Demonstrating God's Incredible Wisdom: Unity - Ephesians Part 7

Lesson Transcript

I just want to remind us again this whole thing of God's wisdom and how it's upside down from the wisdom of this world. It's so opposite that if the princes of this world would have known it, they would never have crucified Jesus, the Lord of glory. I want to start this morning by looking at a few pictures. Does anybody know what this is? Pieces. So you go to the mechanic and he hands you all those and says, "Peace be with you." They're parts to an engine. And there's all kinds of different ones.

There's a few that are the same, like... I'm trying to get my mouse to go off the screen here. There we go. Like up here you see there's a whole row of them that are the same, and then there's a row of these and a row of these. But then there's down here, there's all kinds of different ones. They're one of a kind. How in the world can an engine work with so many different pieces that are all different and like uniquely different? Like wouldn't it be a lot better if they were all the same?

If they were all the same and they then they would all match, right? Well, if that was the case, you all would be walking to church this morning. And it's actually good that they're different because they all fit different purposes. And if the pistons up here would start getting carried away and feel like they don't need to be, they've got this connecting rod down there they got to lug around all the time and would kick it out of the way. Well, there would be some pieces flying.

And the crankshaft, it's kind of cranky, but if the other pieces got tired of pushing it around and the pulley got tired of being spun around by it and the pulley got frustrated with the belt for the pressure it put on it, it wouldn't work, right? And so we're thankful that all the pieces work together. And that actually is designed that way. They're each designed specifically to fit a different role, to fill a different place.

And the reason that we are all here on time this morning was because those pieces in each of your vehicles all work together perfectly. Some of you at work are tired of hearing this, but this is a great revelation to me. Things that are different are not the same. And that's actually a good thing that things are different and they're not the same. This is from the ladies' end of things a little bit more. These are ingredients for what? Cookies, chocolate chip cookies.

Why in the world would you take sugar and baking soda and put it in the same thing and mix it together? How many of you have tasted baking soda? Good, isn't it? Don't get it mixed up with confectioners' sugar. It tastes horrible. How in the world can that be a good thing to mix them together? And to put eggs in the flour, like flour is dry and fluffy and eggs are gooey and sticky. Like why would you do that? It ruins it.

But when you put all those together, it actually makes something that's better than any one of them would be by themselves. Here's another picture of some things that are different. That's an old picture. Sorry, Brayden. These are all different. They're not the same. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Should they all be Justins? Or should they all be Genies or Melita? A whole family of Melitas? Or a whole family of Trevors? Trevor's a cool guy, right? We'd have a whole family of Trevors, right?

Then they would all be the same and they could all get along together, right? What about this? Are these all the same? This is the sunrise service we had on Easter morning this year. We are all actually quite different. So how do we work that out? I forget who it was that brought up the idea one time of switching roles and having Patrick run Scroll Publishing and having David Brissot run Harkin House. And everybody laughed. Neither one of them would work.

The sad thing is too many times in churches, and sometimes for some reason it seems like the more conservative, the more obedience-minded churches are, for some reason, it seems like we have more and more problems working together. And I don't know if God for some reason wants this to be talked about because our Sunday school lesson was about it downstairs, and Kevin brought this up this morning and said there's all kinds of messages have been preached and all kinds of things said about it.

Well, one good thing about expository preaching is that I don't have to pick my topic. I always know what's coming next because that was determined 1950 years ago when the Apostle Paul wrote. So we're ready for chapter four in the Ephesians series. And the message this morning is not on unity. The message this morning is on Ephesians chapter four, verses one through six. And we want to listen to that and see what the Apostle Paul is teaching us through here.

So just remembering the layout of the book of Ephesians and where we're at, the first part is talking about understanding this secret purpose, this newly opened mystery that God has had since the beginning of time, that he would unite especially the Jews and Gentiles, but he would unite everything through following King Jesus, and that together all peoples would become a demonstration of God's wisdom, a temple, a place where people go to meet God and learn about him, to see him, to experience him, to carry out his

activity.

And so chapter four is kind of the beginning of the second half where it starts talking now practically about how to make this happen, how to participate in this mystery of demonstrating God's incredible wisdom through working together and living the way of King Jesus. So I want to read, we're going to read verses one through sixteen because I think there's some other context in there that's important in understanding the first couple of verses.

So beginning in verse one, "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 was 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 by 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 its increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." So going back to the beginning, in that first line there, somebody who is under 18, tell me what's the most important word as we start to try to understand the passage.

What's the most important word in that line? Let's bump up to 18 to 25. Therefore, remember to watch those words. Those are linking words. And we can't really understand what is being taught next unless we go back and we connect. So let's go back to look at the wherefore or the therefore.

