell someone else. Don't use this as an excuse to live a passively aggressive "nice" Christian life. Not every single little thing needs to be brought up in conversation.

But sometimes we are called to forgive and bring it up. Sometimes that's a necessary part of forgiveness—to be honest with your hurt and honest with your forgiveness.

"You know when you said that thing, it really hurt."

Now, if you are being told this, you should say: "Oh, I'm sorry! Please forgive me!" But our forgiveness is not contingent on someone else's response. Paul doesn't say forgive the other person only if they seek it. He commands: forgive!

So when you say, "You know when you said that thing, it really hurt"—even if there is a glaring silence—you can say: "And I want you to know that I forgive you."

Now there is a way of saying that which comes across as self-righteous and smug, and a way of saying it which comes across as humble and loving. One destroys unity; the other builds it up.

I don't know many people who are naturally good at this. Good news: we're all working on this together.

Let me paint a picture of what this looks like: a community of people following Jesus, from different backgrounds, who see conflict as an opportunity for more of God's love to come through, not less. A community of people actually working for each other, where Christians get built up in love and good deeds and people who aren't yet believers come in and see this at work. What can stop a community like that? Nothing!

And the starting point for a community like that: the practice of unity. You can't practise without doing; it requires us to work.

What Happens When We Don't Forgive

When we don't forgive, we spend time brewing up a potion we think is going to harm the other person. But what we do is end up drinking the toxin ourselves! So if you've been wronged, instead of that initial wrong being the end of it, we contribute to it and deepen the harm.

When we are hurt, we want others to feel our pain. Forgiveness is going beyond that, and surrendering control to God. Forgiveness doesn't mean giving up on justice; it doesn't mean no consequences. But it does mean surrendering your control over both of those things.

The few times in our church where people weren't committed to living this way, it wreaked havoc. There are still ripples for a small group of people in our church related to the soul-destroying act of not forgiving others, of gossip, of working against the unity of the church.

When we don't forgive, you can be present, but it's not a life-giving presence. Spiritually, it really does affect our whole church family—in ways you will probably never know, both positively and negatively. As we explore our common unity, we see how deeply interconnected we are.

Don't Give Up

And what does Hebrews say? Don't give up on presence.

The author of that letter was writing to people who were sure the world was going to end soon. Their instinct was: what does it matter to meet together? And the author says: don't give up! Keep on it!

Often when we come across difficult circumstances, our first instinct is to give up on the practice of unity. But it's often in exactly those times that we need others. It's exactly those times we need to be worshipping with our spiritual family, our brothers and sisters. And when you bring your difficulties with you, as we hope you will, you give the rest of us an opportunity to grow in love and good deeds.

Let's not give up! We spur each other on in love; we come ready to be spurred on in love. This is how we grow towards love and good deeds—through spurring and being spurred.

The Why: God's Forgiveness of Us

We can probably understand why unity is good for us. We live in a fractured world. People are suspicious of others. Groups are pitted against groups. We divide ourselves by skin colour, political beliefs, class background—we'll take any excuse not to live in unity.

But the "why" for Christians is rooted in God's actions towards us.

The Father made a perfect world; we trashed it like a 1970s punk band in a hotel room. So He sent prophets to tell us about Him. We killed them. He then sent His own Son, and we killed Him too. But what we meant for evil, God, in His infinite power to love, used our sin against us and provided the way out of our sin.

When we sin, every single one, it's one more debt. Each sin, another debt. It doesn't take long to feel the burden of that debt—we're in trouble! And Jesus, through His death, took that debt away from us and took it on Himself. Our debts were such that we deserved to die. Someone has to pay: it can either be us or Him. So when we surrender to Jesus, His death is the act of forgiveness from God that we desperately need.

So when someone sins against us, it's like this much compared to all we've been forgiven of. The more we are mindful of how much we've been forgiven, the more we will be able to forgive as God has forgiven us.

To withhold forgiveness is to not understand how much you've been forgiven. If we are stingy with our forgiveness, we have a small view of our own sin and a small view of God's love. Jesus' death is the model of our forgiveness.

The How: Not White-Knuckling It

But it's more than just a model. If we're made new, Jesus is also the means by which we can forgive. It's how we can be people who practise unity, even when sinned against.

Have you ever tried to white-knuckle forgiveness? It doesn't work, does it!

There's a better way for Christians: relying on the Holy Spirit alive and at work within you. God Himself—the same all-forgiving, all-loving God—is in you, at work in all His power. Take advantage of it! Take the risk of forgiving more, bearing with more; ask the Lord for patience. He actually gives it!

Through the Holy Spirit, God provides for us all that He calls us to. If this practice of unity seems impossible, you'd be right if you had to rely on yourself. Thankfully, we have a God who supplies our every need—unity, forgiveness, and patience included.

The Baseline Practice

This is the last in our short series on Christian habits. Over these weeks, we've looked at abiding, being sent, generosity, and now unity. Being a member of our church means committing to these practices with these people. Membership is a commitment to grow in these things together, and the church is committed to help you do just that.

It's like an adoption process: you become someone's brother or someone's sister. In adoption, the child doesn't determine the process. Same with the church—to join one is to humbly bring our whole selves to grow in the way God has called us to, together.

If you aren't yet a member, if you feel at home here but haven't yet committed, maybe have a think. Church membership is generally not understood, or misunderstood. Most people don't know where the Bible talks about it and think it's only something power-hungry leaders have come up with. As a church in Manchester, we believe it's one of the most important commitments a Christian can make. And learning from our community at Redeemer helps us understand why.

The baseline practice of unity means being present—the kind of presence we've been talking about—on Sundays and in Missional Communities. Not just showing up, but bringing your whole self. Not just tolerating others, but bearing with them in patience and forgiving them as Christ has forgiven you.

A Forgiven Community

The ever-present, ever-forgiving God invites us to His new life: unity with Him, therefore unity with other brothers and sisters, and a life marked by forgiveness.

When we aren't practising unity—when we hold grudges, when we gossip, when we give up on presence—we don't just harm ourselves. We harm the whole community in ways we'll never fully see.

But when we commit to this practice—when we show up, bring our whole selves, bear with each other, and forgive as we have been forgiven—something extraordinary happens. Conflict becomes an opportunity for more of God's love to come through. Differences become a demonstration of the power of the gospel. And people watching from the outside see something they can't explain: a community that actually works.

The practice of unity isn't easy. But it is worth it. And we don't do it alone. We do it together, spurred on by each other, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and grounded in the forgiveness of Jesus Christ—who loved us enough to die for us, so that we could live for each other.