Sermon Transcript
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men. In saying he ascended, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?
He who descended is the one who also ascends far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into to him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds, minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart.
They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.
Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as in good with building up as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Before we jump into our message, I want to express a word of thanks and celebration that we just finished our budget year at the end of August, and by God’s grace through all of you, uh, we, we finished in the positive, uh, north of our budget. Um, yeah, thank you, uh, and praise God. And that means that our ministries to our community can continue, um, as they have been. And as we look toward the future and what’s next, um, it really provides for all of that to be possible. So, so praise God, um, and thank you We are, and I think our community is and will be grateful, so thank you.
Well, in a 2011 interview, Phil Vischer, who was one of the creators of the hit TV series VeggieTales, reflected on the show and basically lamenting, he said, I looked back on the previous 10 years and I realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity and it was a pretty serious conviction. He continues, he said, you can say, hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so, or hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so, but that isn’t Christianity. Christianity, it’s morality.
End quote. He realized he missed an opportunity to teach what Christianity is all about. Unfortunately, by the time of the interview, Vischer had lost control of the franchise, so there was no course correction that was possible, but he wanted to do something different in the future was his point. If you’re not familiar with VeggieTales, it’s an animated series narrated by Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. They reenact Bible stories, reinforce moral lessons for children.
They tell kids the right way to behave in a fun way using different Bible characters, which in certain respects, there’s nothing wrong with that, right? It’s why it was so popular. Kids need to learn the right way to act, and parents, we need all the help we can get as we try to form the minds of the next generation. So if kids will listen to an animated tomato, run that show all day long, right? Great.
We certainly— I mean, you think about the alternative. We don’t want a television program teaching kids the opposite, right? Like how to steal or how to take advantage of people and get away with it. We wouldn’t want that on a show. So teaching kids morality is fine.
It’s helpful. It’s needed. But telling someone, do the right thing, do the right thing, you should do the right thing, that’s not how Christianity works. So if you’re trying to teach a kid about Christianity instead of morality, that’s not how to do it because Christianity isn’t primarily about doing differently. Christianity is primarily about being someone new.
Then and only then, only after becoming someone entirely new does behavior change and we act therefore Christianly, to use Fisher’s phrase. I realize that’s abstract so I’ll try to give you many examples today of what we’re talking about. We’ve been working our way, as Nate said, through the book of Ephesians and today we look at a passage where Paul draws contrast between who the Ephesians were to who they are now, how they were in the past made new and how they now can continue in their new life. We can’t cover the whole passage but what we can cover we’ll find that being made new in Christianity involves at least 2 interventions, a first intervention intervention, as you would expect if there are 2, and a second ongoing intervention which really points back to the first one. 2 interventions involved in becoming new.
So the first initial intervention in Christianity is God’s to us, God’s intervention in our lives. Without that, there is no possibility of new life. Life? None. The passage we’re looking at today is in the 4th chapter of Ephesians, but Ephesians, as you know, is actually one long letter.
Originally it was not broken into chapters. There was someone centuries after it was written that added chapter numbers, verse numbers, so we could just keep track of where we are, but it is, it is meant to be understood as one complete train of thought. So instructions for behavior in chapter 4 cannot stand in isolation from what has come before them. Like when you write someone a letter or an email, you don’t want them to only read the middle of the email, and if they only read the middle of it, they would probably completely miss what you wanted them to know. So same here, what happens in chapter 4 about behavior is related to chapters 1 through 3, and you can even see hear in Paul’s discussion in chapter 4 of acting new, it hinges on what he has already said about being new.
Verse 1 of our passage, he writes, therefore, therefore meaning what I’m about to say is linked to what I have already said, right? He says, therefore, I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have received. Which he has previously defined that calling. Something had happened to them, and because something happened to them, now they must walk in consistency with that. Or verse 21 and following, he says, assuming that you have heard about Jesus, assuming that you have embraced everything in chapters 1 through 3.
I mean, that’s a pretty big assumption, right? But assuming they have, he says, let go of your old way of living, put on your new self, you know, live into the you that we talked about in chapters 1 through 3. So chapter 4 doesn’t make any sense without chapters 1 through 3. Small recap of those chapters, Paul started chapter 1 telling them, you are included, you are forgiven, you are adopted, you are secure, because of what God has done. Chapter 2, he talks about what God did to forgive them when they were right in the middle of sin and when they were right in the middle of bending away from Him.
