All right, let's grab our Bibles tonight and we'll go to Ephesians chapter number three, Ephesians chapter three, and we'll read just the last two verses of Ephesians chapter three. And I don't know if you normally do this or not, but if you don't mind, let's go ahead and stand out of respect for God's word tonight. Ephesians 3, and verses 20 and 21, just ask you to follow along as I read it tonight. He says, Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, we do thank you for this day, and thank you, Lord, for the opportunity we have to study your word, and I do pray that you'd speak to our hearts through it. Lord, please guide and direct my words and thoughts, and use me, I pray, to be a challenge and a help to your people, and just pray you'd be honored in it. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, you can have a seat. Excuse me. Now here in Ephesians chapter 3, Paul is concluding a wonderful prayer for the church, a prayer well worth studying and learning from in our own prayer lives. But as he comes to the end of this prayer for this church at Ephesus, he closes it with what we might call a doxology, a praise to God for who he is. and his great power. And as he concludes this wonderful prayer, I want to focus on verse number 21, where he says, And what I'd like to do by way of introduction is just outline this verse, and then we'll take some time to apply it throughout the epistle here. But notice, first of all, the purpose. He says, unto Him be glory. Unto Him be glory. And as we look at the scriptures tonight, as New Testament Baptist believers, understand this is our purpose. And we need to be reminded of our purpose often. That is our purpose to glorify God. Revelation 4, verse 11 says, You see, everything exists for the pleasure and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that includes you. And that ought to be our focus in our day-to-day living. because sadly, oftentimes, even in Christians' lives, we can become idolatrous, can't we? We can begin to get our focus on other things, whether it's living for ourselves and finding the pleasure that seems to satisfy or that draws us, or it could be some thing of the world or something else that we focus and fixate on, but our focus must be glorifying Jesus Christ. And so we're reminded of our purpose. But exactly notice the place. He says that unto him be glory in the church. Now, I remind you that this letter was addressed to a church. It was addressed to the believers there at Ephesus. And when they would have heard this letter read, because that's how it would have been delivered, the pastor would have gotten up perhaps on Sunday morning and said, hey, brethren, we've got a letter from the Apostle Paul. And no doubt people would have sit up straight in their seats and said, wow, we get to hear from the Apostle Paul again through a letter. And as they were listening to that letter being read, And they came to this passage where Paul says, unto him be glory in the church. They would not have thought of some universal, visible organization like the Roman Catholic Church, right? Nor would they have even thought of that concept that Protestants teach of that universal, invisible church. No, they would have thought simply what the word means, a local assembly. And they would have thought, wait a minute, God is focused on getting glory in this group of people here at Ephesus that sat before the pastor listening to the letter be read. And as we think about it tonight, understand the same is true for Calvary Baptist Church here in the Yucca Valley, that God wants to get glory through this body of people. So we see the purpose, we see the place, but then notice the person. It's by Jesus Christ. It's by Jesus Christ. Now our whole Christian life is by Jesus Christ. There is nothing about our salvation that we could have done on our own. It's all by Jesus. And if we are going to live our lives in a way that pleases God, it's going to be by faith in Christ, by depending upon him. But as a church, if we are going to glorify God, we're gonna do it by Jesus Christ. We're gonna do it by following what He has commanded us. And we're gonna do it by lifting Him up and exalting Him. I think that certain segments of Independent Baptist in days gone by have made a great mistake in exalting the wrong person. and exalting some preacher or some hero or some movement, when what we need to exalt is Jesus Christ. In John 14, verse 9, Jesus told His disciples, and in particular He addresses Philip, He says, He that has seen me has seen the Father. We could look at other scriptures, but we understand from the New Testament that Jesus came to earth partly to be a perfect revelation of God to us. He was reaching out to us. He was showing us who God is. And it's through knowing Jesus that we can know God. And of course, for us today, the only way we can know Jesus is through the written word. But just like the only way we can get to God is through Jesus, the only way we can glorify God is by lifting up Jesus. And the church that makes much of Jesus is a church that glorifies the Father. When Leonardo da Vinci had finished his great painting of The Last Supper, he took a friend with him to critique it. And as his friend looked at it, he puzzled over for a moment, and he said, you know, the most beautiful part of this whole painting is this cup here. And drew attention to this beautiful cup. And Da Vinci immediately grabbed his paintbrush and began to blot it out, cover it up, get rid of that cup out of the painting. And he said, nothing in my picture is going to attract more attention than the face of my master. And I think that his thinking was very similar to the Apostle Paul's. Paul said, man, I don't want my preaching or my life or anything to be what is prominent. What