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If you have your Bible with you,
you might like to turn to Ephesians chapter 4. But there are some words that
I want to say by way of preparation for that before we actually come
to make some comment on the verses in Ephesians 4. Firstly, as we said last week
when we were talking at our Easter services about the matter of
the death and resurrection of Christ, The things that we understand
about the death and resurrection of Christ are to be understood
by faith. In particular we are saying it
is not simply by faith we know that he died or by faith we know
that he was raised again, but by faith we understand why he
died and why he rose again. We understand the actual nature
and meaning of that death and resurrection by faith, So he
said last week that the death that he died, he died to sin
once for all, never to die again, the life that he lives, he lives
to God. And the amazing thing is that
he has caught us up with himself in that action, that he has identified
himself with us in that action in a way that we could never
ever fully understand because we don't know how it is possible
that even one sin could be taken away, let alone him being the
Lamb of God who takes away all of our sin. Yet in that identification
he has swept through the entirety of our life, he has identified
himself with us on the cross, so that our sin was won with
him on that cross, indeed we in some way were won with him
on that cross. We were crucified when he was
crucified, buried with him and raised with him, so that as we've
been seeing through this series in Ephesians, it says we're now
seated with him in the heavenly places. And as we were looking
at last week in our Easter Sunday service, our life is hidden with
Christ in God. And when Christ who is our life
is revealed, then we also will be revealed with Him in glory.
But at that point there is a revelation of something which is already
given to us. We do not come to a point to
receive something new at that point that we do not already
have. It's an unveiling of what we already have in Christ. Now
that is all understood by faith because we don't have a personal,
emotional or physical experience of having been crucified, buried,
raised and ascended with him to the right hand of the Father.
But by faith we know it is to be so because the Spirit bears
witness with our spirit that we are indeed children of God
and we have within our hearts this ministry of the Spirit teaching
us to cry, Jesus is Lord. And it should be cried as John
read it to us this morning. And we have the ministry of the
Spirit in our hearts crying, Abba, Father. And so these cries
catch us up with God in the Spirit through the Son which is in fact
where we are. But we live in this contested
situation. in which the whole of the current
fallen nature of ourselves, our world, our society, the suffering
and groaning of the creation itself, Everything from one point
of view is orientated against us knowing who we really are
and what Christ has really accomplished for us. And so day by day we
have the battle of faith to understand that we are actually men and
women of the spirit, not men and women of the flesh, that
we are actually sons of God and we're no longer children of wrath
even as the rest and so forth. And this week we're coming to
this matter of unity, the unity of the people of God. And in
a like manner we know it by faith. You may remember when we started
our series on Ephesians at the beginning of the year, I drew
attention to a quote from C.S. Lewis. who in his screw tape
letters, some of you may have read, where you have the senior
devil speaking to a younger devil about the best way to tempt and
to misguide a new convert. He says, the greatest ally in
this task for us at this time is the church. But then he qualifies
that and he says, I'm not talking about the church as we see her,
that is spread through all time and eternity, terrible as an
army with banners, but I am speaking as the church as they see her,
that is, like he uses the illustration, the half-finished Gothic sham
erection on the new building estate, where everything seems
so weak and deficient and by comparison with what is said
of the church seems to be such a moribund state and at such
a low ebb and so far away from what the scriptures seem to tell
us about the church. And in that little bit of correspondence
the senior devil says to the junior devil, of course these
humans do not see it so. They do not see the church as
it really is and that's our greatest ally. Now that word in a sense
has to ring in our ears today because what we're talking about
today is, along with the other things that we know, something
which is held by faith. But before we come to this passage,
let me say a couple of other things firstly. If I was to say
to you what is the greatest longing of every human heart, what would
the answer be? We probably would get a few different
replies perhaps. But I think it would be true
to say that the greatest longing, even if hearts did not recognise
it, even if human societies did not realise it or express it
in these ways, the greatest longing for every human being is to be
utterly at one with the creation and with every other human being.
