Demonstrating God's Incredible Wisdom, Growth Through University of Gifts Ephesians Part 8 Chapter 4

Like, for the last, I don't know how many years, every time you end up with a group that has an apostle, or somebody comes and says they're an apostle, they always—it's always that either they have revelation from God that nobody else does, and so therefore everybody needs to listen to them. It becomes a control regime. There's bullying, and often very bad things come out. Or they claim interpretive authority. So I can interpret what Scripture means; the rest of you can't. You all need to go with what I say. It's—they're very close together.

Good morning. Welcome here, everyone. So we're—for the message this morning, we're looking at the book of Ephesians again, and in chapter 4.

Last time, I really wanted to go through 1 through 16 all together because it's all together. But there's just—there's too many things that need to get said, and it can't be said all in one standing. So today we're going to kind of review that passage a little bit and then finish up talking about the last part.

The title I've given to it, this section is—this whole—the last section of Ephesians is about demonstrating God's incredible wisdom. And this particular one is talking about growth through the university of gifts. You'll find out where that is after a little bit here.

So just a little review. The purpose of the book of Ephesians is to open our eyes to God's open secret purpose, this mystery that was hidden. It was—there's incredible wisdom put into it, and it's something that God has been building and creating and preparing. And now it's open. We get to participate in fulfilling that secret purpose. And that is—that purpose is to demonstrate his manifold wisdom to every being, and to do that through us, his church.

And the way that happens is as we are reunited, everything is reunited through following King Jesus.

And so the book is split into kind of two sections or moves from one section into the other. The first part is about understanding this purpose that God has. And then the second part gets into some very practical things about how to become part of this purpose, this manifestation, this body of Christ, this temple of being part of that mystery being revealed.

So reviewing a little bit from last time when we went through verses 1 through 6, there we learned there's particular directions we need to follow to be able to fulfill God's purpose for us. When Jesus died and delivered us from our master's sin, he gave us gifts, but they aren't the same.

And we need to blend them together in humility and submission so that they help us to grow and become a place where God lives and a place that demonstrates his incredible wisdom. So just a few high points from last time. We started out with talking, looking at Paul bringing up this thing of him being a prisoner. And he does that a lot through his writings. And that that actually is a very important framework that he's setting all of his teachings in. It's a very important principle about leadership. That's Jesus' way and the apostles' way of leadership.

For one, it's the upside-down wisdom of God that will overturn the realm of death. So this thing about serving and looking like a failure because you're following Jesus, but actually is setting—it's like setting the dynamite charges, those acts of obedience, of humility that eventually blew up Satan's regime and is going to again in the resurrection, the final resurrection. It's also this apostolic principle of leadership. It's influence, not control. So it is affecting change in people, but it's not through somehow making them do things. It's by connecting with their want to, being something that's enviable, that gives them something to strive for. And then holding yourself to a high standard and urging others to follow.

So Paul opens with that, and that's an important framework for the rest of the passage to remember that that's the way leadership happens. That's Jesus' way, and that's the way of the apostles.

And then we looked at walking worthy of the calling that we've been called to by basically these four things: with lowliness and meekness, humbling ourselves, being surrendered with long suffering, which simply means suffering long, by bearing each other, carrying each other out of love, and by endeavoring. I highlighted that because to me that's always been kind of a wimpy word, but this means striving, like pushing yourself to your utmost limits to keep the unity of God's Spirit by making peace.

That concept of in the bond of peace is like actually looking for ways to bind ourselves to each other.

So we're going to read the passage verses 1 through 16 just to review what was discussed last time and then to move on into the rest of the passage.

I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, even as you are called in one hope of your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all.

But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore he says, when he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men. Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things.

And he gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the slight of men and cunning craftiness whereby they lie in wait to deceive, but speaking the truth in love may grow up into him in all things which is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, make an increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.

Let's bow our heads and pray. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the light that it brings to us, for the conviction that it brings and the guidance. And we pray that as we teach and we discuss your word this morning, that we can be instructed that your Spirit would move among us and open our understanding to the way you want us to live and help us to be receptive, to have fertile soil that your word can take root in and make the changes that it needs to and bring fruit in Jesus' name. Amen.

