8. How Churches Grow
God's Plan Our Place in it • Sermon • Submitted
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· 1 viewWalk Worthy of Your Calling 4:1-6 Be Equipped For Ministry 4:7-12 Grow Up In Christ 4:13-16
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Reader: Jim Miller
Walking with a group around the room.
A while back you might remember that I took some time at the beginning of the message to stretch my legs and walk around the room. And as I did I talked about the many benefits of walking. Things like increasing heart health, lowering your blood pressure, easing stress and helping you to sleep better at night and things like that.
But then I transitioned from the physical benefits of a good walk to how the Bible often talks about “walking”. Remember, how almost half of the time that we find the word “walking” in the New Testament it is not in reference to putting one foot in front of the other like I am walking right now, but something closer to an illustrative “walking” that in truth means how we are behaving.
And today we are transitioning from how we have walked individually, to how God has designed His holy people, the saints to walk together as the Church and to grow that Church both in the number of people who are gathering together and the righteousness, or Christlikeness that they are walking in.
So I had some friends and family join me in my little exercise in order to demonstrate this idea and see it seeded in our mind.
Tension
So that first time we were talking about the “Christian walk” was back when we were looking at Ephesians chapter 2 which opens up with...
Ephesians 2:1–2 (ESV)
1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked,...
That was our dark and dismal reality. We were a dead man walking. We were just an empty shell of what we were designed to be.
Ephesians 2:4–5 (ESV)
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
This is the saving grace of God. The gift of grace that is given to all who believe for their salvation. But that is the sum total of the gift of God’s grace. We were not only brought back to life...but by His grace He saved us...
Ephesians 2:6–7 (ESV)
6 AND raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
The saving grace of God brings us from death to life, but then God begins to pour out the immeasurable riches of his grace towards us. He has seated us with Christ in the spiritual realms and so we given the graces that come with that incredible honor, specifically we are supernaturally empowered to walk…be…behave... like Jesus.
This is happening among God’s people right now. That is part of what Paul meant by “in the coming ages” plural. He wasn’t just talking about our forever home in heaven, but also the age we are in right now, what theologians call “the Church age”.
God is richly pouring out his grace on us right now in order that we might be equipped to grow to become together to become more like Jesus. To be His body here on earth.
This is God’s plan, and Paul is unpacking it for the Church in Ephesus and for every Church in the coming ages. So the question that we will be grappling with this morning in the message and Table Talk follow up is how do these graces of God grow His Church and are we see that happening here?
So if you haven’t done it yet, let me encourage you to open your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 4, on page 977 in the Bibles in the chairs. I’ll pray and then we will dive into this important message for our Church together.
Truth
So as we said last week, today we are transitioning into the second half of the book of Ephesians. The focus of the first 3 chapters of the book of Ephesians was all about “God’s Plan”.
Chapter 1 showed us how God’s plan unites all things in the physical and spiritual realms under Christ, including choosing us for adoption into his glorious family.
Chapter 2 showed us how God’s plan reconciles us to Himself and to one another through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Then Chapter 3 uncovered for us the mystery of God’s plan of salvation for the Church in this age - something that was not revealed to God’s people in previous generations.
And now chapters 4-6 are focused on how we can find our place in God’s plan. Specifically he says several times in these chapters that there is a way that we should “walk”. Starting with 4:1 where he says...
Ephesians 4:1 (ESV)
1 I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called,
Paul’s calling has led him to be a prisoner in Rome, and from that position he is urging us to remember the significance of our calling. That we have not only been brought from spiritual death to new life, but we have been raised up together to become more like Jesus Christ by God’s grace.
You may have noticed that the notes page looks a little different this morning. Instead of the typical three points it is a thread that weaves together across the big idea for the entire passage. That big idea is that...
God grows His church by giving each of us the graces needed to walk together in the Unity of Ministry for Maturity.
God grows His church by giving each of us the graces needed to walk together in the Unity of Ministry for Maturity.
That is what we are after this morning, beginning with..
Walking together in UNITY (Ephesians 4:1-6)
Walking together in UNITY (Ephesians 4:1-6)
Paul says that our calling is to “walk”
Ephesians 4:2 (ESV)
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.
The path to unity in the Church goes through these three virtues:
HUMILITY
GENTLENESS and
PATIENCE
Take a moment to honestly consider these three virtues. Aren’t these the virtues that we all really want…other people to have toward us!???