I want to be prominent is Jesus Christ. And that needs to be our focus. Whether we're looking at our individual lives or in our church or in our ministry that we, and it's something that has struck me here. lately is how often people can take ownership over ministry, which is good, right? You want responsibility. You want a sense of responsibility for your ministry and you want to be motivated to see it succeed. But sometimes that ownership can then turn into conflict with others because you're fighting over whatever resources or influence or whatever. We've got to be reminded, hey, it's about him. It's not about me. It's about him. And so, again, we see our purpose, we see the place, we see the person, which is Jesus, and lastly, notice the perpetuity. He says that this is going to take place throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. And this is a great encouragement. First of all, we as Bible-believing Baptists today, we are not an anomaly in the history of Christianity. All right. There's been people standing for the teachings of the word of God all the way back to the apostles. And though we may not be able to show an unbroken chain, we know because they pop up here and they pop up there throughout history. There has been men standing and churches standing for the gospel of Jesus Christ. And we praise God for that. But also, it's encouraging to us to know the devil's not going to win. Right? And as dark as it might seem in California, around the world, we know that there's going to continue to be churches standing for Jesus Christ until he comes back. What a wonderful encouragement. Now, having thought through this verse a little bit here, he says, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. So we come to understand that God has chosen the local church to be His place for glorifying Him in the day and age we live. Now, if that is true, then it's also true that God has chosen the local church as the place for sanctification. In other words, the local church is the place where we as believers grow to become what glorifies Him, right? We're not going to glorify Him and we're not going to grow like we should unless we're part of a local church. As a matter of fact, we're living in rebellion against God if we are not a member, an active member of a local church. And so as we look at this passage, I believe this text implies for us that the rest of the book, the rest of Ephesians, gives us many different ways that we can glorify God as a church. So as we think about this passage, that we're reminded of our purpose, reminded that this is the place to do it, this is the place to glorify God. All right, so how do we do it? What are the practical applications of this? And so as we look, just take a little bit of a survey of the book of Ephesians, we find that there are many practical ways that this church can glorify God in 2023. And so let's take a brief survey of some of that. First of all, notice that God is glorified by a doctrinally solid church. All right, chapter three is followed by chapter four, of course, and we're not gonna do a detailed study of the whole chapter, but if you skip down to verse number 11, we see that God gave some apostles, some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers. All right, so God gives these gifted men to the church, and he gives them for a purpose. Look, verse 12, for the perfecting of the saints. Now, in Ephesians 2.20, we find that the apostles and prophets were a foundational office, that they become the foundation of the church, and of course, they are still the foundation of our churches if we are building upon what they write. If we're building upon the word of God instead of building on the philosophies of men or traditions of men, then we are building on the right foundation, and so the apostles and prophets are still a gift to us today. But then he says that he also gives evangelists and pastors and teachers. And so I want you to understand tonight, your pastor is God's gift to you as a body. And we ought to thank God for our pastor, because there's a lot of churches out there that are without a pastor right now. So we ought to be very thankful that God has given us a pastor. But understand his importance. Hebrews 13 and verse 7 says, And I love this verse because it shows the great wisdom of God. Because God knew there would come a day when people would think, oh, I can do something bigger than the local church. I can have a TV show, or I can have a radio program, or I can have an internet ministry, or I can write books, and I can be bigger and accomplish more than what I could accomplish just working in a local church. But you know, we've had enough of that history now to see that there's dangers in that, isn't there? that there's dangers in these men gathering too much money and thinking that they are too important so that they can get away with all kinds of outlandish sin, and nobody will discover it. But I love what God says here at Hebrews 13, seven, at the end of the verse, he says, whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation. That doesn't mean waiting for them to stop talking. Okay. Sorry, I have to throw a joke in once I'll make sure you're awake. All right, but considering the end of their conversation, their lifestyle is what conversation is. It's the idea of what their life tends toward. In other words, you can look at your pastor and you can see him and you can see how he reacts to things. You can see how his life is going. You can see how his family's going and you can consider the end of his conversation. You can look at him and say, all right, I'm gonna follow his faith, I'm gonna follow what he's teaching me because I can see it works, right? And that's the great wisdom of God in giving us churches instead of