So I apologize. That was the King James there. I have one program that I use for the Orthodox study Bible, which is the New Testament, and that is King James. And I guess when I copied and pasted it out of there, it wasn't switched to the right one. So the rest of this should be a New King James. I just realized that I was reading along. I was like, wait a minute. This is not New King James.

I'm sure that you are all fine with that.

So beginning, there is one body and one Spirit, just as you are called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all. The seven there showing this is completion. Everything is fixed now. There's one God, not just one God, but now it's on earth too. And there's one baptism and one body and all those things together. But then he says that each one of us was given grace and gifts, and they're not the same.

That seems a little contradictory to me because, as I'm somewhat famous for, things that are different are not the same. So how can we be one where we're all different and quite different?

Well, in the English language, we have this term university, and we have these places that are called universities. And these are places where people from all different—in our time, all different walks of life, all different ethnicities, all different nations even, different ages, different courses of direction in life, different social statuses, different economic statuses meet together, and they find a common ground and create a place and a community that is so one that they are referred to as their birthing mother. The alma mater is what someone is—the college someone graduated from. They refer to it as that. It's my mother who gave me life.

So we use this term university to describe those places because they are places where there is oneness found in diversity, or we would say often diversity. So this root word verse means turnings. It's a Latin word that means turnings. And there's all kinds of words. It's interesting when you know that then. So, for example, we have different versions. It might be versions of a Chevy truck. It might be versions of translating the scriptures, but there are different turnings. It's like, here's one, and here's another one, and here's another one, and here's another one.

So we have in this term university or universe, this idea of many turnings, but oneness. So it's kind of a paradox that they're different, but they're one. They're different, but they're the same. So our universe is an example of that.

There's all kinds of different—I don't know what you call them—heavenly bodies. There's stars and clouds of gas and blobs of rock, and we call asteroids. And there's bigger ones and small ones. They have different names for them. And some act one way, and there's these dirty snowballs we call comets, and they break all the rules, and they just sling out through and come back and go back across the trail of the planets. And there's planets that rotate stars, and there's moons that rotate.

There's all these different things out there. And then on these balls, there are different—on earth, we have life forms like us, and on other ones, there's minerals and elements. But we all create the world of each other.

And so there's diversity, incredible diversity, but it's all one. It's all working together. They're all influencing each other, and it's all for the benefit of each other. So this concept of things being the same but different is something that really is entrenched in all our world. And I think it's because it's God's nature. The Trinity itself is three people who are different but the same.

They're different, but they're unified, completely unified. And last time, we looked at a few examples of this in our world. These are all engine parts, right? So it's all the same. If you got a box from an auction with all this stuff in it, and you got another one with kitchen utensils and another one with cleaning supplies in it, you would say, "Oh, those belong together," right? Because they're all the same category, right? Even though they're all different pieces, but there's a unity to them. And when they work together, they perform an incredible function that's just exponentially greater than any one piece could do by itself. Here's another one. This is a little more from the ladies' angle.

These are all different, but they're the same, right? They're all kitchen utensils. And it's a good thing that they're different because it doesn't work very well to try to rip a package open with a rolling pin. Neither does it work good to roll out dough with a pair of scissors.

This is another one we looked at last time. I really like this one because in this illustration, there are many things. They're all ingredients of a particular—in this case, I think it's chocolate chip cookies. And when they come together, they lose their identity. You don't say, "Oh, that's some sugar. That's some salt. There's some baking soda. There's some butter." You might taste the chocolate chips a little bit individually. But together, they make something much better than any one of them as an individual.

We'll pick on the Wadells again here. In a family among the human race, there's this. There's two—thank you, Melita, for the updated picture from last time.

You're not here this morning. Anyways, just as man and woman, we're very different, but we're the same. We're humans. And then they come together and work together to make something much better than just a pack of guys or just a pack of girls.

And then you have children and different ages of children. And together, they make a family. A family is much more delightful than some rambling rover.

Here is a business. We are all different, but we're all the same. And as we work together, it's much better. We get much more done than if we were all working by ourselves. Each one of us has particular abilities that do well in our particular departments. And if we cross over, if we get out of those, we're not going to do as well.