And back up to verse 14 of chapter three, where Paul begins his prayer, "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye

may be filled with all the fullness of God." So his prayer is that Christ would dwell in them, that they would be rooted and grounded in love, and that because of that, they would be able to grasp, to get a hold of, with all the saints, the bigness of God's love, that they would experience it from within.

And that that would, then because of that, they would be filled with the fullness of God. We hear this temple terminology again. God is dwelling in them because of that. And so because of this, Paul's wish there at the end, which is a famous benediction that's used many times, "Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end.

Amen." So Paul's prayer there is so that God, who is able to accomplish this in us, would be able to be glorified in us as we allow his power to work in us, and that through that, he would be glorified through the church throughout all time. So because of that, this desire that God could be glorified in the church as he lives in us. And remember in Ephesians when it uses you in terms like that, that's always the plural you. It's all of us because of each of us.

So because God's glory, God wants his glory to be demonstrated through the church, Paul begins by saying, "Because of that, I, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called." So the idea of beseeching is not a term we use very often, unless we're trying to be old-fashioned or something like that. We would use terms like to urge or to beg or to plead. The idea is please, please, please. It's not so much a pull but a push, an urging to do this.

So Paul is begging us to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called. That's not a term we use very much either anymore, a vocation. The idea of that is a calling, and we'll get to that in a little bit here. But I want to stop and look back over because we read verses one through sixteen, and then we're going to focus in on verses one through six. So I want to summarize this passage here to make a point for a springboard.

So he starts out by telling us there's particular directions that we need to follow in order to be able to fulfill God's purpose for us. We need to walk worthy. There's a way we need to walk to be worthy of the calling that we've been given. He goes on and talks about this whole thing that when Christ ascended up, he led captivity captive, gave gifts to men. He descended or ascended, his first he descended and all that.

So when he died and delivered us from our master's sin, he gave us gifts, but those are not the same. They're not all the same gift. And so he goes on there and says he gave these different gifts, and it gives us sampling of some of the gifts that are given to the church, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers.

And the purpose of that is to blend them together in humility and submission so that they can help us to grow together to become a place where God lives and a place that demonstrates his incredible wisdom. And so backing up then to the beginning, he's begging us because there's this difference among us, it's actually a gift that God gave to us. And so there's a particular way we need to walk together in order to be able to accomplish this goal of being a demonstration of God and his wisdom.

I just want to remind us again this whole thing of God's wisdom and how it's upside down from the wisdom of this world. In First Corinthians chapter two, he talks about that, how the wisdom of God is foolishness with men.

And he cites in there particularly, he says, "It's so opposite that if the princes of this world would have known it, they would never have crucified Jesus, the Lord of glory." So God's way of even conquering Satan and his regime was so backwards to anything that Satan and his crowd would have imagined.

They never guessed that they never saw it coming, that it was actually through God becoming a human and living a humble life of service and suffering and righteousness and then dying that that is the way that his regime would have blown up.

And so in the same way, when we listen to Jesus and we obey him in those simple practical ways, when we forgive, when we choose not to take offense, when we choose to speak well of people or speak the truth in love instead of gossiping, when we return good for evil, when we live a lifestyle of humility, when we cover things that could be our glory and we could show them off, when we live disciplined lives physically and in our character, lives of discipline and self-denial, when we do those things, we are living

that same wisdom that turned the realm of Satan upside down in the direction.

So that's just something to prime our minds and remember this, that it looks like losing. It doesn't look like it works. But when we simply follow and obey, we are following that same wisdom, and we get to be part of what is going to turn Satan's dominion upside down. Paul is calling us to be a demonstration of that, particular ways that we need to live in order to accomplish that.

First of all, he says, "I therefore the prisoner of the Lord." So this is the question that came to my mind as I was reading this, and why does Paul keep bringing up the chain? He talks about these different places that he's bound and except for this chain. And I think there's a real lesson in here in the context about influence, how we affect change and affect the course of other people's lives. First of all, it's the upside down wisdom of God that will overturn the realm of death.

So Paul is this person who's bound. He looks like he's being hindered. It actually makes him more powerful. So Paul's highlighting that aspect of just the way God's kingdom works. The other thing is he is highlighting that he is leading and being an example of life he's calling them to. And this is humongous. Paul is calling them to a life of discipline and humbling themselves and forgiving and forbearing and all these things.

And before he does that, he's reminding them that he is living an exemplary life to a whole nother level above what he's calling them to. There are fewer ways to provoke the people that we're leading and trying to influence to anger than to expect something out of them that we don't expect out of ourselves.

