Well do please keep your Bibles open and turn now to Ephesians chapter 4. That will be page 977 if you’re using the pew Bible. I’m grateful for this opportunity to preach as we will be turning our attention in a more focused way towards missions at the end of this month. It might be more appropriate to say that we are actually continuing to focus our attention on missions as that was the main theme of several of David’s sermons through Romans. This letter to the Ephesians, as is often Paul’s pattern, he begins the letter with doctrine. He reminds them of the blessings and the inheritance that they have obtained in Christ. He reminds them that they were once dead in their sins but they have been saved by grace through faith and they have no grounds for boasting in their own good works. And that both Jew and Gentile are made one in Christ and that through Christ they can have peace with God.
Our passage this morning is the pivot point where Paul begins his turn from doctrine towards practice, and so we’ll be looking this morning at Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 through 16, and we’ll look at it under three headers. The first is – gearing up. Secondly – growing up. And lastly – getting up. Gearing up, growing up, and getting up. Before we read the passage though, let’s turn to the Lord in prayer.
Heavenly Father, we ask for Your blessing now as we read Your Word. Speak now, for Your servants listen. Amen.
Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 through 16. Hear now the Word of God:
“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 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, 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. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 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.”
Amen. May God add His blessing to this the reading and hearing of His holy, inerrant and infallible Word.
We’ve got some remodeling going on in our house currently, and if you’ve ever painted a room in your house you know how important preparation is. By the time you’ve filled the holes and sanded everything and taped around all of the trim and put down a dropcloth and found all your brushes and rollers and you’ve stirred the paint, there’s actually not much work left to do. Preparation is key, and Paul has something in this passage to say about ministry and how we ought to be prepared for it and carry it out in the church.
So let’s turn now to our first point – gearing up. If you read closely, you see that Paul writes that if you want to do ministry you must have a specific title. If you want to do ministry, you must have a specific title. Do you see that in the text? Look down with me to verse 11. “And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers.” In the previous verses we can see that Paul describes these offices as gifts to the church. The apostles are ones who witnessed the resurrected Christ and received their commission from Him. The prophets – one who spoke revelation from God. These gifts, these offices were foundational and are no longer found in the church. And the culmination of their work is God’s Word that we read from today. We also see the office of the evangelist, which was also a foundational office. Their work was one of carrying Paul’s letters to faraway churches. They literally carried good news. They would also stay behind helping the pockets of Christians that apostles had reached with the Gospel and to organize themselves into churches. Think of Timothy and Titus and Tychicus and Epaphroditus and others who labored alongside the apostle Paul.
Now as a side note, let me clarify that when I say evangelists were foundational, extraordinary and temporary and no longer found in the church, I am referring to the office of evangelist. Of course we are all called to evangelize and share the good news of the Savior whom we love; we are called to engage in evangelism, and so we are all evangelists in that sense. But the use of evangelist here is referring to that temporary office in the early church. And lastly in this list we see the pastors and teachers. This is referring to the perpetual and ordinary office of elder. These are the elders in the church and their work continues in the church today. But I started this explanation by saying you have to have a title to do ministry.
So which of these titles does Paul say you must have to do ministry? Look back down with me at verse 12. It says that Christ gave these gifts to the church, verse 12, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” Uh-oh! The title we need is that of saints! Now I think you’re likely getting the point already, but let’s make it explicit. Who are the saints? Now if you’re reading your Bible and you’re not sure exactly what is meant by a particular word of phrase, what should you do? The first stop of course is to look at the context. Does Paul use this word in his letter or in other letters? Absolutely. Look back at the very first verse of this book. Paul addresses this letter, “To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.” So he’s talking about the whole congregation of believers in Ephesus. Now look down at verse 4 of that same chapter. “Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him.” Now the word for “holy” and the word for “saint” is the same in Greek.
So who is a holy one or a saint in this verse? Well it’s the ones who God chose before the foundation of the world. And if you were to flip back to the first chapter of another one of Paul’s letters, 1 Corinthians, you would see that Paul addresses that letter, “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling with all who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.” So saints are not a special class of Christian. It is all those who call upon the name of Jesus. And so I hope you hear what Paul is saying. You, men and women, boys and girls of First Presbyterian Church, the ones who are faithful in Christ Jesus, the ones chosen by God before the foundation of the world, the ones who in this place call upon the name of the Lord, you are the saints. And in our passage, Paul is saying that that is the title that you need to do ministry. He says that you, all of you are the ones that are to be equipped for the work of ministry.