giving us TV leaders to follow. And so he tells us to follow their faith. And then in verse 17, he says, You see, your pastor has a great deal of responsibility before God. And as such, you need to recognize your responsibility to learn from him and follow him. Now, so God gives us a church, I'm sorry, gives us a pastor, and again, what's the pastor for? Verse number 12, for the perfecting of the saints. So we are not going to be perfected, we are not gonna grow to spiritual maturity, would be a good paraphrase that's maybe a little bit easier for us to understand, because when we think perfect, we think absolute perfection, even though we don't usually use it that way. When you say, I found the perfect Christmas present, you don't mean that it's, actually sinless, right? You just mean that it's ideal. You mean that it's the right thing for the situation, you know? And the same thing when we see perfection in the Bible, it's not talking about sinless, you know, perfection in that sense. It's the idea of being complete and mature and what we ought to be. And so he gives us a pastor to help us do that. And so if we look down at verse number 13, then we'll see some of the marks of spiritual maturity. He says this this work of what our pastor is doing is going to happen till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man or to 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 and wait to deceive. We could break down all these phrases and be here all night, but if I can summarize it this way, one of the great marks of spiritual maturity is doctrinal stability, that we know what we believe. I've known people, I'm thinking of one in particular, that concerning doctrine is one of the most unstable stories I've ever seen. I mean, he went from being this, to being an independent Baptist, to being something else over here, and now he claims to be a Jew. And I don't understand it. How did that happen? Well, it's because he wasn't grounded in the truths of the word of God. And so one of the marks of spiritual maturity is doctrinal stability, being grounded in the truths of God's Word. Think about Paul's very style as he writes Ephesians. He starts with heavy doctrine, right? I mean, one of the deepest chapters in the Bible is Ephesians 1. There's doctrine and doctrine, doctrine at the beginning. And then, after we get past chapter three, then it's the practical, right? And that's an important principle for us to understand, that our Christian life is based on doctrine. It grows out of what we believe. Doctrine is foundational. And so tonight, if your church is gonna be a doctrinally solid church, guess what that means? It doesn't just mean your pastor needs to be doctrinally solid, right? It means we all need to be grounded in the truth of God's word. And so do you know what you believe tonight? Could you show somebody else why you believe it? You know, if you were sitting down talking to a Seventh-day Adventist at church, and they were saying, man, you've got to keep the Ten Commandments if you're going to go to heaven. Would you be able to show them that they're wrong? Or if they said, hey, no, you've got to worship on Saturday. If you worship on Sunday, that's the mark of the beast. Could you show them that they're wrong? If you had a Catholic neighbor, could you show them why you don't need to go to confessional to a priest? Could you show them those things? Or if somebody comes to you and says, man, why do you live so differently? And you fill in the blank on what the difference is, but would you be able to tell them from the Word of God why you're different in that area? This is the reason that good preaching will be direct, but also that good preaching will include doctrine. Because we've got to know what we believe and why. It's also the reason that as we get ready to go to Santa Barbara, I'm committed to extensive discipleship. Because I want the folks that get saved or become a part of that church to know what they believe and stand on it. Because God is glorified by a doctrinally solid church. Secondly, God is glorified by a devotedly spiritual church. Now this point could be an entire sermon and probably should be someday, but tonight We won't spend a lot of time here, but I want you to think about it. Ephesians is the book where we are warned to grieve not the Holy Spirit of God. It's the book where we're commanded to be filled with the Spirit, where we're exhorted to be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. And we're told to put on spiritual armor while praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit. And Paul himself has already prayed for the church twice here in the course of this letter, for their spiritual enlightenment and their spiritual experience. And so tonight, are you spiritual? I know it's hard for us to judge ourselves. It's easy for us to sit back and say, oh yeah, I'm spiritual, and really what we are is proud. But I do want you to stop and think. Are you spiritually minded? Are you in the Word of God every day trying to let God's Word change the way you think more than you let the television or the radio change the way you think? Do you endeavor to fill your heart and mind with the Word? Do you pray? Obviously, those that are spiritual will pray. Do you pray? We need to be a devotedly spiritual church if we're gonna glorify God like we should. Then thirdly, We need to be a determinedly sowing church. And I apologize for my stretch and alliteration on some of these points, but I'm still preaching the Bible, so. All right, so anyway, verse number 12. Again, we saw the first phrase. All right, our pastor's given to us for the perfecting of the saints, right? Well, why is it important for the saints to be perfected? Why is it important for us to grow to maturity? Is it