Here is a church. We're broadening out even broader. And now we have more diversity, differences, differences of background, differences of personality, differences of gender, differences of opinions. And God desires to work for all of us to work together to make something that's much better than any of us on our own.

We have this term in science called biomes. And this is where there's a whole little world of different things that all work together to make a coniferous forest or a fir or a pine forest or a hardwood forest or a tropical rainforest or a big lake or a pond or the coral reefs, the Arctic. There's a whole different set of animals and organisms and plants and soil and weather. All those things work together to make a realm that's unique in itself.

This is just kind of a little expanded version of that. If any one of these things gets out of proportion, focuses, it's not happening intentionally, but if any of one of these would begin to serve itself and begin to do something for itself rather than for the balance of the whole thing, we have a problem. And I brought this up last time. This is a four-letter word in the South. Kudzu is a horrible thing. At one time, it was heralded as this great innovative crop that's going to help all you farmers on poor soil feed protein-rich forage to your animals. And now in the South, if people down there could all pay $100 and have no more kudzu, I'm guaranteeing everybody would do it.

It's just a plague and destroys everything because it's pushing itself instead of working with the rest of the economy or the ecosystem.

The one that the Bible uses the most to illustrate this concept of unity and of diverse things working together is the body, the human body and differences of limbs, differences of organs. And there's all these different parts. 1 Corinthians 12 says, "For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body being many are one body." Maybe go back and read. I think I missed something. "For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body being many are one body. So also is Christ."

Now you are the body of Christ and members individually. So Jesus left, and he's not here anymore. And he said, "It's a good thing that I'm leaving because my spirit is going to come instead. And you working together are going to be a much bigger me than if I was here." And it's God's design that all over the world now, people don't have to travel and wait all day and climb up on a roof and poke a hole down in order to experience Jesus. But that all over the world, there are people working together so that Christ in a literal physical way can be experienced.

And each of us have a part to play in that. And each of us are different. And it's God's design that we each bring a different part of his character to the table, to the body, so that we can contribute to making a whole that is his presence.

So just a couple of lessons out of this. One is it is a good thing that everyone is not like me. That has been a little bit of a hard journey for me to realize, and I'm still realizing it. When you realize something, it means it becomes real to you, and it changes the way you respond and the way you think and feel about things.

Balance in the body requires that there will be people with gifts and perspective that is the opposite of mine. So if I try to stop anything that's not the way I think or I look at things, we're going to have a body with just an eyeball or just an ear or just a toenail or whatever it is.

And it's not much of a body.

Whether my gift is more prominent than another's or not, number one, its purpose of who I am is to make a functional body, not to be known as the world's best nose or whatever it is. And it must be subjected to the good of the body as directed by the head. So this concept of submission is coming in here again. And I'm so thankful for learning that it's submission. It's not about saying, "Oh, I don't matter, and I just shouldn't even show up, and I'm just worthless and insignificant," all that. But it's saying that I'm going to take who I am and what I have, and I'm going to give that to supporting something much bigger and better than what I am.

It's a privilege. It's actually the way to meaning and purpose.

So moving on back to the passage. But to each one of us, grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. So therefore, because of that, he says, "When he ascended on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts to men."

He's quoting here from Psalm 67 in the Septuagint, Psalm 68 in the Masoretic text. This is actually a war psalm. The whole psalm is this psalm of victory about a war that never took place in the nation of Israel.

But God is winning in this. And this, I think, is prophetic. It's looking forward to Jesus' victory.

But he says there, he pulls out of there then the passage where it says, well, I'll read the whole thing. "God's chariot is ten thousand-fold, thousands abounding in numbers. The Lord is among them at Sinai in the holy place. You ascended on high. You led captivity captive. You received gifts for mankind, truly for the disobedience, so they may dwell there. The Lord God is blessed. Blessed is the Lord from day to day. The Lord, the God of our salvation, will bring prosperity upon us."

So this thing about gifts is something that came out of Jesus' death. We refer to that as the atonement or whatever Jesus did when he died. And this is an aspect that actually very little Christians talk a lot about, but the scripture refers to as the main accomplishment of Jesus in his death is this thing of bringing about a freedom, a redeeming, buying back us from the master sin and the slavery debt. So Jesus descends into Hades or the realm of the dead. Hades is the Greek concept of the realm of the dead.

