Love Christ's Church

This morning, we are beginning a new series, which we hope to take across the next two to three months. I think it's about twelve or thirteen weeks. We're going to be looking at the book of Ephesians from chapters four through to six. So it's essentially the second half of the book of Ephesians, or the letter to the Ephesians. As we'll see a little bit later on, this part of Ephesians is a transition where Paul has been explaining the great truths of the message of Jesus Christ, the gospel as we summarise it, and then begins to say, this is how it shapes our lives.

That if you, as a Christian, believe these certain truths, if you come to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, then your life will look like this. And therefore, for that reason, I'm super excited to find a teaching, I think, that will be profoundly applicable to our lives, something that is going to be hopefully practical for us and hopefully something that will be challenging for even the most saintly Christian in this church, someone who is almost perfect, and that they'll be able to apply these great truths to their lives as well. This morning, we are kicking off the series by looking at the first sixteen verses of Ephesians four. So please, with me, let's turn to Ephesians chapter four, Ephesians four, verse one.

Paul writes: "I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit. Just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore, it says, when He ascended on high, He led a host of captives, and He gave gifts to men."

"In saying He ascended, what does it mean but that He also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens that He might fill all things. And He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the Head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love."

So far, our reading. This is the word of the Lord. This morning, we are going to cover these sixteen verses under three headings. Firstly, by looking at the introductory verse, verse one, we're going to see how Paul transitions us from what he said in Ephesians chapters one through to three into this new emphasis in application. Then secondly, we look at Paul's main appeal, that Christians are to love the church. That is what Paul initially transitions into, that Christians are to love the church, and we find that section in verses two through to six.

And then thirdly, we see that the ability to love our church comes through a growth into maturity, and we will see how that is achieved in verses seven through to verse sixteen. The title for this morning's sermon is "Live Up to Our Calling, Love Christ's Church." Live up to your calling. Well, that is what Paul begins with in his introductory verse. It is a call to live up to our salvation as Christians.

As I said, chapter four transitions from chapters one through to three, where Paul has explained the truth of God's salvation of us through Jesus Christ. And now Paul begins to explain to us how that reality will change us. In other words, Paul is going to tell us that the good news of Christ's salvation changes us as human beings ethically. We look different as Christians. We are going to begin to live differently when we become Christian.

Now, you can see this pivot taking place because verse one begins with the words: "I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called." You may know, if you've listened to sermons before, that whenever you see the word therefore, you should assume that it's reflecting back on what has just been said. If you look to the immediate context, you will see that Paul has just finished a prayer asking God to give the Ephesian Christians the ability to comprehend the incomprehensible love that God has given us in Jesus Christ. But here, Paul is not making a small rhetorical step from simply those verses that have gone just before. He sums up the entire argument that he's been making up to this point.

He's moving on to what is called paraenesis, which is an ethical exhortation. He's about to say, since God has done this for us in Christ, we are to respond in this way. We are to live in this way. Now, the main metaphor that Paul uses here is the metaphor to walk, to walk in a way worthy of the calling. Now, this is the headline command for the Ephesian Christians.

Everything that will come in the next three chapters, chapters four, five, and six, comes from this idea to walk in a way worthy of the calling. What Paul gives us in these few words is a brilliant summary of the dynamic nature of Christian ethics. To walk in a way worthy of our calling gives us this wonderful description of how Christians live the Christian life. If you were to break that statement down, you see that on the one hand, there is a done aspect, a past tense. You have received a calling.

You have already received a title. You have a name. You have a position, a vocation. As a Christian, you have received a calling right now. What is this calling?

Well, it's the thing that Paul has taken three chapters to explain. In chapter one, we are told that God has predestined us in His love, Ephesians 1:5, to be redeemed by the blood of Jesus, verse 7. Our salvation has been sealed and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, 1:13. And all of this is despite the fact that at one time, Ephesians 2:1, we were dead in our trespasses and sins in which we once walked.

