Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 4:1-16 [NLTse]
1 Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. 2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 and one God and Father, Who is over all and in all and living through all.
7 However, He has given each one of us a special gift through the generosity of Christ. 8 That is why the Scriptures say, “When He ascended to the heights, He led a crowd of captives and gave gifts to His people.”
9 Notice that it says “He ascended.” This clearly means that Christ also descended to our lowly world. 10 And the same One Who descended is the One Who ascended higher than all the heavens, so that He might fill the entire universe with Himself.
11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: The apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do His work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.
14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, Who is the head of His body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.
What we believe matters.
Last weekend, at the direction of the Elders, I drove down to Bethesda, MD to attend a presbytery meeting of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Now, I’ve attended a lot of presbytery meetings across my fifteen years of ministry, and during my years of active service to the church before that. The liberalism of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) shows itself in their versions of such meetings, as uuu those who believe the Bible is authoritative and read it fairly literally (like myself and our congregation’s commissioners) are made welcome right alongside those who believe the Bible is more of a guide and read it fairly figuratively and skeptically. The PCUSA sees the Christian faith as a spectrum with evangelicals and conservatives at one end and liberal, all-but-universalists at the other.
The EPC presbytery meeting was not like that: uuu Men and women prayed boldly in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; nobody choked when referring to the Lord with masculine terms; God’s sovereignty and human sinfulness were spoken of plainly. (The Devil even got mentioned in the context of being a true – though defeated – enemy once or twice.)
At PCUSA presbytery meetings uuu there is gentle pressure to embrace unorthodox teachings, to look down on inerrancy and infallibility, and to accept one another’s beliefs as “faithful Christianity” no matter what those beliefs may be! EPC presbyters uuu spoke courteously and respectfully regarding those who believed differently than they, but made clear in their prayers, teachings, sermons, and songs what they believed, and proclaimed it unapologetically!
uuu What we believe matters!
I’ve been preaching these last few weeks through the Essential Beliefs of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and we will be voting in our Congregational Meeting after this Service whether or not to seek admission into that denomination.
If you’ll take out the “Essentials of Our Faith” insert in our Worship Bulletin… Their last two statements of faith proclaim:
Jesus Christ will come again to the Earth – personally, visibly, and bodily – to judge the living and the dead, and to consummate history and the eternal plan of God. “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” (Rev. 22:20)
The Lord Jesus Christ commands all believers to proclaim the Gospel throughout the world and to make disciples of all nations. Obedience to the Great Commission requires total commitment to “Him who loved us and gave Himself for us.” He calls us to a life of self-denying love and service. “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” (Eph. 2:10)
These Essentials are set forth in greater detail in the Westminster Confession of Faith.
(The Essentials of Our Faith, #6 & #7)
There is no promise the Lord Jesus talked about more often than His promise to return: To judge the deeds of men and women according to their faith; to bring this Heaven and Earth of sin and death to an end; to destroy the Devil; and, to establish a new Heaven and a new Earth that will never end. Many who are more liberal and skeptical when reading the Bible believe the Lord Jesus’ promise to return is a merely figurative promise. They believe that through moral teaching, technological and medical advances, and by righting society’s wrongs the church will lead humanity to eradicate injustice, poverty, sickness, and disease, and in doing so establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Teaching morality is a part of the Church’s work in the world. As is showing God’s hand at work in those technological and medical advances that truly are advances. As is promoting social righteousness. But the Lord Jesus made clear His return would be more than merely figurative.
When speaking of His return the Lord Jesus prepared His disciples to expect that others might come and pretend to be Him – miracle-workers, false messiahs, deceitful teachers – but that we should not be deceived! uuu No one out-of-doors misses lightning when it strikes and thunders and flashes across the sky! And just so, the Lord Jesus promises that nobody is going to miss Him when He returns.
What we believe matters!
It matters that we believe the Holy Scriptures “have supreme and final authority on all matters on which they speak.” Those who call themselves Christians, but who don’t regard Scripture as authoritative, live by faith very differently than we do. They don’t have the anchor we have, the solid rock. You see them tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching – every new book, every clever sermon, every captivating thought… uuu And it sure doesn’t promote unity.
It matters that we believe Christ Jesus of Nazareth was and is divine in His origins and nature: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by Whom all things were made.” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If you have a problem with Jesus Christ, your Christianity has trouble right in the middle… uuu
It matters that we believe our Good Shepherd actually performed the miracles the Bible attributes to Him. I mean, does He have all authority in Heaven and on Earth, or not? Can He truly save, or uuu should we be putting our stock in someone else?
It matters that we believe He died and paid God’s just penalty for our sins. We’re sinners! We need a Savior! Without Him uuu we’ve got trouble coming…
It matters that we believe Christ overcame death, truly, bodily. It matters that we believe He was dead and that now we believe He is alive, and with us, always… If His resurrection was faked, if all we have to call upon is the inspiration of a life well-lived almost two-thousand years ago… uuu
Our reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians this morning calls us to, “Make every effort to keep ourselves united in the Spirit, binding ourselves together with peace.” It’s not always easy, Paul is saying. It takes effort: To read the Bible when you have other priorities trying to push devotional time out of the way. Being a part of Bible studies, Sunday School classes, or other small groups so we can “bind ourselves together with others” can take hard work in our ever-busy, wearying world. But that’s what leads to unity: uuu In all our diversity, moving in the same direction, with shared purpose, led by One admiral and king, Who is Christ. Because the diversity in Christ’s Church is only in the diversity of gifts Christ has given each of us for proclaiming the good news and making disciples, not in what we are called to believe and hold dear! The great apostle makes so clear: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as we have been called to one glorious hope for the future. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father, Who is over all and in all and living through all.”
What we believe matters! And it always will until uuu, and I quote, “until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.”