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The Ecclesia Series - Unity and Covenant Community
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Good morning. I want to share with you about what's happening in Jamaica and across our movement. We recently had an amazing time at Friday Fires Jamaica, and what struck me most was how beautifully they're building collaboratively. There's a real coming together between leaders of different churches and leaders within the nation—no competition, just genuine partnership focused on kingdom advancement.
One thing I realized is that sometimes when you travel to other nations, you don't see how much God has already advanced the wineskin here in the UK. We think we're struggling, but when you step back, you realize God has shifted our paradigm so far ahead already. The success of these meetings isn't measured by the size of crowds, but by the transformation that happens when people leave and the word becomes established in their hearts.
We brought the message of unity, which Apostle Toby has been speaking about here. We believe that by God's grace, when we return to Jamaica, we'll see an expansion of communities—coals like we've established here. The nation is healing, and God is moving there.
In this season, I cannot shake the burden the Lord has placed on my heart for unity within the body of Christ. I am convinced now more than ever that the release of unity in the body of Christ is part of one of heaven's primary strategies against the kingdom of darkness in this hour.
We are living in an age of fracture, an age riddled with offense. I've come to realize that this term "unity" is not just a cute phrase or sentimental image. Unity in itself is spiritual warfare. It is the resistance against what the enemy is trying to release, which is division.
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"And many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another." (Matthew 24:10)
Jesus warns about this plainly. There is a consequence to offense. There is a consequence to division. And that consequence—the cost—is souls. Notice the progression: offense leads to betrayal, and ultimately leads to hatred in the heart.
Then we begin to normalize relational fractures, fear, and suspicion instead of taking a righteous stand that says: "No, these things are abhorrent. God isn't in that."
I want to take us back to the foundational Scripture—Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema:
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one."
This prayer is foundational to Jewish faith. They recite it three times daily—morning, afternoon, and evening. They remind themselves: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."
This prayer gets its meaning from that first word: "Hear." In the Hebrew language, you cannot separate hearing from obedience. When this declaration says "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one," it's saying: "Not only do I want you to hear what I'm saying, I want you to obey. I want you to align with it and act on it." It's not passive listening.
Historically, this was during a time of polytheism. There were many gods—Baal worship and all sorts of things. People believed there was a god for everything. This scripture was controversial in its time. It was called a polemic statement—it went against the current worldview. For Israel to declare that the Lord is one was defiant, because people were accustomed to worshiping other gods. It wasn't that they didn't believe the God of Israel was real; it was that they believed in the God of Israel plus something else.
When we look at the original meaning of that word "one," it doesn't mean singularity—that God is alone by himself. It means compound unity. That's what it means.
You can take the natures of God, the facets of God, and within himself, he cannot contradict himself. He does not contradict himself. His mercy and his justice can cooperate at the same time.
God within himself is unified. He's integrated. He's whole.
Look at these examples from Scripture:
Unity does not erase distinction. Just because God is one, he doesn't lose attributes of himself. The God of war is still the God of holiness. Just because he's one, it's not like one attribute drops off and the other ceases to exist. God in himself is internally one. He's internally integrated. He does not compete with himself. He is aligned in his focus, his essence, his mission. And he acts with one will.
Verse 5 of Deuteronomy 6 continues:
"And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."
The heart is the place of our emotions and will. The soul is our mind, will, and emotions. "With all your strength" means with everything you have—your capacity, your resources, your entire force.
This is allegiance language. When they pledged this, it was like pledging their allegiance to the one true God. This was denouncing allegiance to any other god. Nothing else would rival this God.
Why is this important now? Fractured hearts create fractured communities. How do we build healthy communities if we can't model ourselves after the very Lord who in himself is one? We're made in his image and after his likeness.
I looked at my own life. I looked at the experiences I went through—the betrayals, the grief, the people who walked away. I couldn't seem to piece myself back together. Honestly, I was struggling to come back to wholeness.
I started compartmentalizing relationships. "These people aren't going to be benefactors of my space and time anymore. I'm just going to protect myself. I'm not going to fully give myself in relationship." And I found it was eating me up on the inside because I began to contradict the very commandment to love. My brokenness had taken over to a place where I felt inauthentic.
This burden was born after my daughter got released from the hospital. I was lying in bed reflecting on the past season, trying to figure out how to get life back into my heart. How many of us have been in those seasons where it feels like the wind has been knocked out of you—not once, not twice, but back to back?
You get betrayed. You divide. Why? Because it's a coping mechanism. Your heart does it to protect itself. It divides, it fractures, it compartmentalizes.
I don't know how it's possible to develop healthy communities if we can't get health back into our hearts.