But God, being rich in mercy, Ephesians 2:4, because of His great love, has made us alive with Christ, and it is simply because of God's sheer grace that we have been saved through faith, Ephesians 2:8. This salvation was not of our own doing; it was the gift of God. And the result of this salvation is to see ourselves as being God's workmanship, created to do good works, which God has prepared for us in advance to walk in. That is the reality of the calling.

That is the past tense of what you have received. Now Paul says, walk in that calling. Live up to that salvation. Paul is reflecting the language that is used previously when he talks about that idea of walking. As I mentioned, chapter two says that we once walked in darkness, and now we should walk in the good works that God has prepared us to do.

In fact, in chapter five, you'll get to that word again when He calls us to walk in love, and that we are to walk as children of light, that we are to, verse 15, walk wisely in this life. So you could say this word walk is actually a key word in the book of Ephesians, in the letter of Ephesians. It is a key idea, a key theme. That's why we can talk about the Christian walk.

This is what we are dealing with in these chapters. But right here in chapter four, verse one, Paul restates that in light of the glorious effects of the gospel, every Christian should walk in a way that is worthy of what they've received. And Paul urges this as a prisoner for the Lord, he says. Now, that is probably conferring some ethical authority to his encouragement. He is saying that he is someone who is already attempting to walk in a way worthy of his calling, that he is attempting to walk the good works journey that has been marked out for him by the Lord Himself, that his imprisonment for the gospel by the Romans shows that Paul was attempting to live up to what he had received as his calling, and he urges us to do the same.

And so that is how verse one begins with a great summary of what's about to come in the next three chapters, but also reflects back on what has been said in the first three chapters. Live up to the salvation you have already received. And now, having done this, Paul moves to one of the big indicators of exhibiting, living out this calling, and that is a desire for love and unity in the church. Christians love their church. In verses two to six, Paul tells us that the distinguishing feature of the Christian life is a love for the community in which they are called to.

Ultimately, he is stating that the church that we engage with on Sundays, the fellow Christians we see during the week, isn't an optional extra for those who have come to believe in Jesus. It is part of the essence of who we are in Christ. And although there is a certain discipline involved in opening up your life to fellow believers, and as an introvert, I can say it is a discipline, the main motivator in that discipline isn't mental toughness. The main motivator for our involvement in the church comes from a big, squishy, loving heart. It is not a head thing.

It is a heart thing. Paul writes: "With all humility, with all gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, be eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." This is not optional. It is part of the deal. God's purpose has always been to save a people for Himself, not a loose collection of random individuals.

In fact, Paul begins his letter by saying that the ultimate purpose of God's saving work in humanity is that through humanity's redemption, God might unify the universe back to Himself. In chapter one, verse nine, he says that the mystery of God's will, which He set forth in Christ, was a plan that came to fruition in the fullness of time with the purpose to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and on earth. This is the scope, the size of God's salvation. It is cosmic. It is a cosmic unity which God has desired, and for this reason, the unity of the church is paramount. The unity of the church is the vehicle by which the world might see God's power most clearly.

That feels risky, doesn't it? Paul simply reiterates what Jesus Himself has said: "The world will know that you are My disciples by your love for one another. The world will know that you belong to Me if you love one another." So you could say that the church is like this giant display home for the plan of God.

Desi and I are looking at homes to buy. Good luck, KJ and Desiri, on the Gold Coast. That's nearly impossible. But you go to a display home, an open home, and it is amazing. It's immaculate.

You have all the right candles in all the right places. You have some cookies baking just, you know, incidentally, so that you have a beautiful aroma, a homely smell when you walk in there. It is the best of the house to experience, and that is God's hope for the church, to display the unifying power of the gospel. Now Paul is writing to a church who is experiencing the pressures, the reality of humanity, which is a desire to break apart unity. And Paul reminds them of who they have become.