just so that we'll look more like Christ when he comes back? I'm sure that that's part of it, but that's only part of it. Notice the next phrase. It's for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ. So God wants each one of us to grow to spiritual maturity so that he can use us in the work of the ministry and thereby all of us have a part in edifying the body of Christ. You see, every believer has a responsibility to be active in serving in the work of the ministry. Now, what is the work of the ministry? I think if we confine ourselves to the scripture, of course, we have many other things that go along with it today, like vacuuming the carpets and taking care of the nursery and things that are vital, things that really are very important. Because if somebody comes in and first thing you see is a giant cobweb hanging from the ceiling, they're not going to hear anything your pastor says, probably. And so we've got to do those other things. But the work of the ministry boils down to preaching the gospel and discipling converts. And that's what it's all about is getting the gospel to the lost. And when they get saved, we teach them, hey, you need to get baptized and and you need to follow the teachings of Christ. Look at verse 15 in our text, he says, but speaking the truth in love may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ. So he says, as we're growing up in him, we've got to be speaking the truth in love. That means there's a responsibility. There's a ministry amongst the body of believers to be speaking the word of God to each other and to be doing it with love. In verse number 16, he goes on and says, "...from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working and the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." We see a description here of every part of the body being active, every part of the body supplying something, every part of the body being energized by our head, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so when we talk about a determinately sowing church, we're talking about a church where everybody's involved in the work of the ministry. On the 4th of June, 1768, John Waller, Lewis Craig, and James Childs, and some others with them, were seized by the sheriff and heralded before three magistrates in Virginia. I believe it was Culpeper County, if I remember correctly. And the magistrate bound them in the penalty of 1,000 pounds to appear at court two days after. At court, they were arraigned as disturbers of the peace. These were Baptist preachers, disturbers of the peace. And so during their trial, the lawyer came in, and this is what the lawyer said. This is part of his accusation against them. He began to wax eloquent, and he said, May it please your worships, these men are great disturbers of the peace. They cannot meet a man upon the road, but must ram a text of scripture down their throat. And while we kind of chuckle at thinking about a courtroom and a lawyer actually saying that in the 1700s, I think it ought to remind us, though, that some of our Baptist forefathers had a whole lot more zeal to get the gospel to the lost than we do at times. And we ought to be challenged by that. We need to get some of that zeal again. This church at Ephesus was a church that was known for their evangelistic efforts. In Acts 19 and verse 10, We see that while Paul was there, he says, as this continued by the space of two years, so that all they which dwell in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks. So Paul was there preaching, ministering in Ephesus, and while he was there, the entire Roman province of Asia was saturated with the gospel. Paul didn't do that by himself. That was the church being evangelistic. As a matter of fact, when we get to the book of Revelation, we find that there's seven churches addressed in Asia, right? But we only know where the church of Ephesus came from. Where'd the other ones come from? I submit to you, I think they probably were birthed out of the mother church in Ephesus, if I can use that terminology. Paul certainly set the example while he was there. In Acts 20 and verses 20 and 21, when he spoke to the leadership of the church, in a meeting on his way back to Jerusalem, he said, how I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you, but have showed you and have taught you publicly and from house to house, testifying both to the Jews and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. So he said he was going door to door, preaching repentance and faith. And so he set the example and this church, Ephesus, I believe, continued to follow that example of preaching the gospel to every creature. And so tonight, we need to be a determinedly sowing church. In other words, we need to have a determination that says we're not going to quit preaching the gospel, even though it seems like we never see any results. Because in due season, we shall reap if we faint not. We've got to determine to sow. You know, sometimes we content ourselves praying things like, Lord, please grow our church. And tonight I want you, if that's your prayer, I want you to modify it. You know, sometimes God has to change our wanter in our prayers, right? And sometimes we have to improve our praying. And I think we can improve that prayer if we were to say, Lord, use me to reach somebody this year. Lord, can you use me to influence somebody who maybe is backslidden to come back? Lord, could you use me to encourage somebody who's here tonight? Or maybe give some good advice to somebody or help somebody to grow in their Christian life? And so not just a nebulous desire that the church would grow, but Lord, please, would you use me to influence somebody for you? Number four tonight, and one that I think independent Baptists need to hear often, and that