Conrad Stauffer had a good message here a while ago about what the early Christians believed about the afterlife and talks about that whole thing where there's the waiting places of the place of rest in Abraham's bosom for the godly and the place of torment for the ungodly who are awaiting the judgment. Basically, Jesus describes that in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus there. So Jesus went down there, and he wrought deliverance. I don't know of a modern term to use to replace wrought because wrought has this—it's a big project, and you plan, and you do this to it, and you work on it and work on it and work on it and take it to this stage and then take it to that stage.

And there's just a lot of investment in it. But he wrought deliverance from the one who had the power of death, the devil, the master sin. And he brought that deliverance to those in Hades and preached to the spirits in prison.

If you want to know more about that, Brother David has a message on what the early Christians believed about Christ's descent into Hades. His purpose in that was to fill all things. That word fill is pretty simple. Here's the expanded version. It means to make replete, though, like over the top, complete, everything you could want, to level it up, to furnish, to satisfy, to take it all the way to completion. So there's this picture here of him doing all this stuff to restore or make everything, top everything off to where it's exactly the way that it should have been all along. So that's part of what Jesus did in his death and the time there before his resurrection.

So he freed us then to live as genuine images of diverse expressions of God's image. So summing that up, basically two things that Jesus made accomplishments in his death was freedom from servitude to sin and then giving us abilities to develop complete restoration of God's image as humans, which technically that was perfected in his resurrection then. His death and his resurrection were two sides of a coin, really.

And that's what this passage brings out. He led captivity captive and gave gifts to men, gifts to help us to become mature, complete, restored communities of Jesus' character.

But unto everyone of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. So these are these things that we're going to talk about here later. He goes on and says, "Wherefore he says when he ascended on high, he led captivity captive, gave gifts to men, and he gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers." These are gifts that were given from God's grace.

So just a little review. Grace is the Greek word charis, which means favor. It does not necessarily mean unmerited favor. It's the same Greek word that is used in the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Old Testament. When Joseph found grace in the eyes of Potiphar, was that unmerited? No, it was because of Joseph's integrity and hard work. It's just one little illustration of that.

This grace from God in this situation of these gifts is in the sense that it's merited. It's merited because of obedience. As we repent and we surrender our lives to King Jesus and we choose to follow his way of life and let him be Lord, in that sense, there is something we do to qualify to receive the gifts. But they're not merited in the sense that we don't choose what is going to be given to us.

We don't somehow make it happen, and we don't pick to be an apostle or a prophet, evangelist, pastor, teacher, one who shows mercy, one who gives, one who all those kinds of things. Those are things that God chooses and says, "I'm going to give this person this and allow him to use that to contribute to my presence."

I don't want to make too much out of this, but that word charis is also where we get our term charisma. That's helpful to me to think about this thing of grace because charisma is like a person's—sorry to use the term—but a person's personal energy, their personality that comes out and connects with you.

And so that reminds me of what Jesus says that if any man will love me, if any man will keep my words, my Father will love him, and we will come and we will make our abode with him. So these gifts are a result of us choosing to obey God, and then God comes and lives with us and gives us part of himself, his nature, his character in these gifts to be lived out, to be contributed to, to working together to make Jesus a living reality again on earth.

So God is a variety of persons and gifts working together in unity. We already talked about that. The Trinity is this kind of thing. And so God is giving us the privilege of his character because God himself is many different things working together for one common unified purpose in peace and love and harmony.

There's no sand in the gears at all. It all works just perfectly and beautiful. And God's giving us the privilege to not be a solo star, but to work together with others like he does to bring beauty and harmony and order.

And so what is the purpose of all this? So let's go back to the passage. The purpose is to edify the body of Christ till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a perfect man to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

And then the result of that will be that we are no longer children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine. And instead, we may grow up in all things unto him who is the head, which is Christ.

So these are gifts to bring a complete and mature corporate demonstration of the character of King Jesus. That word corporate is interesting. I wrote that in there, and I thought, "Wait a minute. That actually really applies here because you have the root word corp there, which means bodily. A corpse is a dead body.