They are one church, he says, under one Lord, having all received one baptism with the purpose of being reconciled to the one God. Commentator Andrew Lincoln sums it up this way. He says: "The one church, having been formed out of Jews and Gentiles, is both a pledge of the ultimate cosmic unity God will achieve, and it is a witness to the hostile cosmic powers that God's cosmic purposes are already in the process of realisation." It's a wonderful summary of the massive scope of what God is doing in the church. Personally, if I can say this, this is one of the reasons why I'm confident of the truth of Christianity.

There are many religions and spiritualities out there, as we know. But for me, one of the most powerful evidences for Christianity being the true faith with the message that you should believe in Jesus Christ is this: the reason I believe in it is that anyone can belong to the church. The Christian faith is not tied up to one culture, like Islam. It is not limited by your ability to practise rigorous spiritual disciplines, like Buddhism or Hinduism.

Only in the Christian church do you find the rich and the poor together. In the church, you find Black and White, Asian, Hispanic, from well-to-do families to street-fighting rat bags. You can walk into any church, and the chances are that you will find all of them somehow represented, worshipping what? The same God, holding to the same profession that Mary has made this morning. If you take the time to get to know the people of this church, you will see just how profoundly different our backgrounds are.

And yet we've been unified into this one universal people called the church, and we are united by this one truth: that Jesus Christ saves sinners. The only thing that will keep you outside the church, in other words, is whether you are willing to acknowledge that or not, that you are a sinner. Your culture, your financial status, your friendship circles does not prohibit you from the church. It is simply the faith that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness. In light of the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross, Paul now encourages us to work very hard to open our hearts to one another, to bear with one another, with patience and with humility, to love one another.

Why? Because in the gospel, we've all discovered that we are all just beggars pointing other beggars to a place where they can find bread. We say to one another, maybe not this bluntly or crudely: I stink at this thing called life, but I know where to find the help that I need, and I'll point you to Him. For this reason, Paul says, just be a little bit more gracious to each other. None of you have it right.

With humility, gentleness, and patience, with long-suffering love, be unified as the community of believers, and thereby show how Christ is Lord of your life and how He deserves to be the King of the whole universe. A life which contributes to the unity of the church is therefore seen as the only appropriate response to God's divine initiative in saving us. Let me say that again. A life which contributes to the unity of the church is seen as the only appropriate response to God's divine initiative in saving us. So as Christians, we are called to walk in a manner worthy of the calling, and that begins with having a deeply humble, gentle and patient love for each other.

But why does this sometimes not exist in the church? That's the next logical question to ask. Why do we have church splits? Why do we have friction in the church? Why do we fail to do this?

Why does Paul have to write to the Ephesians who are failing this? Well, the Bible tells us it's because we are immature. You are not a finished product yet. So in this next and final half, verses seven to sixteen, we see the method by which this unity will be reached, and that is through something called maturity. God's purpose for this display home of the church is accomplished when Christians grow up into mature manhood, verse thirteen says.

The vehicle by which this maturity takes place is through certain gifts that Jesus Christ has given the church. Verse seven: "But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift." In the next verse, Psalm 68:18 is quoted from the Old Testament as an Old Testament prophecy of Christ giving gifts to the church as the ascended Lord. Now, there's two ways that you could potentially read this. The descent of Christ, Christ having come down, is potentially the giving of the Holy Spirit, that in His descent of His spirit, that is where the gifts came, and we know from Pentecost, Acts two, that this is where it was initiated, the falling of the Holy Spirit.

My take on this is that it is an earlier event of Christ coming down in His incarnation. Christ lived among us as God in the flesh, and then He ascended as the risen Lord, and from there He has given us the gifts through the Holy Spirit. But whichever way you want to take it, what we understand is that Jesus, having risen, having been raised to life, having ascended to heaven, hasn't left us to our own devices as the church. He has sent us royal gifts. And Paul explains that these gifts are human beings.