God raised them to the highest status possible. Chapter 3, Paul prayed the Ephesians would have an experience of God, that the full measure of God’s fullness would be made known in their hearts. That’s who they are. Are. Now, that’s their new self, their new life.
They’re forgiven, favored, included, wanted, filled with God’s love, totally secure. And then here in chapter 4, he starts talking about behavior. Walk in a manner consistent with who you are. And going forward, he’ll talk about all kind of specific behaviors in chapters 5 and 6. So chapter 4 is actually a bit of a bridge between who their new self is, chapters 1 through 3, this new life they have, and therefore how they now act, chapters 5 and 6.
And the order of Paul’s presentation is everything.
First, before anything else, there is inclusion. Then later, there is action. That sequence is critical. It’s why we named this series Inclusion, Then Action. If you reverse that order, if you have action first and inclusion later, you lose Christianity.
You’re back to morality. The order makes all the difference in the world. You can imagine a few weeks ago we used the story of Les Misérables as an illustration of how God gives us new life. Sorry for the repetition, but repetition is the key to memory and it’s a great example and not all of you are here every week. So Jean Valjean in Les Misérables is first, before anything else happens, he’s first forgiven and favored by the priest right when he deserves deserves the exact opposite.
Valjean was given a fortune of silver right at the moment that he was caught stealing silver, and it changed who he was, right? His wiring reprogrammed by grace. Now he has new life, and therefore, secondly, he acts different. His behavior changes. He walks in a manner consistent with what happened to him.
That’s Christianity. Morality, by contrast, would be thou John robs the priest, so the priest lectures him, you know, you should have done the right thing, don’t you know what the right thing is? And then the police would have chained him up in the darkest dungeon until he learned his lesson, which maybe he would have. Sometimes incarceration helps future behavior. Or maybe he wouldn’t have, have.
But either way, it’s morality, it’s not Christianity.
And again, morality is okay, there’s a place for morality in the world. Parents have to teach their kids morality, have to, or should. Societies have to enforce somebody’s morality, that’s what laws are, we need them, every society does. We have to have them, so there’s a place for morality. But it’s not how Christianity works.
Because even if morality gets someone to behave, you know, using a system of rewards and punishment, coercion and guilt, like parents do, if we basically force someone to comply to a standard, or maybe we at least get them to do the right thing more often, often, okay? Maybe morality does get them to behave, but even if it does, it does not mean they’ve had some internal experience of grace that has radically changed who they are and made them new.
Christianity and morality are not the same. One way to tell if you’ve experienced Christianity versus morality is if you even need laws in anymore. Because if you think about it, if you’ve been made new like you are in Christianity, you barely need any laws at all. I mean, did Jean Valjean need any laws after being changed in order to know the right thing to do and to do it? No, because laws are written on his heart, right?
Do you see the difference? Christianity isn’t primarily about enforcing certain behaviors, it’s primarily about making new, and that difference is everything. It’s what makes Christianity unique. Probably every other religion in the world, maybe you could think of an exception, maybe, but probably every religion in the world you could enforce, you could win converts through moral enforcement, maybe, because every other religion in the world is essentially do the right thing, get a reward, do the wrong thing, don’t get the reward. Every other religion is action first, then inclusion later, and it’s really action in order to receive inclusion, which like we Like we said, it is possible to influence action through rewards and punishments built into family systems or legislative systems.
If action is what determines your inclusion into a religion, and we can make you do the action, well then there you are. You’re in the religion. It works for probably everything except Christianity. Because you can’t create a new self that way through action. A new self comes only through God’s intervention into your life.
In Christianity, something has to happen to you. You have to hear God’s acceptance of you, his favor upon you when you deserve the exact opposite, and it changes who you are from the inside. Like Jesus meets the woman caught in adultery, right? The town had arrested this woman, in a manner of speaking, and they wanted to punish her according to the law. You know, give her what she deserves, that’ll learn her.