The greatest longing in marriage is to be utterly at one with
your husband and wife. And the reason that we have so
many difficulties sometimes in our marriages is we feel that
that oneness is not there. And then we can be deceived into
thinking that we can find it elsewhere and then we don't find
it there either. We live in a whole world and
society today which seems to take for granted that the oneness
can be found outside of marriage and so we find these terrible
situations where men and women have given up their integrity
in the search for oneness at a very young age and have found
they find no oneness there. And then they come to get married
later on and they find no oneness there. But it should not surprise
us that that oneness is something for which we should look and
long because it is actually what we are created for. We could
go right the way back to the beginning of the scriptures and
talk about us being made in the image of God and we could talk
about us being in his likeness and we could talk about the male
and female being naked and not ashamed in the sense that there
was no guilt, there was no division, there was no disharmony, no strife,
because everything was in accordance with the image in which we were
created and so the oneness was complete and we know the occasion
of the entrance of sin and all of the deep mystery of that in
the plan and purpose of God. and the scattering of the oneness
and the mutual blaming. It's not me, it's the woman you
gave me. Don't know how recently you've
said that, perhaps even this morning. And she says, well it's
not my fault, it's the serpent, meaning her husband. No, not
really. Meaning, but notice what he says, it's the serpent, she
says, it's the serpent whom you created. It's all your fault
God. And all the oneness is scattered
and shattered and we have disintegrated lives and disintegrated relationships
but we still have to have this oneness. So we try and find the
oneness in our worship and we worship and serve the creature
rather than the creator who is blessed forever. And as we engage
in all of that illicit worship, we are actually looking for the
unity, the oneness, the cohesion, the integration, the sense of
belonging, the mutual fellowship, And all of those things that
Paul mentions about the worship in Romans chapter 1, they leave
us disintegrated. Relational breakdown occurs on
every level. The more we run away and hide
from God, the greater the darkness in our hearts, the more the relational
breakdown occurs. And so if you were to look across
our society today, we could say from one point of view, it's
a society that seems to be disintegrating. morally, socially, spiritually,
economically, before long, ecologically. It is very interesting in these
days where people are talking about climate change and drought
and all these sort of things that I've not heard any of our
leaders and perhaps they could say well it's not our job because
we live in a secular society, but I've not heard any of our
leaders refer to passages like Hosea chapter 4 where it says
things like We thieve and we covet, we commit adultery, we
rob and we steal, therefore the land languishes, therefore the
fish disappear, therefore the rivers no longer flow. There
is a connection between the moral life of a nation and the ecological
life of a nation, if we could put it in those terms. And so
when we look at the situation around us, we could say, well,
it looks as though the whole nation is disintegrating. It
looks as though the climate's giving up on us. Perhaps Gaia
will save us, some ecologists may say. But behind and through
all of that, what you still find men and women looking for is
oneness, utter oneness. And it's one of the reasons,
I think, why great crowd events are so appealing. that there
in the midst of 50,000 cheering the football team or whatever,
you can think that you're one with this great massive humanity
for a certain time. But it's a oneness that's born
out of an emotional experience and the problem is, you see,
that the more you try and play on the emotions to get the oneness
to happen, the greater you have to raise the stakes to get it
to happen next time. And so if you're trying to find
your oneness illicitly, So you find that what satisfies you
when you begin in that relationship doesn't satisfy you the little
way into the relationship and you have to go more and more
out. Do you understand what I mean
in all of that? And so when we talk today about the oneness
of the church, one body, one spirit, one calling, one Lord,
one faith, one hope, one baptism, one God and Father, we're not
talking about something which is Perhaps a nice thought if it
could possibly be that way for the church but it doesn't apply
to anything else. We're actually talking about
what we are creationally structured to know. And the great revelation
of the gospel is that in Jesus Christ, He has done all that
we could not do in all of our diverse seeking for oneness.
He has actually brought that oneness to bear in which He has
taken away the division between Jew and Gentile, slave or free,
rich or poor, enemy and friend and He has forged one new humanity
in Christ and that is in fact where we are. And so everything
that we are saying today about this passage in Ephesians, I
want us to have fixed in our minds, is not walking or working
towards something that we will one day achieve, but it is actually
living from something which is already given. In Christ there is no longer
that division between Jew and Gentile, slave or free, rich
or poor. In Christ there is no longer
the division between the enemy and the friend, the victim and
the perpetrator, because in Christ everything that has separated
those warring factions has been crucified. You say, but I don't
see it that way. Look at the churches. Look, they're
just chaotic. There's division, there's splits,
there's all sorts of things happening. And I'm saying, yeah, but do
not be deceived. We are talking about a reality
which is known by faith and lived in by faith. But that does not
make it less real. Now, let's move into another
statement which will then eventually lead us into Ephesians. It's
taking a long time to get there. But in 1 Corinthians chapter
10 verse 11, Paul says, We are those on whom the ends of the
ages have come. We are those on whom the ends
of the ages have come. Now, some translations just translate
that as a singular. We are those, that is the people
of God, upon whom the end of the age has come But if you look
at a variety of translations, nearly all of them retain the
plural which should be kept there because it is actually a plural
statement in the Greek and it seems very unusual in our ears
because it's plural. We are those upon whom the ends
of the ages have come. Seems a strange statement, doesn't
it? And I think the best way to understand that is to realise
that throughout the scriptures, and particularly in the New Testament,
and particularly the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, you
find that we live in a time between times, or a time of overlapping
times would be a better way of speaking about it. So there is
a current evil age that Paul says is passing away. And yet
we are also people who have eternal life now, we have passed out
of death into life. And we have tasted of the powers
of the age to come. and we have the deposit of the
spirit within us and the pledge of the spirit of our inheritance
and we are people who belong to the hope that is set before
us and we have an aching and a groaning within our hearts
for that hope to be fulfilled and that which is hoped for is
not seen otherwise it would no longer hope for it because it
would be present but there is an age to come in which we already
participate, in which we share because Christ has come to us,
he has united us with himself and he has taken us into the
reality of what it is to be united with the Father in his kingdom
and so we share in an age that is yet to come. But also we share
in an age that is passing away. And we live in the ends of the
ages, like an overlapping age. We're in the intersection of
those two ages. And that's where we understand,
that's where we need to understand ourselves to be. If we do not
understand ourselves to be in that state, or that location,
or that place, or that time, we find ourselves in strife.