They're actually not things; they are people. They are the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, shepherds, and teachers, verse eleven says. And he tells us what the purpose of these gifts are, verses twelve and thirteen: "To equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." The word there, the phrase to equip the saints is referring to us. We are the saints.

It's not a special designation of very holy people. We are the holy ones of God. The gifts of the apostles and the prophets and the pastors and teachers were given to us so that we may be equipped to be the church and to grow into maturity. Now, from the collection of the people listed here, the apostles, prophets, and so on, I think it's fair to say that the main purpose of the strengthening of the church through these gifts has come through their proclamation of the gospel. All these individuals, in other words, are preachers of the good news of Jesus.

And so we are to understand that the building up of the church takes place through these human gifts in them having brought to us the good news of Jesus, of what He has done. We can sort of try and break it down and say, well, okay, the apostles and prophets, do they still exist? And what about the evangelists? And what about the pastors and the teachers? And there might be some fruitful discussions about that.

I think the apostles and the prophets are obviously referring to the era of the early church, and there's only one set of apostles. Pastors and teachers, some will say, are continuing offices right now, or they were referring to what was happening back then. Whatever we decide on that, the one main message here is that through that ministry, we, as the church, have received the gospel. This is all done with a view that the church is built up to be the body of Christ, Paul says. The key thought here is not so much who the gifts were, but how the gifts worked, and the purpose is for the building up of the body.

Now, in older Christian language, the word edification has been used to speak of this building up. To edify someone is to literally build them up, to build them up. And here, the purpose of God sending the apostles, the prophets, the pastors, the teachers was to build up the church. Biblical scholar Herman Ridderbos, in his classic work Paul: An Outline of His Theology, gives a very helpful summary of Paul's language when it comes to edification. He says there are four recurring truths about the church's edification in Paul's thinking across all of his letters that we have.

He says: this is how it works. The building up of the church is firstly the continuing work of God within His people. God is continually working in us and through us. Right now, God is working in us. And so the church is not some dead monument.

It is a living organism, and God is very much active in its ministry. The work of God is with His people. Secondly, the building up of the church is built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ. Now this foundation, as we've just said, lies in the gospel of what Christ has accomplished. This good news has been codified.

It's been written down. It's been confirmed by the apostles and the prophets who point to what Christ has done. He is the bedrock. He is the cornerstone. He is what we are built upon as the church.

Thirdly, the upbuilding of the church is enacted through the various gifts and powers that God has placed at the church's disposal. The church grows through the personalities, the talents, the spiritual gifts of the people inside it. You could say that the church won't function without the work being done by those God has enabled to do it. And then fourthly, the building up of the church is everyone's responsibility. Church upbuilding is a mutual undertaking whereby a Christian is to place the good of the church above his own preferences and abilities.

Each member plays their part to build the church, and so no single leader, eldership team, or ministry model can build the church in and of themselves. Therefore, each one of us is responsible to love, serve, and edify the congregation in which we find ourselves. So what is the main purpose then of this upbuilding of the church? Well, many people read this passage and think that the maturing of which Paul is speaking here is a growth in the personal holiness of the Christians within the church, or the personal ethics of the Christian, that God wants us to be better behaved, to increasingly overcome sin in our lives. And within the context of Paul's call here to gentleness and humility, that seems a fair conclusion, but it's not the whole picture.

For Paul, the nature of the upbuilding of the church speaks of both an inner consolidation of Christian behaviour, so we internalise the good news of Jesus, and that changes us from the inside out. But also, there's a speaking of an outer increase in the activity and the size of the church. As Ridderbos puts it, it is both a preservation and an enlargement of the church. The church grows through, he says, both its extensive missionary and intensive confirmatory work. In other words, Ridderbos claims that for true edification to happen in the church, the church will be active in both increasing its size through missional effort, and Ridderbos clearly says that that comes through sharing the gospel in word and deed, but also in an increase in our thought patterns, our behaviour, our actions that are in line with our new natures as Christians.