We're going to get to that in chapter six where he says that, "Fathers, don't provoke your children to wrath." And instead of that, we should be people who set a higher standard for ourselves and then urge them to follow. That's the way of true influence. Expect more of yourselves than you do of others. Lead a life that others will envy. Urge others to follow your example. And then let the rest walk away till they are ready to invest.

Our tendency is then to yell at people or in some ways, whether it's verbally or whether it's by our actions or whatever it is, but to try to put pressure on people to change when they don't want to. They're not ready to make that sacrifice yet to change. And so we need to, like Jesus did with the rich young ruler, to set a prize before them and then let them walk away until they're ready to invest for it.

The result of this is you may have a small crowd, but they will be doing it what they're doing because they are sold on it. They really want to. They've decided this is worth giving everything for. I think this is really an important concept as we begin this thing about working together and working out things among us as a church. This is the apostolic model of leadership.

You set a high bar for yourself, and you demonstrate a high level of excellence in your character and in your life, something that people should envy and desire to be like. And then you urge them to follow you. So moving on, the idea of a vocation. So he begs us after he has himself set an example, he begs us to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called. And that simply is a calling or an invitation. It's almost a little more like a commission. You've been given a charge.

You've been given a privilege, a treasure to steward, and you've been given that responsibility. This term gets used in so you can go take vocational training. And that goes back to the Middle Ages when it was considered this was your life calling. You were called of God to be a mason or a clockmaker or a shoemaker or whatever it was, or a farmer.

When this is still alive and well, when John Bunyan was on trial for preaching without a license, asked him in the trial, "What is your calling?" And he said, "Well, I'm called as a tinker." In other words, that was what he was. His father was a tinker, and he was trained to be a tinker, which meant they mended pots and pans and metal stuff. So that's where that calling comes from. This is not necessarily saying what you do for a living, although it should include that.

But this is just the idea of a something that you've been given charge of, invited into and given charge of. So we're supposed to walk worthy of what we have been called up to. This is what John Chrysostom says about the calling. What is this calling? You were called as his body. It is said you have Christ as your head, and through though you were enemies and had committed misdeeds out of number, yet hath he raised you up with him and made you to sit with him. That's from Ephesians 2:6.

A high calling is this and to high privileges, not only in that we have been called from the former state, but in that we are called both to such privileges and by such a method. So this is a high and important calling because we were brought from very low to being from being dead because of our works to being given the responsibility and privilege of demonstrating God's wisdom and being part of his team, his army, to take over planet Earth again, to spread the kingdom of God.

And the way in which we were ransomed by the precious blood of Christ shows us the importance and the magnitude of that calling. An example of this is from the story Sir Malcolm and the Missing Prince. This is just one that stuck in my mind. While he's out playing with his friends, his how would you call him? His mentor, not his mentor, but his guardian, Sir Malcolm, calls him to come to court because his father wants him to sit in on a session and learn some things.

And Prince Hubert says, "Why can't I play like other boys?" And Sir Malcolm says, "Because you are the only boy who is a prince." So if he wants to be able to play like other boys, then he needs to lay down being a prince. He can't become a king like that. But if he wants to become a king someday, then there are certain things that he must do and must be exercised in and trained in and needs to learn in order to be a king. And so it's the same way with us.

We should expect if we have this high calling, then there's certain things that we are going to have to discipline ourselves in and be trained in and cultivate so that we can fulfill that calling that we've been given, that responsibility and privilege.

So launching into it, he says, "You walk the way you do this, the way you walk worthy of the vocation that you are called to is by lowliness and meekness, long suffering, forbearing one another in love, and endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace." Those are the things he lists out there in the first couple of verses.

So one thing I'm learning is really important as we read the Bible is often when there's a list of things given, they're given in an order that's intentional, and it's important to pay attention to because there's certain things that you need to do first. And if you don't do that first, then the rest doesn't work. This is one such list. So I listed them out this way in an order of root to fruit. So you have to have a plant. It has to have solid roots before you can bring out the fruit. And so it looks like this.

First, you start by laying the foundation of lowliness and meekness, and then you can move on to long suffering, and then you can move on to forbearing in love, and then you can move on to endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

I think that's really important because you're going to have a really hard time up there trying to keep the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace if you think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, or if you're impatient with others, or you don't want to get involved in trying to help others through what they're going through. It's not going to work.

So it's really important in many of these things that we notice that and we follow the foundation or the root to fruit order that is given to us when the apostles write or when Jesus speaks. So first of all, let's talk about lowliness and meekness. This is square one. This is first grade. If you don't learn your math facts in first grade, there's no point in trying algebra, right? And so these are the first things we need to learn if we want to be able to work together to be a demonstration of God's wisdom.

