“We must fight the collective sin of allowing anything but the gospel to be the cause of our unity.”

That’s not my line. It comes from Michael Reeves, president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology. But I think I’ve said just about the same thing dozens of times to explain what we do at The Gospel Coalition: “We fight the collective sin of allowing anything but the gospel to be the cause of our unity.”

Michael has published a couple recent books with Crossway that grabbed my attention: Gospel People: A Call for Evangelical Integrity and then Evangelical Pharisees: The Gospel as Cure for the Church’s Hypocrisy. I love his perspective on why we must define evangelicalism theologically as people who rally together around the gospel alone.

Michael joined me on Gospelbound to explain orthocardia (right heart) and the cure for evangelicalism. I couldn’t agree more with him that the fundamental problem can be found in John 12:43, loving the glory of men more than the glory of God. The gospel leads us the other direction: we decrease as Christ increases. Michael told me the mark of spiritual health is appreciating the weight and height of Christ’s mercy to us as sinners. And it’s the precondition for evangelical unity as well, as Michael explained:

“And that realization, that integrity personally, actually leads to a corporate integrity, because it’s only when I have an awareness of the depth of my own sin and I become more concerned with the glory of God than with my own glory, only then can I find unity with other believers. If I’m all concerned about my own glory, then I’m constantly going to be infighting. And so that prioritizing of the glory of God over my own glory is going to be the precondition for evangelical unity.”