Right? Isn’t that the truth when you get right down to it. We are a lot quicker to see these things as “virtues” when we are demanding them of others...but they kind of get in the way for us. They trip us up. They slow us down.…which says something about our “walk” doesn’t it.
Humility
And we are not alone in this. The Greco-Roman culture in Paul’s day certainly did not value these things as they should. In fact, classical Greek uses the word for “humble” primarily as an insult to show that someone was proven to be lowly, less-than or lower class. The kind of humility that we might call being “humiliated”, and none of us want that…unless we want to be like Jesus…which IS the calling for which [we] have been called.
In Paul’s letter to the Philippians he fleshed this out more broadly by telling us to...
Philippians 2:3–8 (ESV)
3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,
This is what living in the grace of humility looks like. C.S. Lewis famously described it like this: “humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.” And that couldn’t be more true about Jesus. He didn’t think less of himself, He is the Son of God! but he lived his life as if we were the ones who mattered most. Paul continues in Philippians to say...
5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
There was nothing more humiliating then dying naked and bloody on a Roman cross while people hurled insults at you. With Christ as our ultimate example, we are to walk in the grace of all Humility - counting others as more significant than ourselves.
Gentleness
Paul also says that Jesus’ Church should be marked by the grace of gentleness. This is also found in some translations as “meekness”. Far too many people confuse gentle with “genteel” or “meekness” with “weakness” but nothing could be further from the truth.
My favorite definition of meekness is “power under control”. The idea is that a gentle or meek person doesn’t have to be loud, harsh or braggadocios to get what they need because they already have it. They can walk calmly and talk confidently about what they know, who they are and what they have.
Jesus said in the beatitudes, Matthew 5:5 (ESV) 5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
That is a sizable inheritance by anyone’s scale. To know that you will inherit the earth, or have everything you could ever possibly need completely destroys your motivation to force others into your agenda with loud yelling or harsh words to make sure you have what you think you need.
That is where most tensions and infighting comes from. We are trying to make something happen and someone else or their ideas have gotten in our way of getting what we think is good. So we raise the temperature of the conversation. We get loud. We get accusatory. We get angry. All because we think this person is standing in the way of something good that we have to have.
But how could our response be different if we knew confidently that we already have everything that is good? That is what a gentle or meek person looks like. That person knows the truth of 2 Corinthians 9:8 which says:
2 Corinthians 9:8 (ESV)
8 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.
Why attack someone over something that you already have been given? If it is truly as good as you think, then God will give it to you in His perfect timing. Otherwise something about it is not as good as you think.
If you are in Christ, then you have every grace that you need to abound in every GOOD work, so you can respond to any circumstance with gentleness instead of blowing up with a forcefulness that requires everyone to get on board with your agenda.
Patience
Thirdly, Paul says we are to “walk” in the grace of Patience. I always say, “I have no problem with patience, as long it doesn’t take very long.” And in our culture patience often relates to having to wait behind someone in some line or in traffic, but in the Church we may not be up against being late for appointments. It may be about the spiritual growth of one of our brothers or sisters in Christ.
Everyone who is “in Christ” is growing, but we are not all growing at the same rate nor did we start from the same place. Some of us grew up in religious or moral homes where our parents trained us in habits that are in line with the ways of Jesus. So choosing to walk in those ways has a familiarity to it. Others of us did not have that advantage.
We have talked before about how this would have been like the difference between Jews and Gentiles in Paul’s day. The Jewish Christians grew up with the law, so they had something of a “head start” in developing the habits of walking in righteousness. And this was sometimes an advantage, but other times the “habits” they developed were off course in their legalistic interpretations of the law. So both Jews and Gentiles needed to patient with one another.
- The Jews had to be patient with the slow growth of some of the Gentiles who didn’t grow up with good habits.
- The Gentiles had to be patient with the Jews who thought they knew everything, but needed to humbly see that their was still more for them to learn.
I wonder which kind of patience is more needed here at our Church?
For Christ’s Church to be what He designed it to be, we need to practice the grace of patience, or as the verse goes on to say... bearing with one another in love,
And all three of these graces work together to help us to be
Ephesians 4:3 (ESV) 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
When God the Holy Spirit is the bonding agent then the unity is a foregone conclusion.
This moves Paul to transition from the instructions of these many action verbs to a string of declarative nouns. In other words, those things should be... because these things are. Paul declares...
Ephesians 4:4-6 (ESV)
4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call
The same Holy Spirit came to the Jews at Pentecost, the Gentiles at Cornelius’ house and is present in the lives of all who have placed their hope “in Christ” today.
— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
The pagan nations of the ancient world operated with a whole host of deities, rituals and practices, but “In Christ” there is only one faith. We don’t do “inter-faith” gatherings where it only matters that you believe in something, we are with you. The Bible doesn’t leave room for that because there is...
6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
This is where our UNITY comes from. It doesn’t come from uniformity, in that we all share the same past experiences, personal preferences or daily habits. We unify around these declarative truths. And because these things are, the Holy Spirit works these graces in and through us so that despite all of our differences we can operate as “One” in Christ.
And having established that “oneness” and “unity” Paul moves on show how each one of us has individually been given these graces in order to walk together in...
A Unity of Ministry (Ephesians 4:7-12)
A Unity of Ministry (Ephesians 4:7-12)
He says...
Ephesians 4:7–12 (ESV)
7 But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
And then in verses 8-10 Paul uses and explains a reference from Psalm 68 that shows how from all time God had this plan that Jesus would triumph over the forces of darkness and then give these gifts of grace to men. And Paul then lists some of these gifts in verse 11 which says...
11 And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,
So each one of us is given a measure of Christ’s gift, but did you see what we are all called to do with it? Some of us will function in some of these leadership roles but those roles are not the ones responsible for the ministry of the Church.
This is my favorite verse when it comes to how the Church should be structured because it clearly lays out how God has designed His Church to grow. It is nothing like the consumer mentality that is found at a country club, production theatre or community center. The Church is a living breathing organism made up of many different parts. It is a body.
And just like any other living body, if one part of that body is not contributing in the way that they were designed to contribute then the growth of whole body is diminished. But in beautiful contrast, when all the parts of the body are working together it causes the whole body to grow.
That brings us to the last part of the thread that weaves through our text this morning. And that is that we should look to find our place in .
Ministry for Maturity (Ephesians 4:13-16)
Ministry for Maturity (Ephesians 4:13-16)
The ministry of all us saints is for building up the body of Christ,
Ephesians 4:13–16 (ESV)
13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,
In other words, when we each step into our role in ministry of the Church then it will cause us to grow together to become more like Jesus Christ.
One of the first thing that I try and ask someone when they are struggling to grow in their faith is “where are you serving?”. And sometimes they are surprised by this, thinking that they can’t be serving yet because they have to be more mature in their faith for that.
But that is like someone saying, “I can’t start riding the exercise bike because I am not in shape yet”. The bike is the tool that will help you get in physical shape, just like serving in the body of Christ is the tool that will help you get in better spiritual shape.
And don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that your first step is starting teaching a Bible study or something before you even know anything about the Bible. That would be like getting up one morning and trying a triathlon in order to get into shape. That is just dangerous for you and others around you.
The first step will be to serve alongside others who have had more time on the bike, who have grown some in the graces of humility, gentleness and patience. But ultimately, it is in serving in ministry that we really grow as individuals because we are playing our part in the body of Christ.
And this is what the long term effect of looks like. We grow together....
14 so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.
15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
Application
The Church is the body of Christ. It was not a creation of man, it was God’s plan all along. And because God made it, He determines it’s purpose and how it will grow.
Some of you may remember that I preached on this text just this past August. It was actually something of a spring board for some new steps of growth that we implemented this past year. I concluded the message with three challenges for you all to step up into.
1. Was to commit to read the text for the following week that is included at the bottom of the notes page. It is still there and I know many of you have met that challenge.
2. I challenged you to come ready to stay after and participate in the Table Talk and Sunday School hours. You have met that challenge as well. Those groups are fully of dynamic discussion and sharpening in the Word of God.
3. I challenged you to have the courage to sign up to read the text for us one Sunday as Jim did before the service today. And so many of you, younger and older have stepped into that.
And here is what I have seen. We are growing. We are growing deeper in our faith and becoming more like Jesus and this is causing us to grow numerically as more people are drawn into what God is doing here through our being a Church in the way that he designed us to be. We introduced 7 new partners a few weeks back and we are talking with more.
Landing / Next Steps
That is a reason to get excited, but it is also a reason to remember the foundations of how God grows His Church. As we see more people come into our Church from different past experiences, personal preferences and daily habits we have to be leaning into the God given graces of humility, gentleness and patience.
Being meek or gentle because we don’t have to fight our way to what is good, God has given it to us in Christ.
Being patient because we all need to room to grow and some of us need a little more time and have a longer way to go than others
Being humble because we might need God to open our eyes to the fact that we are not as far along as we thought.
But God has given us the gift of His Church to help us get there.
Let’s pray into that together.