These are the Sermon Notes for June 7, 2020. We are now meeting at the church with limited seating and specific procedures and protocols that need to be followed. Read our Returning to Worship plan here. You can still watch our livestream service every Sunday at 9:37 am on our facebook page or watch the livestream recordings any time.
Ephesians 4:1-6 The Basis of Our Unity
Good morning! Welcome back!
I’d like very much to continue in our study of the Gospel of Mark this morning but the Lord wouldn’t allow it. In my time of prayer in preparation for this morning’s message my mind kept going to the phrase, “unity in the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
In considering what is happening in our church family and in the rest of the country right now that is an important idea to wrestle with.
Let’s pray
We are going to look at Ephesians chapter 4, verses 1-6, that’s on page 977 in the pew Bibles.
The main topic of this text this morning is UNITY, unity in the Spirit in the bond of peace.
There are two main factors why this is an important topic for us to consider this morning and they are fairly obvious, our forced separation for the last three months or so because of the Corona Virus, and the protests and riots that have gripped our country over the murder of George Floyd.
In my view the physical separation that we have endured pales in comparison to the deep divisions that exist due to racism.
As Americans we certainly seem a lot more divided than united when it comes to these things, but nevertheless, as a nation we have the privilege of speaking up and expressing our opinion.
In fact, the undying need to express our opinion may be the only thing that still unites our country…
But praise God we are not here to discuss politics! In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Let’s look at Ephesians 4:1-6 together…
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
In verse one, the calling to which you have been called is the calling of the church to be Christ’s witnesses and testify to His person and work to the world.
We testify to the character of God by living according to His Word, giving a moral example before a corrupt world, and demonstrating in our own lives the character of the God who lives within us.
Hatred based on race, or differences of political opinion, or position, or privilege does NOT demonstrate the character of God our Father who lives in us by His Spirit. It demonstrates the character of our enemy, Satan.
We tell of the glory of God by demonstrating the character of God and telling the story of the hope that He has given us through faith in Jesus.
And we display the manifold, unifying wisdom of God to this realm and the realm beyond by becoming one new unified family no matter who we are or where we are from.
And it’s that idea that brings us to HOW to walk in a manner worthy of that calling to which we have been called.
Now if we go back to the old idea that Paul was talking about the calling of individuals into professional ministry, obviously we would have to focus on the individual’s character and personal holiness, but then the rest of this passage wouldn’t really make any sense, because it is all about the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace and how to accomplish that unity and what it is that should unite us.
Fortunately we are not left wondering! Since we know that Paul was addressing the church and not just individuals we can see exactly how to walk worthy of the calling that the church has been called to, to walk in unity.
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you [plural] to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Here we have the building blocks of maintaining unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: humility, gentleness, patience, and forbearance in love, character qualities that should define us as the Father’s adopted children. Let’s look at those one at a time.
First is humility, humility is the first step towards maintaining unity.
Humility is the laying aside of pride, placing others before ourselves. In humility we lay aside our pride and our desire to please ourselves and become meek and gentle towards others.
CS Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”
In other words, humility really isn’t about the attitude you have about yourself, self-deprecation is just pride in disguise, humility has a great deal more to do with how you view others.
Ask yourself, who’s needs come first?
In order to embrace unity within the family, you must first embrace humility because humility embraces others first.
Getting back to verse 2, humility produces gentleness, also translated “meekness.” This has to do with how we treat one another, not treating each other harshly but gently. This is a fruit of the Spirit found in Galatians 5 and it involves others and our attitudes and actions towards them. Gentleness or meekness is, “strength under control,” sometimes this means holding our tongues instead of lashing out with verbal elbow drops from the top rope.
Humility and gentleness are a product of patience, a state of emotional calm in the face of provocation, being slow to anger. Again this is an attitude that we can have towards one another, it’s not merely a character trait but a moment by moment exercise!
Humility produces gentleness, and both are grounded in patience, or if you prefer: longsuffering. Patience also produces forbearance, or as verse 2 puts it, “bearing with one another in love.”
Patience is a state of emotional calm in the face of provocation and that leads to enduring the difficulties that come with being anywhere near other people! That’s what forbearance is, enduring difficulty, and in our text, bearing with one another in love, simply points to the necessity of enduring relational hardship or difficulty that people create for one another.
This is life in a family!
This all sounds very much like Rule #1: don’t be a jerk.
But is this all that makes a church a church? After all, lots of groups treat their members like this, lots of groups are eager to maintain this kind of unity and do so.
The charge to the church is not: just don’t be a bunch of jerks, but rather, maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
John Calvin called this unity of the Spirit, “a harmony of views.”
We can’t stop with verse 3, if we did, we could settle for just being nice, and just being a decent human.