So it means that we hold intentionally these two things: that when we talk about church growth, you can't separate the numerical growth of the church, adding a new member to our church, as well as the prioritising of our internal growth, our maturing growth. When Paul talks about in verse thirteen that we are to attain the unity in the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, and thereby achieving mature manhood, he has in mind this idea of a full awakening of consciousness to the purpose and the mission of Jesus Christ. In other words, as Christians, we will grow in knowledge and insight of the significance of salvation in Jesus, and our hearts will become so aligned with the heart of Jesus that we will, in some way, grow into the fullness of Christ. This knowledge of Jesus is therefore not a theoretical knowledge. It is a profound awareness of the full implications of salvation.

As a Christian, you don't believe in a philosophy. You are experiencing a transformation. This is why Paul talks about the church as being the body of Christ. He uses the metaphor of a human body and shows how its constituent parts, its arms, legs, and its internal organs form one collective whole, with Jesus as being our Head. And we know if you passed biology in high school that everything flows from the head.

It's the brain that gives ability to everything else. The church is the body of Christ living out the purposes of Jesus Himself. And that's why Paul returns to the topic of unity in the final verses of this section when he says in verse sixteen: "From Christ, the whole body, joined and held together by every joint by which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love." So in closing, I wanna say, why can the church aim for unity even as one of the most diverse communal groups on the planet? Well, it's because we belong to Jesus Christ, and we are one body.

We belong to Jesus Christ. We are one body. No healthy body is divided against itself. An arm can't just jump off the body and continue functioning as an arm, nor can a leg stop doing what the brain tells it to do and still be called a healthy leg. That's when doctors will say it is sick.

It has a disease. And we are being told that we need all the members of this body, all the various gifts that God has given to the church to equip and train each other towards maturity. And so we find this cycle happening in the church. We begin with an imperative to be unified as the body of Christ, to serve one another with the purpose that we may grow more and more to resemble Jesus Christ Himself. But the result is that the more we resemble Jesus, the more we will love His body, the church.

And then the more we love His body, the more we strive to keep unity within the body. And the more we strive to keep unity in the church, the more the church begins to resemble Jesus. And the more we resemble Jesus, the more we love the church again. And that's the cycle that keeps getting repeated. This is how Paul begins his very powerful and practical second half of Ephesians.

And we're going to see these topics of unity, love, godliness, holiness, service come up again and again, but it starts with this one command found right up front. Christians, be worthy of the calling that you have received. So, fellow believers, be worthy of what you already are. You have been washed. You have been saved.

You have been united with Christ. You have that as a gift by simply receiving it through faith. Once you believe, you become the body of Christ, and now you're simply told to resemble Him. As you live your life within the church, God will continue the process of making you more and more like His Son Jesus, and He'll continue to do this by using fellow believers in your life. Christ is going to use this church to help you grow with the purpose that you might resemble Him, and that by resembling Him, you will grow into the humility, gentleness, patience, and love that you and I know we genuinely and enthusiastically hope for with our lives.

May God accomplish all these things at Open House Church for His glory and for our good. Let's pray. Lord, these are vast thoughts and truth about the reality that we face when we say that we are Christians. Lord, church is not an event on a Sunday. Church is not something that we dip into and dip out of.

Church is who we are. And so we ask, Lord, that where there is still lacking in our lives the power, the joy, the transformative work of the church in our lives, we ask, Lord, that You will build us up, strengthen us upon the foundation of Jesus Christ, that we may be able to grow into the mature manhood that You have in mind for us, that we may come and grow into, in some sense, a fullness of the stature of Jesus Christ. Keep this vision ahead of us always in our minds and in our hearts. Help us as elders to desire that for ourselves and for our church, but all of us, Lord, where it is possible and where we are capable. Help us to prioritise these things in us and cause us, Lord, not to become slack in pursuing this. In Jesus' name, Amen.