So one thing I thought about this, this idea of being lowly, that doesn't mean that we go around devaluing ourselves and saying, "Oh, I'm just no good." It doesn't mean that, but it means to bring ourselves back down to where we ought to be. The concept I like about this is we are there are good things about us. We are all special in God's sight, but we're not any more special than anybody else. Everybody else is just as special and just as important and just as worthy as we are.

And as we look at that, we should tend to bump ourselves down a little instead of trying to keep ourselves where we can see over the crowd. Jesus brings this out as one of the foundational characteristics to being part of God's kingdom. He says, "Unless you are converted, unless you get changed over and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." And that's one thing about children, I think, is they just tend to be more humble. They realize they need help and things like that a lot more than adults do. Adults tend to somewhere in that transition in the teen years, we begin to want to be self-sufficient and tend to think we can do more than we can.

Another aspect of this of lowliness is the way we view ourselves in involvement with each other, that we are here to serve. We're here to give rather than to receive than to be served. Jesus says this is a fundamental concept about leadership, but it shall not be so among you. He's talking about the nations that exercise lordship and exalt themselves. It shall not be so among you, but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister or your servant.

I actually believe is the Greek word dekanos, which is deacon. Deacons are the church donkey. Let him be your servant. And whoever will be a chief among you, let him be your servant, even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many. So Jesus sets the example of this. His orientation is to reach out to others, to take care of others, to serve others, and not to have others serve him. So lowliness.

Meekness, really a whole message could be preached about meekness. I think I actually preached one here years ago. Might have been before I actually was a member here. And there's lots that could be said about that. A lot of translations translate meekness as gentleness, and that's a pretty it's one aspect of it, but I think it's just a bad connotation because it doesn't cover the spectrum and it doesn't really cover the foundation. This is a word that gets talked a lot about on this subject, gelasenheid.

It's often garbled to be gelasenheid. Sounds like G-U. I'm not going to try spelling the rest of it. I don't know much Dutch, but I was talking about this with Gail and Stutzman at Faith Mission one time, and it's when a light bulb went on. And I do know enough Dutch to know what gelasen means. And that's what the mom tells her two children when they're fighting over a toy. She says, "Erge gelasen. Just let go." And that made a lot of sense to it. Height would be more like a time or position or something like that.

Brian's chuckling back there. He could probably elaborate better on this. But anyways, that made a lot of sense to me. It's the condition of having let go. And so this idea of meekness or the German concept of gelasenheid is yieldedness or submission to God. It kind of has two prongs. So we're not striving against God. We've humbled ourselves. We've become broken. We become shapable to him and how he wants to work in our lives. We're at rest with him.

And then because of that, then we are also yielded in submission to the ways that God wants to work with me through the people and circumstances in my life. So it starts with our relationship with God and our posture in relating to him. And then that spills over then into our relationships with our brotherhood that we're no longer striving. We've humbled ourselves, and we view the people in our lives as something that God wants us to work with and to be actually to use them to work in my life to shape my character.

These really are the characteristics that are repeated in different ways through the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as Jesus sets up the constitution of the kingdom of God and establishes a framework of what it takes to be in this blessed state. You have being poor in spirit, a sense that I need that childlike spirit that reaches up to God and says, "I need to be taught. I need help.

I need to follow your wisdom and your training." Sorrow, mourning for sin and for sin in my own life and for sin in the world around me and its effects. Meekness, we just talked about that. Being hungry and thirsty for righteousness. Being merciful, being pure in heart. Purity, one of the easiest ways to think about it is this jar right here. It's just water. That's all it is, right? It's pure water because that's all that's in there. And if we put something else in there, it wouldn't be pure water anymore.

Same with gold or something like that. If there's something else in there, it's not pure anymore. And so something that's pure is just that's all that it is. Jesus talks about having a single eye, a single focus, not looking at myself and how I can be pleased and be served. Peacemakers and willing to be persecuted for righteousness' sake.

So lowliness and meekness, if we want to achieve unity, if we want to work together to be a place where God is experienced and that demonstrates God's wisdom to the world around us and brings glory to him, this is first base. This is the first thing that we've got to tackle is having a mindset of lowliness and meekness. So the second one is long suffering. You look that up in the original Greek. It means to suffer long. I actually didn't look it up, but that one's not that hard to understand.

Suffering is not pleasant. It's when something doesn't feel good to us and we endure it in some way. And this to suffer long then means to do that for a long time, for an extended period. In order to do that, in order to suffer for a long time because of somebody else, there's some things that we have to do or a character that we have to have. First of all, we have to put others first, right? They're more important than me. Otherwise, I'm going to shut it off because I don't want to suffer.