But the unity of the Spirit is not found in just how we treat each other, we need to have a harmony of views on the things in verses 4 through 6, not just verses 1 through 3, or else we will be just a social club, a bunch of nice people who want to get together and hang out and love one another and when this life is over we will stand before the judgment seat of Christ and be condemned to eternal destruction.
So let’s make sure that the unity that we enjoy is not based on niceness but based on the truth.
4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
There is one body – this is the church, there is only one church, the Church of Jesus Christ. Paul uses this metaphor several times when referring to the church. You can read 1 Corinthians 12 for more on this idea.
We are one body with many different parts in many different places and many different colors and many different backgrounds over many different ages but we are still one body, we are still an extension of one original, mutually shared life – that’s Jesus Christ, our Head.
And though we become part of this great universal body when we come to faith in Jesus Christ, we are not excused from joining with a local expression of that body, a local church, so that we can serve and grow and love and be loved. And we have certainly learned lately what a wonderful privilege and blessing it is to gather together!
There is one body and there is one Spirit – the Holy Spirit that indwells each believer, He is perhaps the most unifying element of the body since He Himself is not divided and yet lives in each believer. It is the Holy Spirit who, by His grace, gifts and empowers and governs the church, His body. If we belong to Christ, we are indwelt and empowered by His One Spirit and therefore we should be one.
One body, one Spirit, and one hope that belongs to our call…
What is our one hope?
Is it that this life will get better, that the pandemic will stop, that the violence will stop, that racism will stop, or that politicians will fix everything that is wrong in our country?
NO!
Our hope is the return of Christ and eternal life in Him!
Our hope is the resurrection from the dead, that the end of this life is not the end but just the beginning!
Through faith in Jesus our sins are forgiven so that when this life is over, whether by our natural death or the return of Christ, we get to see God our Father face to face and be with Him in His eternal kingdom forever!
Paul wrote about this hope back in Ephesians chapter one and he called it the glorious inheritance in the saints and again in 1 Corinthians 15:19 he said, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
The one hope of the church for all time and in all places, through faith in Christ, the hope which belongs to our call is our glorious, heavenly inheritance in God’s eternal kingdom, not in this life but in the one to come.
If this is our hope, if this is what we are looking forward to with confidence, what place does hatred have, what place does fear have? There is no room, there is no place for those things when our focus is on this hope.
One body, one Spirit, one hope, and one Lord – The Lord Jesus Christ to whose administration we are subject.
The title “Lord” is not just a throw away term. When we confess that Jesus is Lord, we submit to Him as the one supreme ruler of all! And we cannot confess that Jesus is the one Lord without the one Spirit.
Jesus the Christ is the one Lord that we are united under, we cannot claim to follow the one Lord and not walk in unity. Christ cannot be divided.
One body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, and one faith – there is only one truth of God by which people are saved.
All religions do not lead to God, all faiths do not save, only faith in Jesus Christ. We may disagree on style, or fashion, or other minor doctrinal differences but the true church cannot be divided over the saving power of faith in Jesus Christ.
One body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, and one baptism – This is our common experience of initiation into the church, our universal declaration of our repentance and commitment to Christ.
Whether it’s the tradition of sprinkling or dipping or dunking it is still an outward expression of a completed inner work of the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ, the symbolic death and burial of the old way of life and the resurrection of the new creation in Jesus.
One body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and finally, the greatest unifier: One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
As Calvin put it, “This is the main argument, from which all the rest flow. How is it that we are united by faith, by baptism, or even by the government of Christ, but because God the Father, extending to each of us his gracious presence, employs these means for gathering us to himself?”
God is Father of all the church His children, He governs over all the church His subjects, He is through all the church his agents, and He is in all the church, His body, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in Him we live and move and have our being.
These facts are the basis of our unity.
Beneath all our many differences is a unity that already exists that we don’t create, we are charged to eagerly maintain this unity not create it.
The unity that already exists is a unity of the Spirit not a unity of the flesh. It is a supernatural unity that takes the work of a supernatural God through supernatural means in His people.
The church crosses all the lines and boundaries of differences that exist in the world: racial, ethnic, social standing, we are not all the same but we are all on equal footing in Christ.
Differences exist, I get that. It’s a constant and won’t change. But we cannot forget the sound doctrine of Scripture or compromise the gospel for the sake of unity. The church does not have the right to chart its own course apart from Scripture.
We cannot forget that the church is one body, that there is one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all. A church that forgets those core truths will no longer be the church.
So I urge you then:
to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
This is how we tell of the glory of God by demonstrating the character of God and telling the story of the hope that He has given us through faith in Jesus.
This is how we display the manifold, unifying wisdom of God to this realm and the realm beyond by becoming one new unified family no matter who we are or where we are from.
This is how we show this hurting world what our loving Heavenly Father is like. So let’s do it.
Amen.