I mean this is something that Jesus himself taught us, didn't
he? You might remember the words in his high priestly prayer in
John chapter 17 verse 9, I'm praying for them, he says, I'm
praying for the, I'm not praying for the world but for those whom
you've given me for they are yours. So there's a difference
between his people and the world, whatever he means by that in
that context. I have given them your word,
and the world has hated them. So there's a situation in which
the world hates those who have been given that which Christ
has given us because they are not of the world, that we do
not belong to this age, just as I am not of the world. Do
you ever read the things of this age? I don't mean the newspaper
called the age, but the things of this age and you think, I
just don't make any sense of this. I don't belong to it. It's
foreign to me." And you find a disquieted spirit in your heart
because it doesn't belong to you and you don't belong to it. They are not of the world just
as I am not of the world. And then he says, but I do not
pray that you would take them out of the world but that you
would keep them from the evil one. So what's he saying? Here
we are in the middle of this contested situation. They actually
don't belong to the world. I've done something which has
changed that situation forever for them. They receive in themselves
the same sort of hatred from the world that I have received
from the world, but I'm not going to take them out of that situation
just now rather that they'd be kept from the evil one in the
midst of it. So we live in the overlap of the ages and we need
to understand that's the conflict in which we exist every day. and the conflict in which the
unity which has been given to us in Christ has to be lived
out every day. We get ourselves into strife
if we don't realise that because if we don't realise that this
age is passing away, we will invest ourselves in this age
and we will try to make this age a secure home for ourselves
And in making this age as a secure home for ourselves, we have to
wear and work in the armour of this age and we find that we
have to engage in all of the techniques of this age in order
to secure ourselves in this age. And then we suddenly find the
church is caught up wrongly, if I could put it this way, in
politics. I don't mean politics with a capital P, but politics
with a small p. All the things that come from
the flesh. in order to be self-extending, self-preserving, self-advancing,
self-developing. On the other hand, if we don't
realise that the age to come is just that, it is the age to
come, then we'll fall into the error of trying to make the things
of that age present now in this age. So in that age, the age
to come, there will be the fullness of the inheritance given to us
in our sight, experience, in every level from tip to toe,
mentally, emotionally, spiritually, however you want to speak to
it. Our minds will be filled with the fullness of that age
without contest and without debate. But that's in that age to come,
it's not now. So if for example I demand now
in this age that I'm not going to be ill, I'm not going to suffer,
I'm not going to have any heartache, then I will be surely disappointed
and disillusioned because we do not live in that age. As a
friend of ours said, if we've been disillusioned then we've
had an illusion to begin with. It's a very good statement. If
we're disillusioned then we have an illusion to begin with and
the illusion is that I can make this age into that age which
is to come or I can bring that age into this age and clear up
the whole mess. But if you could clear up the
whole mess, you would have to clear away yourself from the
face of the earth, wouldn't you? Because the problem is as much
our sin as the other person's sin. The problem is as much our
response to a person's wickedness as the other person's wickedness.