Now that may seem counterintuitive. Surely ministry is best left to the professionals, or surely Paul is making some kind of mistake here. How would this even work? How could I even contribute? But we have an illustration of how this works before us each Sunday. Just think of our choir. It’s interesting for me at least to think that most people in this room have not actually ever heard Dr. Wymond sing, even as he leads our singing! What does the choir director do? He rehearses, he teaches how music works, he helps choir members learn their part, he explains how the different parts and the different voices fit together. He gives feedback and makes sure the sound is balanced and blended and beautiful. In short, he equips the choir for ministry. He equips them, but it is their voices that minister to us, that aid us in our worship. They are able to be organized and use their voices to their full potential as they are equipped for that ministry. And each choir member has to do their part for it to work. Some are better at reading music than others, some have a better sense of pitch; others are stronger at keeping everyone on rhythm. There’s not a person that can do it all, all have their strengths, but to some degree or another, all need to be equipped for ministry. This is the picture that Paul is painting.
So how does a saint get equipped? The primary place we are all being equipped for ministry is in worship on Sunday mornings and evenings. And that may not feel very practical to you, but look back down at the text and notice what characterizes the offices mentioned in verse 11. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. The primary calling of each of these equipping offices is based on the teaching of God’s Word. It is through the Word that we are equipped. That’s what Scripture does. “It is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Yes, we can and we do read other helpful books, we have practical training in evangelism, we have parenting conferences, we have mission conferences, but if you want to be a saint equipped for ministry, you need to be in your Bible. That’s how we are to be equipped.
So we’ve talked about being equipped and gearing up for ministry. Now let’s turn to our second point – growing up. Look down with me at verse 13. The saints are to be equipped for ministry, “for building up the body of Christ, 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, 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. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” So in these verses we see the goal of the equipping, the goal of the ministry that we are all being equipped to do. And the goal of this ministry is the maturity of the body of Christ.
And we see here that Paul says in verse 13 that we need unity for that and we need knowledge of the Son of God. Do you see that there? Unity and knowledge of the Son of God. And I wonder at this point if Paul has Jesus’ high priestly prayer running through his mind as he is writing this. Think back to Christ’s final moments before His arrest and where He is in the garden. And He is praying. And in that moment, in that critical moment, in that agonizing moment, He was praying for His disciples and for future believers. In other words, He was praying for you and for me in that moment. And what are two of the main themes that we find in that prayer? Unity and knowing God and the truth. Unity and knowledge – exactly what Christ knew His church would need for maturity.
Now think just how remarkable this is. This chapter we are in, in Ephesians, describes Christ’s ascension in the first few verses, and as He ascends victoriously He is giving gifts to His church and those gifts are for equipping the saints to do ministry, the goal of which is to build the church in maturity and give unity and knowledge. And that is absolutely mindblowing to me. The very things we need are the very things that Christ prayed for and then the very things that He provides to us. And even more remarkable is that He uses us, He uses the saints and our work of ministry to accomplish that. It makes it all the more miserable then when instead of unity that the church needs, our first instinct is often to sow division. When someone asks about a fellow Christian and the first thing out of our mouth is something that just rips them to shreds, that’s someone that Christ prayed that prayer for. That’s someone for whom Christ died, and yet we don’t think twice but to all but ruin their reputation and the unity in the church as we do it. When we harm each other we are harming the body of Christ and we are failing to become mature.
And Paul goes on now to show us how dangerous it is to not be growing into maturity. Look down at verse 14. “So that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.” Now this is a vivid picture that Paul is painting. Can you imagine a more dangerous situation than a child, maybe even an infant, out in open water with waves rising and falling and winds swirling all around. There’s no protection, there’s no shelter, there’s no rescue. That’s the image of how dangerous it is to lack maturity. We need unity and we need knowledge to grow into maturity to be able to see and identify counterfeits and vague spirituality that has nothing in reality to do with Christianity, to be able to identify what Paul calls human cunning and craftiness and deceitful schemes that would threaten us.