And we're actually going to be willing to make others suffer so that we can have what we want. So first of all, we have to put others first. And we have to have this mentality that I am here to absorb what's going on in someone else's life. This is, I think, a key part of maturity is when and this is one of the things that's exciting to me watching my former students is seeing them get to become being the ones given to. They're the ones giving.

And some of them are teaching school or some of them have their own children now. But this mindset that I'm here to absorb what's going on in someone else's life and to pour Christian grace into that. When something happens, instead of thinking, "He made me look dumb," or, "That's not going to work for what I want to do," I think, "Hmm, I wonder what's going on in his life. I wonder what he's going to wonder what he's concerned about.

That's why he's expressing this." As Anabaptist people, one of our hallmark differences from a lot of other people who call themselves Christians is we believe we should practice what Jesus taught about loving our enemies. It's often called non-resistance. But for some reason, it seems like in our local brotherhood, if someone comes with a gun, then we can see that black and white. But when our local brotherhood, then we struggle with seeing this importance of loving someone who is causing me to suffer in some way.

And so that's really where it starts. And if we can't do that among ourselves, we really shouldn't expect that somehow it's going to be easy to do that when somebody we don't know comes and threatens us. This is an important characteristic. This is another thing John Chrysostom says about it. "For it is possible for a man to be lowly and yet quick and irritable, and thus all is to no purpose.

For ofttimes he will be possessed by his anger and ruin all." So a person can lower themselves in many ways, probably not with true heart humility, but still be quick-tempered. And so Paul's developing this concept of lowliness and meekness and giving us a bigger picture of what it looks like as he expands out and then to show us that it's something that then because of that, it suffers for a long time. The next one is forbearing one another. This literally just means to carry another person.

So this is moving from having a perspective about ourselves of lowliness and meekness to being willing to bear, to suffer long when things are not pleasant or things are not going so well. Now we're moving to starting to involve ourselves to do something about the situation that's causing difficulty. It's becoming proactive and involved. You're no longer a passive bystander waiting, just suffering long until somehow, hopefully, that gets fixed.

You become part of the solution by following the things that Jesus teaches us. And so again, in order to do that, you have to put your interests aside. You have to park what your plans and your agenda was for the day and carry the other person. And so because of that, then you are becoming part of the solution. There's a couple of pictures of this that came to my mind. Some stories from the Bible. Here's the first one. Somebody want to tell me what story that is from? The story Jesus told. Yeah, the Good Samaritan.

So often when we think about the story of the Good Samaritan, we think about him taking care of him, they're pouring in oil and wine and bandaging up his wounds and then putting him on the at the end, arranging a room for him and to be taken care of at the end. But if you've ever tried to how many of you ever tried to pick up somebody who was unconscious? I know some of you have because your children, you carry them in from the van. They're asleep. It's hard.

A person who's unconscious doesn't sit on a donkey and hold themselves on the donkey. It says he was half dead. So I expect that the Good Samaritan's trip to the inn was a lot harder than just walking. He's walking and trying to hold this guy up on the donkey and keep the donkey going the right direction. It was extremely inconvenient. It was extremely exhausting. But he carried the man to a place where he could get the help that he needed.

So this idea of forbearing one another, being willing to inconvenience ourselves and put aside what we want to take time to help somebody else to walk forward and to grow, especially bringing them to the solution to their problem, to Christ the Physician, and helping them to understand his solutions to their problems. Here's another story. This one may not be real easy to see and know how well the picture's showing up from the back.

But this is the man who was paralyzed and he was carried by his four friends to Jesus. So again, you have people who cared enough about this guy. They were willing to put aside what needed to be done for the day. And this was a time when people worked hard all day from sun up to sun down so that they had food to eat and clothes on, not so that they could go to sight and sound. And they tore the roof off and lowered the man down to Jesus so that he could be healed.

There's another example of that self-sacrifice and dedication to limiting yourself and giving your energy to helping someone else to come to a place where they can find the answers to their difficulties and to be able to grow. This last one is a story that's not very long and not very often told in the Bible. I tried hard to find a picture that was decent. This is when Noah, after the ark, and Noah gets drunk in his tent.

And his youngest son, Ham, sees this and he runs out and tells his brothers, "See what's done?" And his two older sons, Shem and Japheth, took a sheet between the two of them and walked in backwards. So they didn't see it and went in backwards and covered up their father's indignity. And that is for sure. I don't remember where it sparked, but that picture has been floating in my mind for the last couple of months about the way I relate to people.

