Foreign, open your Bible to Ephesians chapter 4. This is a very important book, and I have chosen to go through it ever so slowly because it is so foundational to our Christian life.
We find ourselves now in chapter 4, and we're trying to work our way through verses 1 to 6. This is the third message in chapter 4, verses 1 to 6, and we will actually get a third of the way through verse 2. But you'll see why.
Let me read the text to you:
Chapter 4, verses 1 to 6:
"Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all."
What clearly strikes you here is the repetition of "one" in verses 4, 5, and 6. This is the foundation of our unity. That is a creed, you might say, that is a theological creed that celebrates the oneness of divine reality. Reality is related to salvation, and based upon that, we are to be diligent, verse 3 says, to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Everything about our salvation, everything about the work of God has a oneness to it, a unity that should be displayed in the church. The church should manifestly declare its transformation by its unity.
In John 13, Jesus said, "By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." In John 17, Jesus prayed that they may be one, that the world may know the Father sent the Son. This is clear, unmistakable, and yet elusive in the experience of life of the church in the world.
So I want to take a little bit of time as we go through this to help you understand these very important components that lead up to unity that will make our living consistent with the creed.
Now let's think back to how we got to chapter 4 in Ephesians, and let's talk about what all true Christians possess. It started in chapter 1, verse 3. We're all blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. All true Christians possess all spiritual blessings, and Paul delineates these blessings all the way from election to glorification down through verse 14 of chapter 1, and culminates it in verse 15, which expresses our love for the saints.
We are all possessors of the same full range of blessings in Christ's salvation blessings, and they culminate in love for all the saints. As he goes on in that chapter, Paul continues to talk about what we all possess as true believers. We possess these same spiritual riches; we have been lavished with spiritual riches, with power, with strength because we are in Christ. He is our life; he is our head, and we are his body. So we are connected to Christ in that unity, that spiritual unity.
As you come to chapter 2, Paul says we all started out in the same condition. We were dead in trespasses and sins; we were walking according to the course of this world; we were under demonic and satanic influence. But we were all saved by grace through faith, not of works, but we were saved unto good works, which God before ordained that we should walk in them.
So we all started out with all the same spiritual blessings. We all came to engage with these blessings, to receive these blessings when we were saved by God's divine grace through faith. We have now become Christ's, and Christ is ours, and we are in him, and he is in us. We are his body.
As we go further into chapter 2, we find again celebrating our unity that all believers, whether Jew or Gentile, are one new man. It doesn't matter what their ethnicity is; we're all one new man. We are all fellow citizens; we are all members of God's household, God's family. We are one building; we are one holy temple for the Lord. We are built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.
It also says that in chapter 2. So again, all of these things mark out our unity.
Then in chapter 3, we read that we are fellow heirs, fellow members of the body, fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. And that collectively and together, verse 19 of chapter 3, we are filled up to all the fullness of God so that, verse 21, God can be glorified in the church and in Christ Jesus. The church displays its redemption to all generations forever and ever.
So Paul has been going through these three chapters, lavishing on us all our spiritual blessings, and the idea is to help us understand we all have the same blessings. We are all one, and that comes out, as I read a moment ago, in verses 4 through 6, where Paul goes back to the foundations of our faith: one body, one Spirit, one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father.
All of this is a plea for unity in the church. But even with all these pleas, there are some necessary attitudes and some necessary spiritual dynamics that have to be at work in a church to fulfill this calling, and that's what we find in this passage before us.
First, there is the call to walk worthy. Look at verse 1: "Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord,"—he was actually a prisoner when he was writing this—"implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called." We looked at that a couple of weeks ago, the call to walk worthy.
The word "worthy" is axios; it means equivalent. In other words, our conduct should match our convictions. Our duty should match our doctrine. Our behavior should match our belief. This is Christian life 101. If you say you belong to the Lord, you ought to walk the way he walks. This is the basic reality of every Christian's life.