But then Jesus intervenes. He takes a totally different approach. First, he gives her. Total forgiveness, total inclusion, total adoption, total security, even though she doesn’t deserve it. He says, I don’t condemn you.
You’re free. And then second, He tells her, your behavior will now be different. Go and sin no more. First, no condemnation. Second, sin no more.
If you reverse that order, you lose Christianity. If Jesus said, go and sin no more, lady, and if you can pull that off, well then, I won’t condemn you anymore.
If He said that, you’ve lost Christianity. You’ve lost the gospel. If it were action first, inclusion later, it’s morality. It’s every other religion in the world. It can be legislated to some extent, but it’s not Christianity.
You’ve lost what is so unique and powerful about the gospel. You’ve robbed the beauty of it.
So the first intervention is God’s to us. God gives us new life, a new self.
Second intervention involved in being made new is ours to each other. We play a role in each other’s lives. Lives as part of the ongoing work of being made new, whether we like it or not, whether we are people who want to be around people or not. Christianity is not a religion of personal isolation. Of course, like caveat here, there are times when being alone with God is needed.
Everyone should have a private prayer life, devotional life. That’s wonderful. It is needed. Jesus needed time alone with God sometimes. But if you are always only alone, you will not grow.
Every once in a while I hear someone say, you probably do too, they say something like, I don’t need church in order to live faithfully as a Christian or to grow as a Christian. I can do it on my own. And if that’s you, well, you’re probably not here today. ‘Cause you’re on your own. But just in case you are here, look at these verses.
In this passage, how do we grow? Verse 15, speaking truth in love to each other, we grow. That requires another person. Verse 16, as each part of the body does its role, we grow. We all play a role in each other’s lives in order for us to grow.
Verse 13, we reach maturity, really, he’s describing a church here. It’s being connected to all the different people that make up a church and benefiting from all the different gifts that God has given to each one of us. And none of us have all the gifts, so we need to be around everybody else in order to be around all the gifts in order to grow. So we grow not in isolation from each other but together. I mean, the illustration is a body, and you think about it, a hand cannot grow without being connected to to everything else, right?
And sure, in the metaphor, Christ is the head. He’s the most important. He directs everything. But a hand cannot say, the only thing I need to grow is the head, right? A hand will not grow if it’s only connected to the head, right?
The hand needs the whole body in order to grow. You need others. You need to be connected to others. So none of us can say, all I need is me and Jesus and my Bible, right? You will not find that picture of Christian growth anywhere in the Bible.
It’s not how it works. You’ve got to be around others. And not only around others, around others in a way that we are known Paul gives a number of specific instructions here, we’ll talk about them, but what is clear is that we need to be close enough to each other where we are really involved with one another’s lives, close enough where we offend one another, close enough where forgiveness will be required from time to time, close enough where we correct one another. That’s close. It means we don’t only sit in a pew and leave.
It means we don’t only watch online. It means we speak into each other’s lives.
We speak into them correction, forgiveness, encouragement, but more specifically than that, we don’t only correct and forgive and encourage, we do so in a way that points back to to what God has done for us. Like, for instance, Paul’s instruction isn’t beat them over the head with, I’m supposed to forgive, you’re supposed to forgive, God says we must. That’s not the instruction. Paul’s instruction is forgive as Christ forgave you. He always ties it back to what Christ has done.
Put away all wrath and bitterness. Why? Because God put that away from you. God didn’t give you the wrath you deserve. Remind each other of that, and then the less wrathful and bitter you will be.
It’s why our interventions with each other are just really a reflection of God’s intervention to us. If you want an example of practically what it looks like for Christians to live in community with one another like Paul describes here, I am inspired, to say the least, by the community of students that Dietrich Bonhoeffer Hoffer organized. His efforts at creating community were— this is why I know about it— one of the sections of my dissertation. So I did a deep dive on him the last few years. By the way, I passed my dissertation defense if you didn’t know that.
Oh wow, thanks. Beth’s cheering the loudest over there. I’m all done with PhD, just graduating. We’re just awaiting graduation in December. Okay, but if you’re not familiar with Bonhoeffer, if you didn’t write a chapter of your dissertation about him, he was a German pastor and scholar, and one part of his story, from 1935 to 1937, he created a seminary right under the nose of Hitler’s Third Reich until it was eventually shut down by the Gestapo and Bonhoeffer was arrested.