So are we someone who is like Ham and goes and says, "So and so, every time he does that, so and so has to." And I think about it at a shop when we get off, and this is not even about brothers in our church, but we get off the phone with customers and then a salesman say, "That guy right there, I don't know why he doesn't get it." Sometimes we need to share what goes on in life and document the suffering or whatever we're going through. I'm not saying we can't talk about it, but I think about it sometimes.

Why do I feel like I need to tell somebody about this? And so in our lives, I think this is a really powerful lesson here to be like Shem and Japheth. It's not that we cover up sin and say, "Oh, don't, you can't say anything that's speaking you." Okay? We want sin to be opened up, but we want to handle it in a way that respects our brother's dignity. We don't want him to be shamed more than necessary. There are things that need to be brought up and needs to be opened up and dealt with.

But our desire is not to spread it further than necessary, not to bring more embarrassment on him. And we actually would rather be embarrassed ourselves than have him suffer more embarrassment than he needs. And the whole idea is to get to a place where it can be covered and he no longer needs to live in shame. So we're forbearing one another in love. Because you can carry somebody and think, "Man, this is a pain. Why do I have to do this?" And if he would just, whatever.

How can you bear others in their needs and shortcomings if you are driven by your passions or are critical? So if you're being ruled by your own desires and thinking about yourself or are you critical, you're picking apart other people and finding fault with them, not exercising the mercy that you want to be shown. This is one that stood out to me at Faith Mission in working with mentally handicapped people.

And sometimes they do stuff that is like, "Come on." But I realized that God could look at me and the intellectual gap between me and the people I was taking care of would show up like about a hair's breadth compared to the distance between my maturity and intellectual wisdom and God's would be out of sight. And if I could look at them and scoff, God could a hundred thousand million times more look at me and say, "Stupid idiot.

You are so dumb." And if I want God to be merciful to me, then I must be merciful to those who seem immature or wrong. I mean, again, this doesn't mean overlooking things or just saying it's okay and hush hush about it. But there's a way that we do engage it. We engage it in a spirit of lowliness and meekness because we prefer our brother and we want to see him succeed.

And I think overarching that is the perspective that Paul starts out with of setting a high standard for ourself, first of all, and then encouraging others to follow. So the last one then is keeping the unity of the spirit. If we separate ourselves from other members, we separate ourselves from the head and the spirit departs. That's what happens to our physical body. When a member gets cut off, it's no longer connected to the head.

And we say it's dead because the spirit that gives life and moves through the rest of the body is no longer there. And it's the same way for us. When we disconnect ourselves from other members of the body, we are disconnecting ourselves from the head and the spirit leaves. This is the unity of the spirit, the spirit of God. So this is not just unity for the sake of unity. Okay? We're not hippies all saying, "Yo, bro, peace, love, and hair grease," or whatever.

This isn't about sitting around and you know my favorite one, sitting around and holding hands and getting dewy eyes and singing Kumbaya or something. It's not just, "Let's all just get together and just get along." But it's a way that we handle our differences that's Jesus' way of handling them. And so it brings about unity and it brings growth to those who are not at the same level. This is not unity for the sake of unity, but unity produced some spelling errors there.

This is not unity for the sake of unity, but unity produced by living from the head and allowing his spirit to inhabit each of us. And this is done in the bond of peace. John Chrysostom brings this out because he starts out talking about Paul being bound. You will be bound by something, that kind of perspective, that we're going to tie ourselves to somebody or something. We're going to be committed to somebody or something.

We're either going to be committed to our brotherhood and we'll have chains that are chains of freedom, chains that help us to accomplish something bigger than ourselves, or we're going to be bound and restricted by our own selfishness. And we will be alone and isolated because of that. That's the end fruit of that is isolation. So bind yourself to your brother by making peace or be bound and imprisoned by self and strife.

The irony of this is if you desire something and bind yourself to it, the obligations are no longer a hindrance to you, but they're a help because you are agreeable to the end result. It's something that you want anyways. And so the bonds help you stay with it. And it's the same way in a brotherhood. I left one word out here at the beginning, and that's endeavoring.

And that's an English word that doesn't mean today what it used to, evidently, because I think of endeavoring like, "Oh, I'm kind of trying, but you know what? I can't quite measure up." It's kind of like a feeble attempt. Maybe that's just me. But this is a lot more powerful word than that. It means to use speed, to make effort, to be prompt or earnest, to give diligence, to be diligent forward to, to labor, to study.

These are some different places where that Greek word is translated into English in a different way that helps round out that concept. So we have, Paul says, "Giving to the poor was something I was eager to do." I think that one's actually the NLT translates it that way. The others are all from the New King James. Study to show yourself approved unto God. Do your diligence, he's saying to one of his coworkers, to come shortly unto me.