Corporal punishment is when you physically punish the person bodily." So a corporate demonstration is a demonstration by a body, many people working together as one.

So the gifts are to bring a complete and mature corporate, a bodily demonstration of the character of King Jesus. So stability and wholeness is experienced by each part of the body, so by the people inside and also by those outside who encounter it.

So there's an important piece of the story that I just learned, and so I'm really excited about that. And that's one of the things that's exciting about following Jesus is you continue to learn things that changes the way you look at yourself in the world and challenges you deeply to how you're going to respond. And that is this little part that's always confusing when you want to memorize this passage. So he does the whole thing. So he went up, but first he went down so then he could go up. And it's like that was always like, "So the he that ascended first descended so that he could ascend." And it was always confusing. My students had a hiccup with that one, and I wish now I could have explained it a lot better.

Probably would help them remember. So he says here in parentheses and aside, after he says about Jesus ascending on high and leading the captor captive and giving gifts to men, he says, "Now, this thing about ascending, well, logically, in order to ascend, first you have to go down, right?

And the one who descended is the one who ascended." So he's showing us here that this very thing of us being set free from the power of sin and being gifts to be restored humans came as a result of Jesus humbling himself and lowering himself all the way down to even being killed and going into the land of the dead.

And it was because of that that then he rose. And he's setting a model for us. We follow Jesus. We follow in his steps. We do things the same way he did. If we want victory, if we want to overcome, if we want to reign with Christ, we have to follow his way. And his way is to humble yourself and go down. And in this picture of this discussion of using these gifts that we're given, this is so important that we frame it that way. That's the first principle is that we subject ourselves, we humble ourselves, and we serve others rather than asserting our gift and pushing our way or pouting about the gift we didn't or didn't get.

I all of a sudden realized, "Wow, that's profound." In good Eastern mind fashion, he's giving you a picture that teaches you a lesson. Jesus, he ascended on high and led captivity captive. But how did he get there? It's because first he humbled himself and became a human and always honored his Father and served and took wrong and injustice cheerfully and blessed instead and all of that. And we follow that same way.

It's the upside down charge. It's the unlikely victor in the story. You don't expect that to happen.

And it was because of that, like the song we worked on last year, Children in Sunday School, it talked about the little boy from the carpenter shop talked about how then out of the devil's prison house came a procession led by the king shouting, "Now great, where is your victory? And death, where is your sting?" It's because first he humbled himself and became a servant and suffered the just for the unjust, suffered injustice, suffered wrongfully.

Philippians chapter 2 is a parallel passage. I'm not going to read that for the sake of time, but he talks about this where Jesus systematically, step by step, he just keeps going down, down, down, down, down, down, down to where he's dying the most painful, despicable, shameful death that's been invented. And because of that, then he's exalted and he has authority over everything and he has praise of all things.

There's a little song that's in our hymnal. I didn't look up the number, but says this very clearly. This is the way of God's kingdom. Light after darkness, gain after loss, strength after weakness, crown after cross, sweet after bitter, hope after fears, home after wandering, praise after tears, sheaves after sowing, sun after rain, sight after mystery, peace after pain, joy after sorrow, calm after blast, rest after weariness, sweet rest at last. And that refrain should have been deleted.

Near after distant, gleam after gloom, love after loneliness, life after tomb, after long agony, rapture of bliss. Right was the pathway leading to this. That last line just means that that's the way of God's kingdom. You suffer, you go through the difficulties first, and then you experience the reward and the blessing.

And so just a reminder, I've said this many times through this series and because it stands out to me. When we follow Jesus upside down way of simple obedience, however stupid it looks to the world, however much it doesn't look like it's going to work for us, we are following the same wisdom that if the princes of this world had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory because it turned Satan's kingdom upside down. It led the captor captive and gave gifts to us. And I am convinced that in the second resurrection, that that is going to happen again in a more complete way. And we will have been part of the ones setting those dynamite charges by our humbling and our serving.

So another review here. So we are one, but we're different. We find unity in our diversity coming together and working together. Our differences are gifts of God's favor and character. These gifts were born out of Jesus demonstrating the way of humility and submission. When we follow King Jesus' example, the differing gifts work together to make us a restoration of his mature living wholeness in our world.

