Saints, Together

1 Corinthians 1:2 "To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours."

Saxony, Germany. 1727. A small refugee village called Herrnhut, founded five years earlier by Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf on his own estate, was about 300 people deep and falling apart. Lutherans, Reformed, Anabaptists, Moravians, and other Protestants who had fled persecution from across Europe had landed in this single community and brought their arguments with them. They disagreed about predestination. They disagreed about baptism. They disagreed about how holiness worked. The village was wracked with such bitterness that the whole experiment seemed near collapse.

Zinzendorf, then in his twenties, went door to door. He asked them to focus on what they shared rather than what divided them. The community signed an agreement of unity. On August 13, 1727, during a communion service, the Holy Spirit fell on the gathering in a way that witnesses said was like Pentecost in miniature. Differences dissolved. Hardened hearts wept.

And two weeks later, about 50 Moravians made a covenant. They agreed to pray, in hour-long shifts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, around the clock, without ceasing.

The watch lasted more than a hundred years.

Out of that prayer meeting came the largest Protestant missionary movement the world had seen up to that point. By 1791, the Moravians had sent roughly 300 missionaries across the world. That number equaled the total size of their entire community when the prayer watch began. Every person at Herrnhut had, in effect, become a missionary or sent a missionary. They went to the West Indies, Greenland, Turkey, Lapland, West Africa, South America, and the English colonies. A young Anglican named John Wesley crossed paths with Moravian missionaries on a storm-tossed ship in 1735, and his life was never the same.

Now read what Paul writes at the end of his greeting in 1 Corinthians 1:2.

"...called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours."

Saints together.

With all those.

In every place.

See, Paul isn’t just writing a letter to the Corinthians. He’s writing to the worldwide, every-generation, every-language gathering of every human being who has ever called on the name of Jesus. The local church of Corinth is one local instance of a global, multigenerational family. And the same is true of us this morning.

When you walk into church for worship today, you aren’t gathering by yourself. You aren’t even gathering with only the people in your row. You’re joining a worship service that has been going on, somewhere on this planet, every Sunday since the apostolic age. You’re joining the saints of Herrnhut who covenanted in 1727. You’re joining the underground house churches of China and Iran gathering by candlelight, the Kenyan brothers and sisters who started singing four hours before you woke up, the Brazilian Baptists in São Paulo, the persecuted believers in northern Nigeria, the Korean prayer warriors who were on their faces at 5 a.m. while you slept.

And you’re joining your church family at Bayside, the people God has placed in this season of your life to walk with you, and toward Jesus, together.

Paul will spend sixteen chapters in 1 Corinthians fixing a fractured local church. But he opens by reminding them they aren’t just a fractured local church, but a local moment of a global family. They are saints, together. The togetherness is not extra. The togetherness is the saintliness, lived out.

This is what we’re gathering for today. Not entertainment. Not religious obligation. Not a weekly task to check off. We’re gathering as a people made one in Christ, drawing on the same Spirit, walking under the same Word, on our way home to the same Lamb. We are a Bayside that lives, loves, and gives like Jesus together.

Today: Arrive to church as someone the New Testament knows by name. Saint. Brother. Sister. Saint together. Sing like a person who has been beheld by the Father all week. Receive the Word like someone who has been carrying it from Monday through Saturday and is finally putting it down in the company that knows how to hear it with you. Pass the peace like the Moravians who hugged each other and let the differences dissolve in the room. When you leave, take the togetherness with you. The Word that gathered us is the Word that sends us. We’re joining a worship service that began 2,000 years ago and will not end until the Lamb is on the throne and every tribe and tongue is singing in front of it (Rev 7:9-10).

Prayer: "Father, I worship You for a saintliness that is shared, a gathering that hasn’t stopped, and a family that crosses every century and every shore. Thank You that this morning I am joining what You’ve been doing among Your people all week. Make Bayside today a people whose unity in Christ tells the world what Your grace has actually done. In Jesus' name, Amen."

-PK