Although the idea of community is a huge part of the Christian life (Gr. ekklesia: translated “church” in the NT–“kirk” if you’re Scottish), there is a huge danger on relying on what the people outside of yourself think about you and how you’re doing. All that they’re seeing is what they can see. People can appear to be Christians just by behaving a certain way, saying certain words, doing certain things. But that is not where our life in Christ exists.
The great enemy to the Lord Jesus Christ in the present day is the conception of practical work that has not come from the New Testament, but from the systems of the world in which endless energy and activites are insisted upon, but no private life with God. The emphasis is put on the wrong thing. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, for lo the kingdom of God is within you,” a hidden, obscure thing. An active Christian worker too often lives in the shop window. It is the innermost of the innermost that reveals the power of the life.
We have to get rid of the plague of the spirit of the religious age in which we live. In Our Lord’s life there was none of the press and rush of tremendous activity that we regard so highly, and the disciple is to be as His Master. The central thing about the kingom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship to Himself, not public usefulness to men. (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, October 19)
You have to know Jesus for yourself, and consider that relationship more important than all others, and your unity with Christ has to be more important than your unity with your brothers and sisters. When Jesus prayed for us in the garden of Gethsemane, he prayed “that they may all be one, ust as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21, ESV). The unity that we have must be in the Father and the Son, or it is nothing but meaninglessness and vanity.