David understood this. In Psalm 86:11, he prayed:
"Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth. Unite my heart to fear your name."
Even David knew. So many of us are walking around without the fear of God because fracture in the heart desensitizes you to certain things and numbs you in certain ways. But David knew to pray, "Unite my heart because I want my devotion to you, God, to be whole."
This wasn't a prayer for perfection. This wasn't "God, make me flawless." This was "God, simply make me undivided because I want to be able to worship you with all my heart, all my mind, all my strength, and all my soul."
Matthew 28:18-20 says:
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
This command is not merely to convert individuals but to disciple nations, people, cultures, systems, and households. Discipling nations requires structure. It requires a relational architecture, because people are complicated. But most of all, it requires covenant community.
Too many of us don't know how to walk in covenant community because we're too broken. We're too internally fractured. We don't have healthy families or healthy relationships modeled to us, so we've lived fractured.
I'm studying what the apostles have been teaching about the oikos—the household. The season we're walking into as a church is a season of multiplication. Not just addition of souls, but multiplication—where the Bible speaks about multitudes.
The oikos was not just the nuclear family (mom, dad, kids). It was an interconnected household. Oikos means household. It was extended relatives, family, servants, people sharing life together. It was a place of shared economic life and shared allegiance under one head—the head of that household.
Throughout Scripture, when salvation came to somebody, salvation came to the entire household:
"Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." (Acts 16:31)
We see this with Cornelius (Acts 10), Lydia (Acts 16:15), and throughout Scripture. God builds through households. The ecclesia is made up of multiple households coming together.
The divided heart is a threat to your oikos. The divided house, the divided heart, is a threat to your household.
James 1:8 says:
"He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways."
To be double-minded means to be "two-souled." A two-souled person is internally divided. Their loyalty is fragmented. Their desires compete and war against one another. Their allegiance is divided.
That means you trust God with some areas, but not with others. You've made Jesus Lord in this area, but because of your brokenness, you trust yourself to take care of things in that area. You haven't fully made him Lord of your whole life.
An oikos cannot thrive where lordship is contested. When Jesus Christ is not singularly enthroned in our hearts, our competing desires or competing masters begin to shape the culture of that household—whether that be ambition, fear, money, or the need for approval.
Any household slowly reflects whatever governs the heart. If the heart is divided, the house divides. If the house divides, communities fracture. If communities fracture, nations destabilize.
We think, "Oh, this is just a small issue," but this is the foundation that everything else is supposed to be built upon. We want to see transformation in our nation, but we're struggling to lay the right foundation.
I've done a study on the difference between camaraderie, fellowship, and covenant relationships. Many of us in this room are at the level of camaraderie.
Camaraderie is a relational bond created through shared experience. It comes with feelings of trust, loyalty, and friendship that develop through shared experiences, often through challenge, mission, or hardship. You've been through something together. You've learned to stand together, walk through trials, serve side by side, fight the same battles.
We see this with David's mighty men (1 Samuel 22) and with Paul and his collaborers. Camaraderie is powerful. We need it. But the truth is, camaraderie usually stays at the place of the experiential and emotional. It doesn't often go beyond that.
Soldiers develop a deep sense of camaraderie very quickly. Their allegiance is to a higher mission. Because of that mission, they get behind each other. But whilst this is powerful, there is another level.
Fellowship, in the Greek koinonia, means participation, shared life, communion, partnership. This is a layer deeper than camaraderie. You can be comrades with somebody without truly sharing life with them, because you're bound only by experience, and that experience can be momentary. But what's expected of us in the model of the oikos has to go beyond comrades to koinonia—to genuine fellowship.
Shared life. You're not anonymous. You're not another number. Your joys and burdens are known. You don't come into church and get lost in the crowd; you're part of a smaller community that sees you. Part of the human experience and makeup is to be known and fully known.
Shared resources. In covenant there's generosity. You find yourself in a place where, if you're struggling, there's somebody to help and support you. This doesn't mean financial dependency, but generosity out of the life of Christ that wants to support, help, give, and love. Lack is addressed. No one is abandoned.
Spiritual participation. You're an active part of that community, not a spectator. Many of us in church can sneak in and out on a Sunday thinking no one will see. But in an oikos, you can't get away with that. You can't get away with not participating, not praying, not being actively part of the community.
Communion with Christ. This is the deepest layer. Union is not personality compatibility. It's not "I like you" or "we get on well" or "we don't get on well." Many of us base our Christian walk on personality compatibility. This erases that.