sense to us and so if we are to try and bring that clean brush
and sweep through everything and make it all settled and perfect
here, there'll be no one left standing on the field at the
end apart from ourselves and then you'd have to pull it through
your own brain. We need grace in this age, don't
we? We need to forgive as we have been forgiven. We need to
have mercy as God has shown mercy to us because we are still in
the overlap of those two ages. Now, all of that brings us to
1 Corinthians, to Ephesians chapter 4. And what we have here is the
nature and basis of the unity despite all of the contest and
all of the conflict and the overlap of the ages, this is the way
it really is for us in Christ, beloved. One body, one spirit, one calling
or one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father. You will notice as you run through
that from 4 verses 4 to 6 that each member of the person of
the Trinity is mentioned. And each is mentioned in relationship
to the special gifts and operations which they bring to us. The spirit
is the one who unites us to the body of Jesus Christ. So there
is one body in one spirit. The spirit is the one who is
the down payment or the deposit of the inheritance which is the
hope of our calling. So we have the spirit within
us crying Abba Father. We have the spirit within us
groaning and longing for the revelation of the sons of God.
We have the Spirit within us interceding, waiting and bringing
us to the hope that is yet to come. And so the Spirit is the
one here who brings to us the hope of our calling in Christ. The Spirit is the one who baptises
us and unites us to the body of Christ, but it is the Lord
Himself, verse 5, and I think the word Lord there must be understood
to be the Lord Jesus, the Lord Himself in whom we are united. And so in the book of the Acts,
wherever there was a baptism, most commonly we read they baptised
them in the name of the Lord Jesus. So there's one Lord Jesus
and one baptism. Every believer spiritually is
baptised into Jesus Christ. You cannot be a believer and
be baptised into anyone else. Whether you are baptised at a
certain age or whether you are baptised at an older age, Spiritually,
every person who comes to Christ by the Spirit is actually baptised
into Christ of which that physical baptism speaks and the blessings
of that spiritual baptism are ministered to our hearts in the
physical baptism. But you're actually baptised
into Christ. You're not baptised into the
church except in a secondary sense. You're baptised into Christ. The church is His body. So there's
one Lord, Jesus Christ, and our faith is in Him. So you do not
have faith, I trust, in any other human being. You've probably
tried that, and you've found it hasn't worked, because the
other human being in whom you've had faith has let you down, and
sometimes you become very wounded, and then you've realised that
you can't even trust yourself. It is a strange statement in
our society that we hear almost every day. Oh, you've just got
to believe in yourself. I think, well, if I know what's
in a human heart, oh, that's the last thing I want to believe
in. Because out of the human heart comes all of the darkest
muck of the universe. So, in Jesus Christ there is
one Lord in whom we are baptised by one spirit We have one faith
in Jesus Christ. So you can't put your faith in
another human being because every other human being is going to
disappoint you terribly. And guess what? You're going
to disappoint every other human being terribly. So we have one
faith in one Lord in whom we are baptised with one baptism
And then we have one God and Father who is over all and in
all and through all. Now that is a statement which
we could never begin to plumb the depths of really. But it
should be to us an enormous comfort and assurance to realise that
God the Father is over all. God the Father is in all and
God the Father is through all. Paul says in Romans chapter 8
that he, God, has purposed that we would be conformed to the
image of his son and he presses into service absolutely everything
to bring us to that place. So that he turns even that which
is evil for our good and for his glory. He is over, in and
through all things. Can you see the story of Joseph
in your mind? Now I think sometimes we can
get this a little bit wrong. There has been a line of teaching
that was around perhaps some years ago which makes a bit of
a resurgence from time to time that says no matter what the
circumstance you have to thank God for it. I don't think we
should ever thank God for that which is actually evil. But I
think we should thank God that He turns evil for good and that
He has pressed everything into service so that we would be conformed
to the image of the Son. The evil that happens does not
finally dictate the outcome. The Lord dictates the outcome.
God the Father is over all. Now I just want us then to take
a step back and look over your whole life And in a mind's eye,
in an instant you could go back to your earliest childhood to
where you are now and just say to yourself, by faith God the
Father is over all that. All the muck ups, all the mistakes,
all the wickedness, all the sin, all of the failures of my parents. And somehow or other he's used
it all and he's brought you to faith, hasn't he? and somehow or other having emptied
it all of its anguish and its pain and its guilt and its shame
and all of the terrible alienation that you felt and taken the sting
of the failure out of it, you can look back in all of that
and you can say, well actually I've got to this age and I've
learnt something. He's in all and he's through all. But it's
not just the events and the circumstances that Paul's speaking about here.
He's saying in the church, every one of us, God the Father is
over us all here today. So is there a bit of a blemish
in someone next to you? Have they got a bit of a wart
that's sticking out? Well you don't have to get a
scissors and lop it off. It's God the Father who's over all.
