The concept of unity has always been challenging for me. It sounds too much like the Borg. I don’t want to be assimilated!
But in a recent study of Ephesians, I realized that is not God’s intention for unity.
What I fear is conformity—me ceasing to matter as an individual.
What Paul describes is harmony—togetherness that can’t be achieved in a single note but requires multiple sounds to create.
Ephesians reveals this divine harmony from macro to micro: unity with God, within the Church, at work, in relationships, and inside ourselves. We’re shown the wholeness of a body, a building, a family, and time itself as examples, but the most powerful illustration is the dichotomy of darkness and light.
Paul urges us to strip away a huge list of gross personality traits in order to eradicate the darkness that separates us from God and to therefore enter the light and become ever more like Christ (5:3-9).
What’s remarkable about this is that it calls us from one form of unity to another.
In the unity of light, all things are made visible with a discrete, unique identity while also existing under the same source of illumination. It enhances, reveals, and empowers through oneness with Jesus, the light of the world.
But there is also unity in darkness.
It hides, numbs, and forces everything it touches to become like it. In darkness, individual things have no identity except as shadows deepening the gloom. It’s oneness only available in the absence of light.
Ultimately, we’re asked to choose.
Will you remain in the soul-erasing uniformity of darkness?
Or will you embrace the distinctive harmony of light?
“When anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light.” (Eph 5:13-14)