What you are in position, what you are in possession, you need to be in conduct. Anything other than that is hypocrisy, and anything other than that, of course, cripples the message of saving power because it doesn't demonstrate that transformation to the world. If people are hypocritical, and again we have to come back to the fact that the unity of the church is the church's greatest testimony, and yet it seems to be the hardest thing to see realized.
So the call to worthy walk—we talked about it. As you come to verse 2, then we look at the characteristics of this worthy life or this worthy walk, and the characteristics might be a little surprising because, given that this is such a high calling, heavenly calling, holy calling, what the Lord wants from us is lowliness.
Verse 2: "With all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." Again, the goal is always the unity of the Spirit; that is the demonstrated testimony of transforming gospel power.
But in order to get to that unity, there have to be some virtues that are manifest and that are established as the priorities in the life of every Christian. Notice in verse 2, and I want to take time with this because these are what is essential to being a Christian in the church in such a way that the church becomes one and its testimony is clear.
With all humility—the Christians invented this word. Literally, the word means to think lowly of yourself. That is a far cry from the unconverted world's interest. In fact, no such word existed in classical Greek. Apparently, the Christians coined this word because thinking lowly of yourself was the last thing that Greek culture wanted to advocate as a virtue.
We would be the same in our culture today, as would be almost every culture throughout human history. You're supposed to think highly of yourself, promote yourself, because, of course, in your fallen condition, pride is the default position of every human sinner.
But Christians have come up with this, by virtue of God's design and God's revelation, that we are to be defined by all humility—not some, but all humility. This is the virtue of the person who is aware of his own unworthiness and weakness.
In other words, to walk worthy, you have to recognize your unworthiness. Now we're talking about humility. What are we talking about? Well, I think there are three things that would simply help you to see what humility essentially perceives.
Number one: self-awareness. A humble person is aware of his own limitations, his own boundaries, his own competencies and incompetencies, his own weaknesses, his own sins—self-awareness. You start by being honest about yourself, and you hear Paul say, "I'm the chief of sinners," or you hear him say, "I don't do what I want to do; I do what I don't want to do. I'm a wretched man."
Paul is declaring his unworthiness. So the worthy walk is a walk of one who is convinced he is unworthy—honesty about yourself. Because, as we said, the default position for fallen sinners is to overestimate themselves, and pride is the dominating default sin.
Secondly, I would say it's a Christ-awareness. When you're overestimating your significance, your importance, your value, your competencies, you probably have been looking to compare yourself with someone less than you—not likely Christ. But as you gaze at the glory of Christ and as you see him for who he is, you get smaller and smaller.
John the Baptist said, "He must increase, and I must decrease."
Then it's also a view of God, like Isaiah 6. Isaiah, who's the prophet, sees God, and having seen God, he puts a curse on himself and says he's a man with a dirty mouth and pronounces judgment on himself.
So humility comes from an honest evaluation of yourself and a true vision of Christ and a true vision of God. The purer your vision of yourself and your Lord and God, the more useful you become.
In Jeremiah 9:23 and 24, Jeremiah wrote this: "Thus says Yahweh: Let not a man boast in his wisdom; let not a mighty man boast in his might; let not a rich man boast in his riches. But let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am Yahweh who shows loving-kindness, justice, and righteousness on Earth; for I delight in these things," declares Yahweh.
If you're going to boast, boast in the Lord. That's what we're after here.
So this is humility, but we talked about that last time. So let's go on to the next word, and the next word will be enough to occupy us for a few more minutes: gentleness.
You might say, "Well, I get it," but you probably don't. Now listen, this is foundational, right? We've had three chapters of doctrine, an incredible lavish layout of doctrine, and now we're supposed to walk worthy. We're supposed to match up our living with our doctrine, and he gives us these very simple words: "in all humility and gentleness." So we better know what they mean.
What is gentleness? Some translations translate it as meekness. Prautes in Greek means mild or gentle. So meekness works; gentleness works. It's a gentle-hearted, on the negative side—no spirit of revenge, no spirit of retaliation, no vindictiveness, no bitterness, no hostile anger, no angry assertions. It's gentleness.