Now our culture is such that this is challenging. This is challenging for us. At every point our culture is asking questions to erode our confidence in God’s Word. It’s asking the same questions that the serpent asked in the garden. “Did God really say that? Is that really what the Bible says about marriage? Is that really what the Bible says about remembering the Sabbath Day and keeping it holy? Is that really what the Bible teaches about who goes to heaven?” Here we are taught that the way to avoid being wind-tossed, wave-beaten infants lost at sea is to grow up into maturity as we are equipped and then engaged with each other in ministry for building up the body of Christ.
So we’ve seen that Paul wants us to be gearing up being equipped for the work of ministry and he wants us to be growing up; our goal is to become mature. And now we’ll turn to our final point – getting up. Look with me at verse 15. “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 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.” Now there are several places in Paul’s letters where he compares the church to a body, and the idea is simple enough. Christ is the head of the church. He is the source of the life of the body and the standard toward which we all are growing. He is who we are all unified under and we also see that we are an organic whole. Without each other we are incomplete; we need each other.
And we often think about the image of the body of Christ in the context of the local church, and that is surely helpful, but verse 4 of this chapter reminds us that there is one body and one spirit. When we talk about individual churches as the body of Christ or as local bodies of believers, we can start to get a sense that each church is out on its own. And if we’re not careful, we begin to apply this language about the body of Christ only to individual churches. But we must not fail to see that the church is one body. This passage is also talking to us about the global church. We need each other within this church, absolutely, but we also need to see that we need and are needed by believers in other places as well.
In 1944, C.S. Lewis wrote an introduction to an old book. The introduction to that book was all about the value of reading old books. He wrote, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to making certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period and that means the old books. The only palliative is to keep the clean seabreeze of the centuries blowing through our minds and this can be done only by reading old books.” I hope one day I write a sentence like that – “to keep this clean seabreeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and that can only be done by reading old books.” And I agree with Lewis, and we can apply this to the context of the church as well. We are all so grateful for saints who have gone before us, on whose shoulders we stand, but who also critique us from centuries away in our current blindspots. But if I may be so bold, I would like to add to what C.S. Lewis said. We need to engage with believers from other times but we also need to engage with believers from other places. Look, I love First Presbyterian Church. There is absolutely no other place that I would rather be. But if our understanding of the body of Christ is only as broad as the distance between Belhaven and Pinehurst streets, then that is a terribly impoverished view. We need our brothers and sisters in other places and they need us.
Let me give you an example. Last year I went on a vision trip to Honduras with a couple other First Pres members and it was just a long weekend that we were there and we worshiped together on that Sunday with the local church. And the three of us, we were sitting in the back of the sanctuary and we didn’t have a translator but we had the bulletin which was in Spanish, but with that bulletin in hand we could follow along well enough to understand what was happening. And that Sunday they happened to be baptizing multiple adults who had come to saving faith in Jesus. And one at a time, each one of them came forward and knelt down and Aaron Halbert, who will be with us in a couple of weeks preaching for our mission conference, he put both hands down into that bowl of water and then in a language that we don’t know, but using familiar words that we still understood, he baptized them in the name of the Father, the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And he had so much water in his hands for each baptism that I’m not sure you could still call it sprinkling! And as it rolled down over the heads of those who were kneeled, it was so much that if I close my eyes I can still hear it splashing off the tile floor in that sanctuary. And I looked to my right and I looked to my left and both other members of that team were just weeping at the sight and the sound of it all. This little but growing missionary church had more adult baptisms on one Sunday than we at First Pres often have in a year. And that can be frustrating and discouraging to us, but we were so encouraged to know and see how God was at work in other places with other people in other languages. We need each other.
We need encouragement and we need to give encouragement. Around the world there are churches with resources that we don’t have and we are blessed with resources that they don’t have. We need each other. And Paul is saying here that we are all one body and the way that we will grow up in every way into the head, into Christ, is when every part of the body gets up and works properly and makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. So let me ask you, First Presbyterian Church, as part of this global body, are we working properly? Are we helping or hindering the body of Christ to be built up in love? How can we share what we have with a global church?