is that God is glorified by a decidedly soft-hearted church. If we look at verse 15, we see that we're not just supposed to be speaking the truth, but we're supposed to be speaking the truth in love if we're gonna grow like we should, right? And in verse number 16, we saw that every joint supplies, right? Every part of the body's important. You know, it's a sad thing when somebody can look at another church member and honestly think that it's not important, that they aren't important to the body. If somebody doesn't show up on Sunday and it doesn't burden you to pray for them and maybe reach out to them, because every joint is important. Everybody supplies something to the life of the body. And likewise, we need to be careful about how we think about ourselves. Sometimes we think about ourselves like, I don't have any talents or I'm not doing any important jobs or nobody notices me. I'm not important. But you've got the wrong attitude. God has put you in this church for a reason. And you are an important part of this body. You see, every part of the body is important. And I've seen this more than once. where a man in a church becomes very zealous for the Lord, and he begins to reach people and bring people in. And it's exciting at first, until that man allows his bitterness to come out, or his anger problem to come out, or just his mean spirit to come out. And that young plant, that young Christian that was newly saved, gets trampled on and offended. And I think we need to hear what Jesus said in Matthew 18, 6. Now that's some really strong language. If I were to say, pick somebody out here and whatever reason say, boy, they ought to be tied to a stone and thrown in the ocean and drown. That would be awful for me to say that, right? But this is Jesus giving us a proper perspective about how we treat our fellow Christians. You see, scriptural unity is vital in the church. We have it emphasized here in the first part of chapter four in verses one through six, you can read it, where Paul tells us and he piles up all these different things that we have in common that should give us unity and do give us unity. But in verse three, he says we need to be endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. Notice he says we need to keep it. All right, if you're saved, you naturally have it. We have that unity because we're all in Christ and we all have the same spirit. He says we need to work at keeping that unity. We see in the book of Acts an example of what a unified church can do. We see that church of Jerusalem working in unity. We see the great power that God demonstrated in and through them. And it seems to be a natural law that God has built into creation, that there's a synergy or a multiplication of power when animals or people work together. We see it even in the scriptures in Leviticus 26 in verse seven. We read about the Israelites going to battle and God promises that if five of you work together, you'll be able to chase a hundred. But then he goes on and says, if 10 of you, I'm sorry, if 100 of you work together, you can put 10,000 to flight. Sometimes we read something like that and we don't stop and think about what these numbers mean. But if you take those two ratios, of 5 to 100, that's a ratio of 1 to 20, if we reduce it, right? It's pretty good, you know, one guy can take on 20 enemies, that's pretty good, right? But he says when you work together with 100, you can put 10,000 to flight. That's a ratio of 1 to 100. So if one guy can take on 100 enemies, that's really good, isn't it? And so we see that there's a multiplication of what the Israelites could do in battle when they work together. And I think it's true in our churches as well. Even heard about a horse poll, where the winning horse could pull 9,000 pounds, second place could pull 8,000. And when you put them together, they could pull 17,000, right? No, you put them together, they could pull 30,000 pounds. Because you multiply what you can accomplish when you work together. Now, let's apply this then. Look at verse number 30. Here we have a verse we alluded to already. And I think he gives us some examples of ways that we grieve the Holy Spirit. But there's certainly ways that we fail to endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit. In verse 31, he says, be put away from you with all malice. He says these things ought to be gotten rid of. They ought to have no part in our lives. Somebody described bitterness as a hurt that is allowed to color our entire outlook. There's a lot of truth to that. And the hardest bitterness to let go of is the one that we're just and hanging on to it, right? We were honestly hurt. But understand we're only hurting ourselves to hang on to it. And not only are we hurting ourselves, but ultimately we begin to hurt the unity of the church. Because it begins to color how we look at others and how we treat others. God calls it sin. He says that with our wrath and our anger and our clamor, that's that, you know, getting angry and yelling at each other. No place for that in the church. Evil speaking, talking bad about each other or calling people names, all that kind of things. Many different ways we can have evil speaking. He says all these things need to be put away with all malice. Man, what is wrong with a Christian who wants to hurt somebody? That's what malice is, is a desire to hurt somebody. How can you hang on to malice in your heart and claim to love Christ? He says these things need to be put away from you. And verse number 32. Now, if a missionary or some other pastor were to write a letter to your church, and in the end of the letter say, now remember to be nice to each other, who would think, what's wrong with this guy, right? What are we, junior church kids, right? But Paul, in dealing with, hey, let's