But before then, the vision of the seminary, the reason it came to be is because Bonhoeffer saw a need for pastors not only to be trained in academic rigor but also in personal Christian practice. So yes, they had all the classes and Bonhoeffer was like a world-renowned intellect by that point so he was totally qualified to teach everything. But more than that, they lived out possibly to a greater extent than any other group in church history since the first-century church. They lived out the various commands of Scripture for being in community with one another. So, for instance, here where Paul instructs the Ephesians to speak truth in love to one another, when they confronted each other about their sin, and they did, they did confront each other, they would only use Scripture to do it.
When someone needed to be corrected, they would just speak Scripture to each other. Now, you may have a different method for correcting someone, but listen to why they did it only with Scripture. They wanted it to be God’s Word alone that was confronting the person instead of their own ideas about right and wrong because they knew if it was their own words they might do damage. You can think about you go to correct someone, you could say too much, you could say too little, you could be confronting them for personal gain, you might want, you know, your pound of flesh, you might be out revenge, you might want to make yourself look better than them, which all of that would be in itself would be sin and then you would need correction, right? So they didn’t want that.
They wanted to do what Paul says here which is one, don’t let any corrupting talk come out of your mouth but also 2, only say what is useful for building up. So they ask, how do we do that? How do we safeguard against saying something destructive but also ensure that whatever we say is definitely going to build each other up? How do we ensure all that? Answer, we will speak Scripture to one another because God’s Word is always useful for building each other up, particularly if we’re speaking the totality of God’s Word to each other.
And we’ll get to forgiveness in a minute, but if we are really speaking Scripture to someone, it will include words of restoration, of hope, of Christ’s substitution on our behalf, of the first 3 chapters of Ephesians. So while we are correcting, we are also saying how favored the person is, how secure, how rewarded. It’s truth and love at the same time. Bonhoeffer said this, a quote, we are both gentle and severe. Fear with one another because we know both God’s kindness and God’s severity, end quote.
That’s what we all need for change. We need the severity of truth and we need the comfort of love. If we receive all affirmation, you know, all love without truth, it enables us to just keep doing what we’re doing. But if we receive all truth without love, right? It’ll crush.
It’s law, it’s morality, it won’t make us new. In order to continue being made new from the inside, there has to be ongoing words of both truth and love, has to be. And Scripture provides it, affirmation and correction, totally included. Now leave your life of sin. And they would speak that to one another.
If that sounds intimidating, to be known, corrected, loved, included all at the same time, and then also speaking those words for others as well, if that sounds intimidating, let me address one of our possible hesitations. We might say something like, but it’s none of my business to get involved, and it’s none of their business to get involved with with me. Like, sure, that guy’s straying off course, making destructive decisions, or maybe I am, but that’s his business, or that’s my business. No one else is getting hurt, only the person doing it, so just let it go. We may think that.
The problem is none of that is true.
It’s not only the one involved who is hurt. If anyone is involved in sin, it’s actually hurting everyone. This is Bonhoeffer again. He said, there is no sin in thought or word or deed, no matter how personal or secret, that does not inflict injury on the whole fellowship. It hurts everybody.
It’s a bold claim, but think about why that would be. It’s because we’re all part of one body. Your arm cannot be hurt without it affecting every other part of your body. You break your arm, sure, your arm might hurt worse than any other part of your body, but every other part of your body is still affected. Everything else has to adjust around it.
And more to the point, if your arm has some wound, your hand doesn’t ignore it. Your hand doesn’t say, none of my business. This, you know, not my problem, that arm is going to have to work that out itself, I don’t want to get involved. The hand wouldn’t say that, right? And similarly, the arm wouldn’t look at the hand and say, mind your own business, hand, this is my problem, this is my issue, not yours.
Well, like, sorry, we’re all part of one body whether you want to be or not. What’s going on with you is going on with everyone, so it is everyone’s business.
And therefore we have a responsibility to address one another. But when we do, again, it’s equal amounts of truth and love. I mean, think about when you have some wound on your arm and your hand goes to do something about it. Your hand will be very careful to address the wound in a way that only restores worse instead of making it worse. Right, your hand will only do what builds up.
