A lot of people are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges. – Charles Bower
Each week as I sit down to write this weekly column, I want to stay sensitive to the Lord and to what he wants me to write. There is not a magic formula that I follow or use. I usually just read and study the Bible like normal, and in that process, the Lord will speak a word from a verse of Scripture in my spirit. Today, as I was reading Psalm 133, the Lord spoke the Word “unity” into my spirit.
In Psalm 133:1, the Word of God says, “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to live together in unity!” To fully understand this simple yet powerful verse, I want to invite you into my personal Bible Study for a moment. Reading this verse, I notice four words that jump out: good, pleasant, brothers, and unity. Seeing these four words is one thing, but studying them is different.
When studying a word in the Bible, it is not wise to look up that word in our modern Dictionaries. Why? Because the Bibles that we have are translations based off of the original Bible Manuscripts. For time sake and not to bore you, when studying a word found in the Bible, it is best to look up the word in the original language. Many free tools can help you do this, back to the Bible study. The words good, pleasant, brothers, and unity definitions in the original language are below.
– Good – having desirable or positive qualities, especially those suitable for a thing specified.
– Pleasant – affording pleasure with the implication of being acceptable or favorable.
– Brothers – Brother by blood or companion
– Unity – To be together with cooperation and interchange or exchange.
Stay with me…
The Word of God tells us that with unity comes positive qualities that pleasure us when we cooperate and have exchanges with other people who are related to us by blood or with whom we have something in common.
Unity is God’s gift to His followers. As followers of Christ, we are unified by our love for Him. It does not matter your skin color, financial position, geographical location, or political position. Christ unifies us. When we focus more on the thing (Christ) that unifies us and less on the things that divide us, we are more pleasant people to be around. The decision we have to make is, are we going to focus on Christ more than the things of this world. One more word that I want to look at that is not in our text of Scripture but speaks to our text of Scripture is teamwork.
Dictionary.com defines teamwork as “a cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.”
Here is a closing question, how well would a family or a sports team function without teamwork which is essentially unity? Let me answer that for you, not very well.
A lot of people are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges. – Charles Bower
In the day and time that we live in, let’s seek unity!
Draper Rogers is a pastor on staff at Gardendale First Baptist Church. His devotional column appears every Wednesday in The Gardendale News.
