Paul, having expressed his confidence in God’s faithfulness to keep the Corinthians blameless and steadfast, is not afraid to tackle a question of misplaced loyalties (1 Cor 1:10-17). He has been informed by some members of the church of divisions, behaviour which reflects immaturity and a focus on the external rather than the eternal. Factions, people preferring one leader above another, have arisen and he is appalled, pleading with the church to agree and be ‘perfectly united in mind and thought.’
“Division has always been a problem among God’s people, and almost every New Testament epistle deals with this topic or mentions it in one way or another. Even the twelve apostles did not always get on with each other.” (Warren Wiersbe ‘Be Wise’, P 22) The blessedness of unity is described in Ps 133:1-3; Jesus prayed for unity in the church (see John 17:20-21). It is largely because of the unity in the Godhead that unity in Christ’s body is seen as so essential. Paul tackles this topic in a number of letters (see Eph 4:3, Col 2:2, 2 Cor 13:11). The fact that unity is our goal is not in dispute, but the ‘how’ of achieving unity is sometimes harder to define.
Paul clearly points out that unity is essential, for Christ is not divided. It’s pointless to follow human leaders slavishly, for they were neither baptised for us nor crucified for us. Only Christ can be our Saviour and He must be the focus of our message (a fact he goes on to emphasise in the rest of the chapter.) Our eyes can be on messengers for a variety of reasons (including the fact that we understand some better than others, like some better than others, and are more comfortable with the message of some more than others), but our focus must be on the message, not the messenger. For us to learn to take others into consideration and live harmoniously alongside those who can be very different to ourselves requires maturity. We must study Christ (see Phil 2:1-11) in order to learn to put aside our selfish ambition and belief that only our way of doing things is correct, striving to allow love to be the motivation for all we do and working together with a common purpose and aim. Unity is not the same as uniformity. There will be times when we have to learn to agree to disagree; not everything has to be done in the same way, for example. But there is only one gospel (Gal 1:6-9) and only one Saviour (1 Tim 2:5), only one way to the Father through Jesus (John 14:6), and we must learn to be restored to that position of harmony and fellowship which is possible in Christ.