So let's keep going and talk about the gifts.

This is an acronym we'll go over later. You will hear this used a lot in the broader world, so we might as well use it today. It stands for Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, and Teacher. Shepherd and pastor are interchangeable terms there, the same idea. So let's read the passage.

And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a perfect man to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

So we have the five gifts listed out there. This is not an exhaustive list. This is not some sort of a template or a magic five. I think he picked them because in the context of gifts to help bring maturity, they are a good spectrum of them. There are other passages that list out lists of gifts that are given by the Spirit of God. And some of these are included, and there are others added.

Here's one in 1 Corinthians 12:4-11. There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all. But the manifestation or the showing forth of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all. To one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit. To another, the word of knowledge through the same Spirit. To another, faith by the same Spirit. To another, gifts of healing by the same Spirit. To another, the working of miracles. To another, prophecy. To another, discerning of spirits. To another, different kinds of tongues. To another, the interpretation of tongues.

But one in the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually as he wills. So in each of these passages, there's teaching about how we relate to these things and the purpose of them that I think we can learn from across the board interchangeably.

Romans 12:3-9, this is a pretty common one. For I say through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, realistically, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace, that is the favor, the way God has dealt his favor out to us, let us use them. If prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith.

Or ministry, serving, let us use it in our serving. He who teaches in teaching, he who exhorts in exhortation, he who gives with liberality, he who leads with diligence, he who shows mercy with cheerfulness. Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil, cling to what is good.

And then 1 Corinthians 12:27-28, he says some interest to make some comments about how these things work together. Now you are the body of Christ and members individually, and God has appointed these in the church. First apostles, second prophets, third teachers, after that miracles, and then gifts of healing, helps, administrations, varieties of tongues. And John Chrysostom says this is like that it is that there's apostles are foremost, they're the most crucial. And then there's prophets, and some are not as prominent or as impactful, or you could even say important as the others, but it doesn't mean that they're not important. And he makes a big point of saying that a person should not gripe or complain or envy others because of what God has chosen to give them.

They should be thankful that God has given them a gift and to use it to their best ability to bless the church, to make the church be able to be a demonstration of Jesus' life.

So back to the list here.

There's some problems that have come out of this list. People have grabbed this list and read into it different things and made structures and made it say things that it doesn't. This is in the passage. It's a brief reference to a few things in a passage that's talking about submitting to each other and making the body work together well.

One observation I'd like to make is these are gifts. They're not leadership positions. I think this is important, and I'm probably going to double back on this later because leadership positions, we're told to ordain how to choose deacons, we're told how to choose elders and a head elder or an overseer, a bishop. We're told qualifications how to find that kind of person and the kind of person that is going to lead God's church well. And most of it is their character. There are a few things that are skill sets. So for example, for the elder, it says he needs to be apt to teach. He needs to be able to lead his household after him.

The deacons, I don't even think it really says that much about skills. It's more about being trustworthy and some things like that. Most of what that has to say, though, when you're choosing a leader is not his abilities or his skill sets or his gifting. It's his character. And that's because you can have I forget which one it was. It was Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think it was Henry David Thoreau that said that technology gives people improved means to unimproved ends. So in other words, it just helps them do whatever they're going to do. It helps them do it better. So if you have a good person, technology helps them to do good better.

And if he's a bad person, technology helps him do his bad better. And that's the same way with gifting.

A few examples of that, you look at the Old Testament, I thought of Mordechai and Haman. They're both men who are gifted in leadership and management in the kingdom. They both did well in their spheres. The king advanced them, but one was self-centered. And he's going around using his influence and his abilities to take out people who are going to make him feel, well, just irk him to see him sitting there and to consume their estates into his own and make him more wealthy. And you have Mordechai who's actually looking out for the king and is willing to, if it means that he just gets set beside the wall and nobody looks at him when they walk past, then he's okay with that.

But you have a gift there. Both of them have a gift. You could do the same thing with Queen Esther and Queen Jezebel. But there's lots of ways you could do that. If you think of it as a tool or a weapon in someone's hand, you could line up. You could go on the street to Chambersburg last night at the parade. You could pick, you could just randomly pick 10 people and line them up here and give them all the same tool. And depending on their character, if you give them a shovel or if you give them a gun or if you give them $100, depending on their character, the outcomes of how they use those things are going to be vastly different.