In Hebrews, "Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest." This is to strive and to give, make every effort towards it. Give diligence to make your calling and election sure. Be diligent that you may be found of him in peace. But instead of saying endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace, we could say eagerly study and diligently strive and work hard to be bound to your brothers and sisters following our head King Jesus.

This was a helpful concept to me about this being in the bonds of peace. That was kind of a little abstract to me before. But this concept of working to be bound to my brother. And I think that's an important concept without using those terms that we talk about at different times, but that's why we hang out together. And that's why we like to do work projects and lots of other things like that because we want opportunities to create a bond with our brother. This also happens in our discipleship groups.

Humbling ourselves and confessing our faults to each other, those things create bonds between us. Apologizing to somebody when you aren't being lowly and when you're not forbearing and you're not being peaceful, those things create bonds then. They bind you to your brother when you come back and you say, "I'm sorry. That was wrong. I apologize for that and pray for me." So he closes by this one one one thing. There's one body, one spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling.

When I think about hope, especially this kind of context, first of all, he says here, "There is a hope to your calling. There's something that you're hoping for." I like the term Paul uses in Philippians 1 verse 20 as he's looking at his persecution and he says, "This is my earnest expectation and my hope that in all things Christ would be glorified, whether by life or by death." So there is a hope or an earnest expectation.

There's something we're looking forward to, something God is looking forward to in this calling. And that's unity and oneness. Earlier in the book, this is not coming up in the right order. Earlier in the book, he talks about bringing all things together in Christ Jesus. In chapter two, he talks about bringing the Jew and the Gentile together, breaking down that middle wall that was a divider or a barrier to both of them from God. And together of the two, making one new man.

And that being characterized by making peace between them. And then they become a temple together, a demonstration of God's wisdom. That's the expectation that we have. That's what God is looking forward to in this whole thing of sending Jesus and redeeming us from sin, is that there would be unity.

So he says, "There's one body and one spirit, just as you were 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." There's seven ones there. And in the Bible, whenever, especially someone with Hebrew background, uses the number seven, he's saying something about it, that this is completion.

And if you think just a little bit about the Old Testament worship system, there was a prayer that was the prominent prayer, and that's the Shema. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." And he goes on there. And I think that's what the Apostle Paul is doing here, is this is a clue, a hyperlink back to that, that God is one.

And so God gives you these laws with the intention that you all would become one. And we know in the Old Testament, the law of Moses couldn't go deep enough to accomplish that. But now in Christ, God is accomplishing that goal of unity. Now it's not just God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit together one, but now God is bringing everything back together in one and fellowship.

So yeah, in a lot of ways, he's saying that the Shema, the first and great commandment in the Old Testament, is now being completely fulfilled by the seven ones. This is the verse I was thinking about earlier. He says that in the dispensation of the fullness of times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth in him. That's God's goal. That's God's expectation. And it should be our expectation in fulfilling our calling.

And so in doing that, then he starts off when he says to walk worthy of the calling we've been called to, he starts off with these instructions about humbling ourselves. This is what Jesus prayed for in his last breath, so to speak, after the Lord's Supper out there in the garden. "I pray not for these alone, but also for those who will believe in me through their words." Jesus is praying for us that they all may be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you.

That's actually a pretty powerful picture because the Trinity is three distinct persons. They're not the same. They're different. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Father. And the Spirit is not the Father. And they all work together perfectly to accomplish the same goal all the time. We are called to join that and mirror that. "They also may be one in us and that the world may believe that you sent me.

And the glory which you gave me, I have given them that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be perfect in one and that the world may know that you have sent me and I have loved them as you have loved me." So that's how God's glory gets revealed. That's how people know that God exists. Jason is doing a great job of teaching on apologetics.

But there's lots of Christians who waste so much time arguing about fossils and DNA and distant starlight and all that kind of stuff and trying to convince people that God exists. And I think sometimes the reason we have so much struggle in that turf is because the ultimate proof is not present. They don't see us living together in a way that people say they see God and they see God's love and the change that he can bring. And this all goes home with me as much as to anybody.

Part of the reason this is so important to me is because I have seen the carnage from the lack of this kind of stuff through a lot of my life. And I'm not here to pat us on the back, but we have some good beginnings to things here. And it's going to be extremely important that we grow in these things if we want to do anything more than become another statistic of a church that lasted for a few years and then split.