And God the Father's in all and God the Father's through all.
Because it's God the Father who has appointed Jesus Christ to
be the one in whom all things are reconciled. And it's God
the Father who sent the Spirit so that we might understand that
reconciliation in Him. And it's God the Father who has
flooded His love into our hearts. And it's God the Father who has
forgiven all of our sin. And it's God the Father who's
taken away all of our guilt. And it's God the Father who has
given us the Spirit by which we cry, Abba, Father. So if He's
over all and in all and through all, Does that not bring us great
encouragement to say that we don't have to be the ones driving
the boat? So does he just leave us then
to sort of drift on, saying I'm over all and through all and
in all, trust me, on one level that's all we ever have to do,
but on another level he says, well no, he does other things
too. And this is what he's going to tell us in the rest of the
chapter. He has caused his son to be raised to the right hand
of the Father, and from there he's given gifts to men, apostles,
prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists, and they keep preaching
the gospel to the church. And as the church keeps hearing
the gospel, so the unity which they already have in Jesus Christ
is opened up for them. That's why your heart sings when
you hear the word of grace, and why it all crumples in when it
hears the word of law. because it's the ministry of
the Spirit which is bringing through to you the liberty of
the glory of the sons of God from the ministry of the Father
who's over all and in all and through all those gifts. And
so the unity of the Spirit is not something that we have to
create, but it is something which is already there in which we
have to live. And you say, well how do you
do that? Well, that's what we're coming to in these chapters.
One of the things is, hear the Gospel. Hear what the apostles
and prophets and evangelists and pastors and teachers are
telling you because the whole point of that ministry is that
they will equip the saints for the work of ministry so that
the whole body will build itself up in love. So hear the word
of the gospel. What else do we do in that unity?
Well, put off the things that don't belong to it. Put off the
immorality, put off the sexual immorality, put off the greed
or the bitterness. Have you ever found in your heart
when you are greedy that you don't have any generosity in
your heart for everyone else? You can't be greedy and give
to another person at the same time. What else do you do? Well he says put off the anger.
Is it possible that there is a person here who some other
person may have offended at any point? Is that ever possible
like a husband or a wife? And what happens if you hold
on to the anger and you let it smolder away? Why don't you just put it off?
Don't give the devil an opportunity. And why not instead put on love?
And why not forgive as you've been forgiven? And so forth.
So that's how it is that that unity is actually lived out of,
but it's not living in order to get something that has not
come. So in this opening up of Ephesians
in the next chapter or two, we are going to actually hear how
practically related this matter of oneness really is. Now that time is away and I am
just going to say a couple of things as we close in the last
minute or two. The first is this, there are two things that will
kill our joy and experience of the unity very quickly. One is, if we try and think that
that age to come should be this age now, because if we try and
make that age to come this age now, we will become perfectionist. And we will demand of ourselves
and one another, like if you can bring all of that with perfection,
you don't need grace, do you, around the place? There is nothing more deadly
to the unity of the church and to the people's experience of
joy than perfectionism. You know the greatest perfectionist
in the whole universe would have to be Satan, wouldn't he? People have got control issues,
Satan has got the control issue. He is working full time to try
and get everything under control and he can't. And he is as mad
as a cut snake, literally, because he can't. But the other thing is this and
it comes to the other side of what I said before. If we think
that we are going to, if this age is not passing away, then
we have to make this age our home and all that this age offers
is all we have then it's every man for himself. And if it's every man for himself,
then you're not going to prefer one another in love and you're
not going to honour one another as you have been honoured. So we need to recognise the age
in which we live, we need to recognise the contest. And the
final closing thing is this, as I've been speaking today,
I want us to be deeply, deeply, deeply assured that the whole
basis of the unity in which we stand in Christ is what has happened
on the cross. As I went through earlier at
the beginning of this talk and I was talking about the things
in which we seek to find that false unity, I could sense among
us as we were talking, I failed. And some of those failures might
go all the way back to our very early days as young men and women.
where we've sought wrong unity. You say, well is there no unity
for me? And I say, in Christ all of our failure has been washed
away. That is the basis of the unity.
It's the reality of the unity. So we stand in Christ as new
creations and we live out of that for one another. That's
good news, isn't it?
Two Ages: One Church
Series Ephesians
This week we continue with our series from Ephesians, and we will be considering the great unities in which the people of God exist. It is important to see that we are called to work from these, rather than seeking to work towards them.
| Sermon ID | 412075372 |
| Duration | 37:00 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | 1 Corinthians 12:1-13; Ephesians 4:1-6 |
| Language | English |
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