And that's something I think is really important to remember here with this thing is when we focus on gifting or abilities and we choose people for that, we are only setting ourselves up for a lot of something to be done. And the question is, what quality is that going to be? Is it going to be Jesus' way?

Some more comments on that later. So these are gifts. These are abilities. They're not qualifications for leadership or positions that we ordain. We don't ordain an apostle. We don't ordain a prophet. We don't ordain an evangelist. We may ordain an elder who is an evangelist, has the gift of evangelism, or the gift of being a starter. We'll deal with some of that later.

These are descriptive, not prescriptive. So it's just saying, this is how it is. It's not saying, you need to make this happen. So when a doctor prescribes something, he says, here, do this. When somebody comes in and describes their symptoms, they just say, this is what's happening. So this is just saying, this is what's happening. This is what Jesus has done. Not saying, you need to take this and go and make something out of it.

I think this is redundant. Not a template list. It's simply a sampling of variety to make a point. So we're going to go through here and just talk about what is an apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher. No, we're not. We're going to talk about apostle first.

This is probably the one that's got abused the most, at least in my experience, is this concept of an apostle, a position of being an apostle. One of the issues here is that when we have nouns in English, so for example, just to change the subject here, we can say a disciple. So John the Baptist had disciples. Many other rabbis had disciples. You could say Elisha was a disciple of Elijah in the Old Testament. So it's just a relationship there. But when we say the disciples, we're kind of putting a capital because it means a particular group of those people. And that's what people do when they talk about apostle. Often they switch back and forth.

They use this term to mean the 12 who walked with Jesus. I'm going to put a few things up here. I'm using color to help us get this picture. So capital apostle, that's one of the 12 versus any old delegate messenger or one sent forth with orders.

An apostle, a capital letter apostle was a one-time gift that's still a foundation we build upon. This was the men that Jesus chose for their character, and they walked with him. They listened to him. They handled him, like John says, and they had firsthand experience with Jesus and were chosen by him. There are a few others that the early Christians would refer to as apostles, but they are always those, or like the apostle Paul, who was God chose to reveal to himself to him by revelation or by vision. And then there were a few like Timothy, who was basically Paul's sidekick. They worked together. They were like the right arm of one of the apostles in their church planting.

The early church didn't quote current-day apostles. They always go back to the 12. So this whole concept of calling somebody an apostle ended with the 12, the 13, including the apostle Paul. And like I said, one or two that were basically like the right arm of the apostles.

They always went back to the original 12 when they wanted to quote apostles, when they wanted to benefit from the gift of an apostle.

I ran ahead with myself here. Apostles were all men who walked with Christ, saw his very life, and heard his very words, except, like I said, a couple who were close partners with those men. Honoring leadership was tied to the assumption that they were trained in and approved by the tradition of not just any old apostle, but the 12. And so there's comments like this in the facing Gnosticism that get taken out of context where, like Ignatius says, do nothing without the bishop. And people start thinking, oh, that was the beginning of the Catholic Church. That's not what he's saying. But he's saying these were men that were trained by the 12 who walked with Jesus, and they're trustworthy.

And anybody who isn't following after what those original 12 said and did is not trustworthy. Don't go with them.

So apostles in Ephesians chapter 4 here, when he says the gift of apostles, they're not people with current-day autonomous, in other words, of themselves, authoritative revelation or interpretive authority, but initiators. If we're going to say today that we have people today who are apostles, we must use that in the term of just a general, a delegate, someone who's commissioned by the church to spearhead something.

Personally, I think that because of the confusion, there's probably better terms to use than to call somebody an apostle.

I would like to say everything, but I haven't heard of everything. But for the last, I don't know how many years, every time you end up with a group that has an apostle or somebody comes and says they're an apostle, it's always that either they have revelation from God that nobody else does, and so therefore everybody needs to listen to them. It becomes a control regime. There's bullying, and often very bad things come out. Or they claim interpretive authority. So I can interpret what scripture means. The rest of you can't. You all need to go with what I say. They're very close together.