guard the unity of the church, and let's become all that God wants us to be as believers, in verse 32, and again, we like to make our kids memorize this verse, right? When brother and sister are fighting, we want the kids to memorize this verse, but are we living verse number 32? And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. You know what it takes for somebody to forgive? First of all, it takes somebody else hurting you. Somebody else doing you wrong. That part's assumed. Now, we don't like to assume it, but that part is assumed. All right, if I'm gonna forgive somebody, it means they're gonna do me wrong. They're gonna hurt me. But my duty is to forgive them. Tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you. You see, we need to be a soft-hearted, a tender-hearted, as the word Paul uses here, a tender-hearted church if we're going to glorify God like we should. Because we've got to endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit. That doesn't mean we ignore sin. No, it means we follow what the Bible tells us to do. Right? You've read Matthew 18 before, haven't you? Go to him, right? Or Matthew 5. You know you've offended somebody? Go to them. Before you leave your gift at the altar, go make it right first. We need to be soft-hearted towards one another. Lastly, and just quickly, we need to be a dedicatedly serious church. A dedicatedly serious church glorifies God. In verse 15 and 16, we saw the idea of all the members being involved. Well, that's gonna involve commitment. That means that every member needs to be committed to doing their part in the church. And we're not gonna grow as an individual Christian like we should until, as verse 15 says, we're speaking the truth in love. Then we may grow up into Him in all things. And so we need to have that commitment on the part of the members to say, hey, we're gonna serve God, but then we also need a clean membership. Now, what I mean by this is, again, not that we're all sinlessly perfect, because then we would have a completely empty church, right? Because we'll never get there. But in verses 17 and following, and for sake of time, we won't read all the verses. You can read it over later on if they're unfamiliar to you. But Paul begins to talk to the church about how they should be different from other Gentiles, right? That if they're saved, Christ has taught them to be different. And so he tells them, in verse number 22, that we need to take our old life, our old activities, our old sinful behavior, and take them off, put them off. And the picture is like taking off your dirty clothes and getting rid of them. And so you take off those dirty clothes and instead be renewed in the spirit of our minds. So it starts with that attitude, we might say, but then put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. So we take that old life, we take it off, we set it aside, and we put on this new life in Christ. Now, the rest of the chapter, he goes through several specific applications of that. In other words, if you've been a liar in the past, he says, now speak every man truth with his neighbor. He says, if in the past you've had a problem with stealing, he said, well, go get a job, right, and start giving. Replace that sin with righteous behavior. And here's the application I want you to see tonight, is that all of us, as members of the church, need to have that attitude of, God, show me today what dirty clothes I need to take off. Lord, show me today the life of Christ I need to put on. Show me the things I need to change. Show me the life I should be living. Show me the service I should be performing. And we can go on down the list with examples. And again, this is why hard preaching is so important. This is why things like church discipline are sometimes necessary. But on a day-to-day basis, it ought to be our attitude, God, I want to be clean. I want to be what you want me to be. Help me to grow, help me to see. That's a dedicatedly serious church that's approaching the Bible that way. And so if God's to be glorified with our church, we need to have a doctrinally solid church. We need to have a devotedly spiritual church, a determinately sowing church, a decidedly soft-hearted church, and a dedicatedly serious church. I'm sure there's many more lessons we could draw from the book of Ephesians. Well, I know there is, because I've preached through Ephesians before. But I think these are key. If a church is going to glorify God, we need these things. Now, in Ephesians 3, verse 20, where we started, he says, I love what John Trapp, the Puritan, wrote about that. He said, In other words, he's got more power than he needs. He's got redundant power, of plenty, but of bounty. He is often better to us than our prayers. And amen to that. God is so good to us, isn't He? But here we see that He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. You know, we think about these five ingredients of a church that glorifies God, and we might think, man, some of those things sound awful hard. Not sure if I can do that, if I can be that. But notice the end of verse 20. He says that he's able to exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power that worketh in us. You see, God's power, the same power He described in chapter one as the power that raised Jesus from the dead and set Him at His own right hand and made Him to be head over all things, that same power is active in your life and mine if you're saved. And it's our job to let that power work, to trust in Him, to respond with belief and obedience to the Word of God. And what we'll find then is that He is able. He is able to make us what we should be. He is able to use us. He is able to build His church if it is glorifying Him. And so unto Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.