That is, if not the greatest reason, it's one of the top five reasons why conservative churches lose their young people as you live and work among them and listen to the stories. They don't have a problem with the church. The things that people are bickering about, they couldn't care less, really. They just wish that the strife would stop. So this is the ultimate apologetic. A few things here. Christianity is not Christian unity, I'm sorry, is not. It's not overlooking sin. Okay?

It's not saying hush, hush, just let it go. It's a way of dealing with it. It's not the liberals submitting to the conservatives all the time. It's not the conservatives always submitting to the liberals. I've heard this cry about unity and submission and all that kind of stuff, but it's usually the one party is wanting the others to submit to them or the other way around. It's not that. It's neither one of those. It's both. And so when we submit, we are simply putting our life mission under somebody else.

And that's a good thing. It's a powerful thing. It's not a doormat position unless the mission needs a doormat. And doormats are very important. But this is about learning to submit to each other and put my desires and my interests lower, submit them and give them up to a mission that's greater than mine, God's mission, the mission of the brotherhood. Christian unity is speaking of others' faults only when necessary for the redemption of the spirit. Oh, that should say. And in the spirit of Shem and Japheth.

So following that same attitude, preferring my brother's opinion and concerns above my own. And I have had a lot of work to do on this. I have had a lot to learn about this. In the last few months, there's been a lot of things that have dawned on me, and I've found I need to change. But really, does it matter if what I think doesn't happen? Is it really going to make a difference? And I'm going to create a worse problem by creating contention and pushing my way, even if my way is better.

I'm going to create a worse problem and hinder the kingdom of God more by pushing that and causing contention than if I simply be quiet and live a life of wisdom and let things pan out. And then I will be able to have influence. If I sit there and I beat on the drum until everybody's tired of it, nobody's going to listen to me anyways. And I will cause greater damage by the strife and contention I create than by the person who is doing something in a less wise way.

That doesn't mean we don't give advice, but we don't create contention and strife over it. Laying down my opinion on things is clear obedience issues. There's a lot that could be said about that. We do need to be loyal to King Jesus and simply and diligently follow his commandments. And the whole thing here is not that we avoid problems, but it's how we deal with the problems.

Again, it's the apostolic model of leadership that we live as an example of Christian rigor, and we urge others to follow rather than forcing others to do as we think. A couple of songs here. Bruce and Shan sang this one at their wedding, I believe. And I'll put a link to it on the chat, on the WhatsApp chat. The Nathan Good family sang it. "If by love we show the world that we are his disciples, I can't take it lightly. I commit my love to you.

I will tear down all the walls I built with my selfish pride, and I will crucify it. I commit my love to you. Because when we are divided, I can hear him crying. That's Jesus. We're tearing apart his body. And I can't be a part of breaking his heart anymore. I can't do it anymore. So brother, I commit my love to you. If you have offended me, you know you are forgiven. I will not remember. I commit my love to you. I will see the best in all you do. I will defend you when they come against you.

I commit my love to you. Because when we are divided, I can hear him crying. And I can't be a part of breaking his heart anymore. I can't do it anymore. So brother, I commit my love to you." I'm going to wrap this up by reading a paraphrase of Ephesians 4:1-6. "Because of this, I, Paul, who am imprisoned in order to demonstrate God's incredible wisdom, beg you to live up to the invitation and commission all of you all have been given to be a temple together to God's glory.

You have to start with humbling yourself and being yielded to God and each other. Then be willing to suffer a long time to absorb life in a fallen world and the growing pains which you and everyone else go through. Carry each other through these difficulties and do it out of a heart of love for each other. Eagerly study and diligently strive and work hard to be bound to your brothers and sisters following our head King Jesus. Jesus has only one body and one spirit that flows through all those growing from him.

The expectation you have been called to is that you get to be the instruments of bringing all things together in one through following King Jesus. In him, all have the same Lord, the same commitment, the same exodus, the same baptism, the same God, the same Father parenting all of you all, who is seen and known as people meet all of you all and is living in all of you all." We're going to sing this song closing. And you all know that the last verse, the last half of the last verse is my favorite part.

"Heart with loving heart united, met to know God's holy will, let his love in us ignited, more and more our spirits fill. He the head, we are his members. We reflect the light he is. He the master, we the brothers. He is ours and we are his. May we all so love each other and all selfish claims deny that the brother for the brother will not hesitate to die. Even so, our Lord has loved us. For our lives, he shed his blood. Still he grieves and still he suffers when we mar the brotherhood.

Since, O Lord, you have commanded that our lives your love should show, so we wait to be commanded forth into your world to go. Kindle in us love's compassion so that everyone may see in our fellowship the promise of the new humanity. It is in our obedience and our unity together in that that people know that God exists, that they know that he created a good way to live and that he is restoring all things to that order."