There's a place of maturity where it's no longer about protecting yourself. It's no longer about you. The kind of love you give abandons itself. It's selfless. This is the place we need to aspire to—the kind of love willing to count itself as nothing, willing to lay itself down totally for somebody else, willing to prefer somebody above yourself even if that person has done you wrong.
There's maturity in understanding that whether we're different, whether we agree or disagree, we share one head. We share in one spirit. We share and partake of the same covenant. It's Christ that defines us. It's Christ that binds us. It's Christ that governs us.
Fellowship—koinonia—is deeper than camaraderie because it's spirit-rooted, not just experience-rooted. But if our hearts remain fractured, we'll remain at the level of experience only. We'll never be open enough to allow the family of God in.
This doesn't mean you have to allow absolutely everybody in that way—it's not possible. That's why the oikos is a specific community where you can be known. There's only one Apostle Toby. Not everybody can have that direct level of proximity. But in the oikos, we find that place that moves beyond camaraderie to genuine true fellowship.
I want to highlight something important. Because of the intensity of how camaraderie can feel, sometimes we mistake it as covenant. We interpret camaraderie as covenant. But to somebody else, it's simply camaraderie. When they walk away, we feel heartbroken because we interpreted it as covenant, but it wasn't genuine covenant.
Covenant is bound by oath, by a vow.
Human unity built on pride collapses. But look at Acts 2:1:
"When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, in one accord."
And Acts 2:46:
"Day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes..."
An essential part of the oikos and fellowship is breaking bread together. Acts 4:32 says:
"The full number of those who believed were of one heart and one soul."
You only get to that place of oneness when you understand the spiritual principles we're submitted to—one love, one Lord.
Matthew 22:37 shows that the Shema was fulfilled, and this should be the byproduct of becoming one within ourselves after this model:
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind... and a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
My vertical integration—my oneness and my becoming undivided in God—has an expression in how I choose to love my neighbor. How I choose to love those around me. How I choose to pour into those who are in my oikos.
You cannot love God with an undivided heart and refuse to fellowship with his people. It's not possible for those two to exist at the same time.
It's not possible.
Part of you becoming one in yourself is not becoming perfect, but understanding that in this next phase, in this next season, God needs you to be whole enough to be part of his plan to disciple nations. That's fundamentally what it's about.
We don't have time like we think we have. And honestly, I'm feeling this pressure more and more every single day. If I died tomorrow, I want to know what my life would have counted for. My life cannot have been spent perpetually trying to heal without fruit, because we make so much of it about just our healing. Our healing. We're constantly healing, but we're not healing to something.
Sometimes we're trying to heal to find the confidence to step into what God has called us to do. What if part of our discipling nations is through this?
When we think of discipling nations, we think of government, the top of the mountains. But not everybody is going to be on the top of the world systems. But all of us can have an influence at some level. You can be on the top of the mountain in your sphere. But what if the way to disciple nations is through our oneness and how we reflect that in community?
I want us to pray the prayer that David prayed—that God would unite our hearts in the fear of the Lord.
Bring anything before God that feels fractured. Where there's been double allegiance. Where you've had to depend on yourself or rely on yourself. Where you felt like you've had to guard and protect your heart. Where you've struggled to integrate into community.
God reveals to redeem. He always reveals to redeem. We weren't called to be an island. The enemy's mode of operation never changes. The moment he can get you in isolation, he knows he can cause you to stray, cause you to doubt, cause you to shift out of alignment with what God has called you to do.
We want a release of the spirit of unity that bonds us together. But we also want to pray that God gives us the grace to sustain unity. The Scripture says:
"Make every effort to maintain the bond of peace." (Ephesians 4:3)
Even in the effort, it's not by our might or by our strength, but by his spirit. The word for "bond" is a linking—as though chains bound together or ligaments that cause movement and flexibility.
I want us as the bride of Christ, as people who God is uniting in their hearts, to pray for his bride. That's the person next to you. That's this church and the wider body as a whole. Stand in the gap for the body. Cry out for unity. For a spirit of unity to overtake us, to grip our hearts.
Ephesians 4:4-6 says:
"There is one body, one spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all."
Let him spiritually unite us. Let him bring to light what needs to come to light, heal the brokenness, fuse back together areas that have been fractured, realign your allegiance, refocus your heart and vision, anchor your soul where it's wavered.
We're being ushered into this new season of expansion, of discipleship, of evangelism. We don't want to treat this lightly. We want to position ourselves for God to use us and move through us, for his spirit to flow through us, for lives to be impacted through you, through your oikos, through your households.
We want that burden for souls. We want to become so restless that we can't even rest in ourselves until we've spoken to somebody, until our lives have shown forth God's goodness and glory in the life of another person.