Well even the simple act of going to some distant place to serve others in the name of Christ can be a remarkable and effective thing. There are a few churches in Cambodia that our denomination’s mission agency, Mission to the World, has been involved in planting. And as part of their outreach ministry, these churches have partnered with local hospitals and they have become so trusted in that community that now there are anti-trafficking organizations that refer young girls to them for care. This is the story of one of the MTW team members that worked in that hospital with one of those patients. He writes, “It was the same every time. I attempted to engage ——- like I do with all of the girls, trying to make her laugh and trying to create a non-threatening environment. My attempts were always met with silence from her, not a shy silence but a ‘no one’s going to hurt me again’ silence. Respecting her boundaries, I have cared for this thirteen year old very often over the course of a year. She remains silent, hardly acknowledging my presence. One day, while gently bandaging her new surgical wounds, she broke the silence. ‘Why did you come to Cambodia?’ she asked. ‘Jesus sent me here,’ I said. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘To take care of you.’ The hard shell cracked open and —— started to cry. She started to trust.”
And we don’t know what happened to that little girl, we don’t know if that was the beginning of her conversion, but isn’t it remarkable that going and being willing to serve was what opened the door to speak a word for Jesus. Could it be that the act of going and serving, often thanklessly, strikes at something familiar? Christ was willing to give up all the riches of heaven and to humble Himself, taking on flesh, becoming a servant, and was obedient to His heavenly Father, even to the point of death. And all for us and for our salvation. All for us and for our salvation. No wonder that going and serving, which is reflecting what our Savior did for us, is often the perfect entry point to tell others about Jesus. You know, we live in a unique time and place with resources to travel and the passport that gives us easy entry into almost any country in the world. And this is a resource that God has blessed us with and we should go.
So we can go, but we can also strive together with our missionaries in prayer. We live in a time and place where we can freely gather and pray. We should be using that privilege, that gift that God has given us. We have a missions prayer time every Sunday evening at 5pm, right back here in the parlor. We would love for you to join us as we read reports of the missionaries we support and then we pray for them. And if that time doesn’t work for you, you can take your bulletin home each week and pray for the missionaries in the announcements on the back with your families. And there’s also a beautiful booklet that’s being printed that will be given out during the mission conference that will have a list of all of our missionaries and will have their pictures and their names and ideas for how to pray for each one of them.
So we can go, we have resources for prayer, and we also have great resources here for encouraging the global church. I know that because I have been so encouraged by this church. We would be thrilled for you to write notes to missionaries, to visit their churches as you are traveling abroad, and especially to spend time with many of them who will be here for our mission conference in a few weeks. So we can pray, we can encourage, but we can also give. Our church has been blessed with resources to give financially to missions and support the work of the church in that way. Your gift to missions makes a difference. Your gift to missions makes a difference. The children of the Day School are trying to raise $450 for a church in South Africa. And with $450, the church will be able to buy 80 bags of cement that they are going to turn into bricks and they’ll use that to build a new Sunday school room and a church office to expand the scope of the ministry of their church – $450. It doesn’t take much in many of these places. And so when you put a gift in the offering plate and write “Missions” on it, you can be sure it is making a difference. It is keeping missionaries on the field doing Gospel ministry and it’s helping us to support new ministries and missionaries as they apply for support.
And as our mission conference approaches, this is the perfect opportunity and the perfect time to consider how we will be a part of the body of Christ that is working properly and helping to build it up in love. As we do each year, we are going to have a pledge card and my hope is that you will take these next couple of weeks and you will prayerfully consider how God might use you this year for the building up of His kingdom through the work of missions this year. My plea to you is to fill that card out and to put it in the offering plate. You may sense that what God is calling you to do is to pray for missions with renewed vigor. You can pledge to do that on the pledge card. You may sense that God is calling you to go and serve in His name. You can pledge to do that on our pledge card. And you may sense that God is calling you to give perhaps very humbly or perhaps very generously to the work of missions, and you can pledge to do that. But please don’t miss the opportunity to use this time and that pledge card as a tool that is designed to equip you, the saints at First Presbyterian Church, for the work of ministry.
We’ve seen how we as saints ought to be gearing up as God prepares us for ministry by His Word in the church. And we’ve seen that ministry is so that we can be growing up into maturity with unity and knowledge. And last, we’ve seen how we need to get getting up and doing what God has gifted us to do as a part of the body of Christ that is properly working.
Let’s pray.Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for Jesus Christ – our Head and the King of the Church. We ask that You would make us humble and obedient citizens that seek the expansion of His kingdom. It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray, amen.