The Church should be composed of people who are different in every way but who carry the same faith and experience of God’s grace. Look around your church, is that true? Then it is a church that the Apostle Paul could envisage.
Following on from King David’s, “Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord will never count against them” (v8) Paul asks an important question: who is that for? The Jew or the Gentile? The answer is it is for anyone who has through faith been credited as righteous (Genesis 15:6) and not some outward sign that they had been accepted by God, i.e. circumcision (seen later with Abraham in Genesis 17:11).
“Is this blessedness only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? We have been saying that Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness. Under what circumstances was it credited? Was it after he was circumcised, or before? It was not after, but before! And he received circumcision as a sign, a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. So then, he is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised, in order that righteousness might be credited to them. And he is then also the father of the circumcised who not only are circumcised but who also follow in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.” (Romans 4 v 9-12)
If Abraham is then the spiritual father of all (circumcised and uncircumcised) why is this important?
(This is not to negate circumcision or any other outward sign of an inner working, i.e. baptism, that’s not the point) It is simply this:
There are no barriers to the pure grace of God to everyone and anyone. Churches that are not mono-cultural and who have an array of diversity and where the different classes and tribes worship together then we have the best display of the grace of God on the earth. This is the application of Paul calling for the circumcised Jewish Christians and the uncircumcised Gentile Christians to walk together because what holds everything in unity is their righteousness by faith given by God’s amazing grace!
Missions Paul 