Sometimes the word was used to describe a soothing medicine in ancient times; other times it was used to describe a gentle breeze. Other times it was used to describe a young colt that had been broken—where it was unruly, it now became tame, gentle, and its power could be channeled in a productive way.
Secular Greek uses it of people who are mild or friendly or gentle or pleasant, as opposed to rough, harsh, hard, violent, angry. It's a godly virtue. It's a godly virtue. It's used 12 times in the New Testament. We saw it there in Matthew 5:5: "Blessed are the gentle" or "the meek." We see it in Galatians 5:23, where it appears as part of the fruit of the Spirit: gentleness.
We see it in 1 Timothy 6:11 as a virtue of a man of God who is marked by his gentleness. And again, there might be people who think, "Well, this is weakness. How can you be a strong leader and be gentle?" You can if you understand this term.
I think one of the best ways to understand it is to see it defined as power under control. It doesn't refer to impotence or lack of power or lack of courage, and it is a byproduct of humility. If you're a humble person, you may have immense power; you may have immense capabilities; you may have immense competencies. You may be a force, but if you are humble, all of a sudden you're transformed into someone who's gentle because this is a product of self-humiliation.
This is a product of self-emptying; this is the product of a broken will. Again, it doesn't mean weak; it doesn't mean impotent; it doesn't mean cowardly. What it means is that your powers, which are formidable in Christ, are under the control of the will of God and the Holy Spirit.
Proverbs says in Proverbs 25:28, "Like a city that is broken into and without a wall is a man without restraint over his spirit." On the other hand, Proverbs 16:32 says, "He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his own spirit than he who captures a city."
Gentleness means you have self-control. There is a meekness; there is a gentleness.
Let me see if I can't define it in some specific ways by giving you some specific illustrations. The best one: Jesus said in Matthew 11:29, "Come to me and learn of me, for I am what? Meek and lowly." So if you're looking for an illustration of what gentleness and lowliness looks like, look no further than Jesus.
Was he weak? Was he cowardly? Was he short on convictions? No. But the Apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:1 that we need to follow the meekness of Christ, the meekness, the gentleness of Christ.
How is it that we can even look at Jesus in that way? After all, he blasted the temple system twice—once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. He condemned the hypocrites, the leaders of Israel. He unleashed judgment on their heads. There's no cowardly Christ; that is inconceivable.
He stood fearlessly before a crowd that wanted to stone him and disappeared, and then he took whips to clean out the temple when his father's house had been defiled. Yet the Bible says he was meek.
He's the model of meekness—total selflessness. How is this possible to be both meek and such a force against evil? The answer is this: Jesus never wielded his power to defend himself. He never wielded his power to defend himself; he wielded his power to defend his Father, his Father's reputation, and his Father's house.
"You have taken my Father's house, which is the house of prayer, and you've turned it into a den of thieves." When you think about the Incarnation of Christ, I know you understand that he became a man—became truly man. You see much of the human part of it in his living, of course, but I think we tend to overlook the unique characteristic of gentleness that is, on the one hand, fiercely defensive of God and not of oneself.
For him, his Father mattered. His Father mattered for him. Isaiah 53: "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth." He didn't open his mouth; he was like a sheep dumb before its shearers. He had power, but he never used it for himself.
You don't find that he was always humbling himself, taking on the burdens, taking the hostility, the hatred, and eager and fiercely loyal to his Father. He is our model of what meekness looks like. You defend God; you defend his kingdom; you defend his truth; you don't defend yourself.
That's the power that's under control. Meekness is that power under control, used only at the right time, on the right occasion, for the right length, at the right cause.
So this is a virtue that goes right along with humility. As believers, we're not into defending ourselves because if we are all busy defending ourselves, there can't be unity because we don't look on the things of others; we're too absorbed in our own issues.
Follow the pattern of Christ. Do you experience that kind of control?
on Nov 05, 2023