It will never be corrupting, like ever.
And that’s what we do for each other. Before we move into forgiveness, I just anticipate there’s 2 things in our mind right now. One, we are thinking of someone we know in the church who needs restoration in some area and we have been avoiding that conversation. We believe someone needs to say something, we just don’t want it to be us. That’s one thing on our mind.
Second thing on our mind, we hope no one comes to correct us after this message. We may or may not be aware of anything in us that needs correction, but we sure hope nobody finds anything.
Am I right? You don’t have to raise your hand. Me too, I’ll raise my hand. It’s easier to say nothing, isn’t it? It’s easier not to confront.
It takes courage to say something to someone else, and it takes humility to receive something someone else tells you. Neither of those are easy. But what happens if we don’t, right, is verse 14. We will be children tossed to and fro, deceived by false claims of what is right and true and what isn’t. I mean, it means the more we leave problems unattended, probably the bigger they will get.
If you don’t bandage an open wound, it could end up ruining everything, and God doesn’t want that for us. So he has given us each other for each other. Okay, now to forgiveness. Like we said, uh, Paul’s instruction here is for the Ephesian church to forgive one another as Christ forgave them. And going back to Bonhoeffer, his students had a dedicated time every day, every day during the evening worship service where they would go directly to who hurt them or offended them during the day, not for retaliation but for reconciliation.
Bonhoeffer said every dissension the day has brought must be healed in the evening evening, and they did it every night because Paul says here, don’t let the sun go down on your anger, don’t leave it until the next day, which is hard. And confession, Beth and I struggle with that. A lot of times we’re frustrated with each other and we just go to bed, right? We need to find a better answer. Maybe it can be that we don’t totally agree with one another before we go to bed, but we could forgive one another.
And then pick that conversation up again later. But these students, every day they went to each other and they said something like, your offense has broken something between us and I want it fixed. I want it healed. So I am taking the initiative to you to give you forgiveness before your behavior changes, before anything else. I forgive you.
Which, isn’t that what Christ does for us? Isn’t that exactly what Christ did? Didn’t he come here to us? Didn’t he initiate forgiveness with us even though we didn’t deserve it? And if he has done that for us, how could we not do that for others?
Having been forgiven, how could it not be our joy to forgive others? Bonhoeffer taught that believers will, quote, want but one thing thing to forgive without measure, without qualification, without end, because anything less than that would fall short of how Christ has forgiven us. So are you withholding forgiveness from someone? Do you have grudges? Do you have bitterness?
Is there a measure or an end to your forgiveness, a limit? Have you told someone or just thought about someone, I am done with you forever.
Then go back to how Christ forgave you. Get the cross down further in your heart. Reflect on your offense to Him and what He did to mend it. The cross is the strongest possible simultaneous message of both truth and love, of severity and gentleness, to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase. Because on the one hand, the cross is the most severe truth about you that you could ever hear.
It says you are so far gone, your offense before God was so great that only the brutal death of the Son of God could clear your record.
That’s severe truth. But at the same time, simultaneously, it’s an affirmation beyond anything you could imagine because it says that God Himself loved you so much that He wanted to go to the cross for you, that He would sacrifice everything to be with you. He’d sacrifice everything to mend what is broken between you. That’s how much He desires you in His life. That’s how much He loves you.
So, the cross humbles you to the ground and it elevates you to the sky all at the same time.
And the more you see the depth of your sin but the height of God’s love, the more that pulls and stretches and reconfigures everything in your heart, the more forgiving you will be, the more you will not look down on those who offend you, the less bitter you will be toward them, and the more restored you then the more words of restoration you will speak to others.
That’s the role that we play for one another. It is essential in becoming new, speaking truth and love to one another.
But really, we just point back to what God has done for us.
That’s how we are involved in making each other new. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for making us new. Thank you for reaching out to us with kindness and redemption and forgiveness, reward when we deserve the exact opposite, Lord. I pray that does stretch and reconfigure, reshape, rewire our hearts that we are new.
If we’ve never seen the beauty of You, I pray that we would embrace You and Your forgiveness today, and I pray that we would speak such love and truth into each other’s lives as we continue to be formed anew in Your image. We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
