The Starting Point for Christian Unity

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his address to the Westminster Ministers’ Fellowship in June 1962:

The starting point in considering the question of unity must always be regeneration and belief of the truth. Nothing else produces unity, and, as we have seen clearly, it is impossible apart from this.
An appearance or a facade of unity based on anything else, and at the expense of these two criteria, or which ignores them, is clearly a fraud and a lie. People are not one, nor in a state of unity, who disagree about fundamental questions such as:
(a) whether we submit ourselves utterly to revealed truth or rely ultimately upon our reason and human thinking;
(b) the historic fall, and man’s present state and condition in sin, under the wrath of God, and in complete helplessness and hopelessness as regards salvation; and
(c) the person of our Lord Jesus Christ and the utter, absolute necessity, and sole sufficiency, of His substitutionary atoning work for sinners.
To give the impression that they are one simply because of a common outward organization is not only to mislead the world which is outside the church but to be guilty of a lie. (Knowing the Times, 160-61).

Kevin DeYoung