I don’t know how you feel about unity but I LOVE it! There’s very little I love more than everyone being on the same page, getting along, and agreeing on everything. Unity seems like a terrific goal. However, last night I read that, in Hebrew, the name of the high priest Eliashib (Nehemiah 13) means unity through compromise. Hmm… Suddenly, unity doesn’t not seem like such an admirable goal after all. Although the word compromise can have a positive connotation (an ability to listen to two sides in a dispute, and devise a compromise acceptable to both), it also has a less positive meaning that has been much on my mind for more than five years…to accept standards that are lower than is desirable.

In Nehemiah 13, we discover that Eliashib lived up to his name. David Wilkerson says, “By law, no Ammonite was permitted to set foot in the Temple. But Eliashib allowed Tobiah, an Ammonite prince, to live there. The high priest made God’s house a dwelling place for a heathen!” Nehemiah tells us, “I learned about the evil thing Tobiah had done…It grieved me bitterly; therefore I threw all the household goods of Tobiah out of the room” (Nehemiah 13:7-8).

“Nehemiah was not acting on impulse or legalistic tradition. Rather, he was seeing through God’s eyes, feeling as God felt, discerning the evil of the cancerous growth of compromise in God’s house… O Lord, give us a body of preachers and parishioners who are sick of sin and who will take a stand against it! Give us people with enough discernment to see the depth and horror of the compromise that has crept into God’s house!” (David Wilkerson)

When we returned from Japan in 2011, we began to see changes that were taking place in the body of Christ─and not for the better. Christian women in leadership were wearing low-cut tops with cleavage even on the platform, and we heard reports of people in leadership allowing unmarried couples to live in their homes. Since then, we’ve become aware of even more widespread compromise relating to homosexuality and abortion, to the degree that some churches have had to leave their conferences or denominations. Eventually, I asked the Lord, “What is behind these changes? What are we battling here?”

The Holy Spirit answered, “It’s a spirit of compromise, the body of Christ is compromising with the culture.” A counselor we visited clarified this by reading Romans 12:1-2 from The Message,   …Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking… Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you. In other words, don’t come into unity with the culture by compromising and lowering your standards. “The essence of compromise or mixture is to be just like the world.” (David Wilkerson) In addition, because compromise is progressive, it’s only a matter of time until we will lower our standards yet again.

If we are not to come into unity with the culture and those in the church who are compromising, what should our response be? Ezekiel 9:4, the Lord called to the man with the writing kit clothed in linen and said, Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.

Do you grieve and lament over all the detestable things being done in our culture, as well as in the church, or have you become so desensitized by what you read, watch, and listen to that it no longer moves you? A few years ago, a man in our small group said, “I’m going to pray that God would re-sensitize me to the things in our culture that are displeasing to Him so that I can do something about them.” It’s a wonderful prayer.

A few years ago I spoke to a manager in Walmart about a scantily clad, life-size cardboard figure of a woman in a bathing suit–in the very section where children would buy their pens and pencils for school. As the manager carried away the offensive object, she said, “If no one complains, we think it’s okay.” Wow! Really? Come on, Church! If we don’t even have the courage to complain to a store manager about offensive advertising, what will we do when real persecution comes? And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28).

So, as I said earlier, there is very little that I love more than unity… However, there is one thing… I love Jesus, who said I am the Truth, more than I love unity. If the cost of having unity is accepting standards that are lower than is desirable or accepting misinterpretations of God’s Word, the price is too high.

Father, your Word says, “Buy the truth and sell it not…” (Proverbs 23:23). I pray there would never be anything or anyone we love more than the Truth so we will not be deceived. Amen.