Ephesians: The Church United (pt.2)

Eph. 4:4-6.

“The Basis for Unity

A Church as One

FC: To be one in the Church, you must be one in Christ

In today's churches, anyone can join it appears.

You don't have to have a testimony of salvation or a letter of good standing from another like minded church.

As long as you can be counted in the numbers present and pay tithe, that's all that matters.

Well, Paul tells us that is not the case.

Paul had to deal with a lot here in Ephesus.

Remember back to the beginning. Paul was instructing both Jew and Gentile here and he was having to overcome false doctrine and the worship of many god’s.

He was also having to deal with internal conflict in the church between the Jew and the Gentile. Chapter 2 11-16

So, Paul is reaffirming in these sets of verses, that if one is a part of the family of God, they are part of the God’s Church.

Paul wanted to be sure, as he is discussing the unity of the church, that everyone understands that to be part of the church, one must be part of the family of God first.

example: Eph. 1and 2

Paul is going to, over the next 12 verses, explain to us what the basis of a unified church is, what gifts a unified church receives, and how a unified church is to act.

So lets take a moment and look at A Church United: The Basis for unity

We are a Church of many people but having the right view of what church is will allow you to see that we are a Church of One. Capital ‘O’

I. One Church, One Body

Our physical bodies are made of many cells and has many different parts that have different functions, but it is still one single body.

Same thing goes for the church.

There are many personalities and many different gifts that have different functions, but it still is one body.

In 1 Cor. 12, Paul develops a very good image of how the physical body is interdependent on the other parts of the body.

Turn with me there.

(Read 12-22)

Paul wrote this letter from Ephesus, so it is no surprise that he had Ephesus in mind as a body when he wrote to them.

If they were going to get anything done for the glory of God, they were going to have to work together as a complete unit.

Same goes for us here at VBC,

when a limb is missing, it effects the whole body.

The body may still be able to function, but how it functions will be drastically altered.

Just like the human body.

If I lose a thumb then my whole function of gripping things changes.

When a person or family leave VBC, it hurts and then the body must figure out how to function without that limb.

the church will never be the same

It does not matter who you are or how old you are, your presence helps the function of the body.

Its kinda like the Gall bladder, you can function without it, but when you lose it, you have to learn to adjust without it.

The years may pass and the scares may heal, but you know that your gall bladder is missing.

People will leave and it will hurt, the years will pass, the wounds will heal but the emptiness will always be there.

Now, Paul here is referring to both the universal church and the local called out assembly.

Now anyone that can talk and make a profession and can become part of a local church, but it is the universal church that really matters.

You can fool the deacons, the pastor and the other members, but you wont fool God.

He knows who His children are and unless you have come to Him by faith with a humble heart and believed on His dear Son, not in but on, and recieved the gift that was given on Calvary, then you are only a member of the local church and not the Church of the Living God.

Which are you?

You know who you are, and what you are.

You are either a child of God or a child of the devil.

II. One Church, One Spirit

We now look at the second term which the Apostle uses.

If you notice the ‘s’ is capitalized.

that lets us know that what we have here is brought together by the one and only Holy Spirit.

I think Paul is drawing their attention to how they all were brought into the body.

by the exact same way.

When a person gives a testimony, they may stand up and say certain things that sound different from another but in all reality it all comes down to the same thing.

It was the drawing of the Holy Spirit that brought you to salvation.

We have many differences in the small particulars of our conversions.

But when we begin to talk about what the Holy Spirit did in our hearts to bring us to faith in Christ, our experiences are identical.

There is an awakening to sin

whereby we become conscious that all is not right between ourselves and God, that we are in violation of his laws, hostile to his holy character, and under his wrath.

There is the work of regeneration,

whereby God in a supernatural way places the new life of Christ within our hearts so that we change.

We become different from what we were before.

Following that,

There is the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification,

which produces the same fruit of the Spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23

Galatians 5:22–23 KJV 1900

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

—in all of us.

When we begin to think along these lines we say, “Isn’t it marvelous that, regardless of what background we come from or how we have come to Christ, the one Holy Spirit of God has united us in a much more important common experience?”

Has the Spirit of God done this for you?

Have you been brought into the family of God?

Not the church family, but God’s family?

If not, today is the day.

Wont you listen to the Spirit and come to Christ today?

III. One Church, One Hope

The third thing Paul talks about is our hope.

Hope has suffered in English speech, so that today it does not mean quite what it meant in earlier, New Testament days.

Today hope usually means something uncertain, something we perhaps hope for wishfully but do not really expect.

The biblical idea is quite different.

If you have been to a funeral service, you may remember the portion of the service in which we speak of our “sure and certain hope,” meaning the resurrection of the dead.

“Sure and certain”—that is the biblical idea.

It is future, true enough.

We have only an earnest of it now, that is, the possession of the Holy Spirit as proof of what is to come.

our hope is not uncertain just because we do not at this precise moment hold it in our hand.

Our hope is not of this world.

There is something better waiting.

He gave us new life; He called us out of the world, and baptized us into the body of Christ.

Why?

all these things have taken place merely as a preparation for something that is yet to take place.

The Church is not an end in and of itself;

the Church is the body, the instrument which God is using through Christ and by the Holy Spirit to call out of mankind a new humanity,

a new people for Himself, which He is finally going to perfect and cause to dwell in a renovated glorified world free from all sin.

Paul has already referred to this hope.

Ephesians 1:13–14 KJV 1900

In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.

Paul is reminding the believers here at Ephesus, to remember that you are bought with a price and are sealed with the holy Spirit of promise.

His desire is that they might know the hope to which God has called them, that they might know and realize and appreciate and understand the grand purpose which God has at the back of this great plan of redemption.

In his first chapter, he is praying for it in general, but here he deals with it, and adverts to it, specifically in connection with this principle of unity.

He appeals to them ‘with all lowliness and meekness, with all longsuffering, and forbearing one another in love’, to endeavour ‘to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’, because they are ‘called in one hope of their calling’.

Nothing so promotes unity, and guards it and keeps it, as our realization of the blessed hope that lies ahead of us, the same glorious inheritance which we are to share.

It is largely because we fail to keep our eye on ‘the hope of our calling’ that there are so many divisions and distinctions and misunderstandings.

We must not only dwell negatively on what we were called from; we must rather dwell on what we are called to.

Being reminded that there is a better hope and all those that are born again, will one day all be together, regardless of our past.

Helps unite us regardless of our skin color, ethnic background, economic status or prior life.

If you are one of His Children, you have a hope that all the rest of us have that are gloriously born again.

If you are lost here today, you dont have a better hope, you have no hope.

You will spend eternity in the pits of Hell were we all belong.

So, Paul has told us that we are one body, one spirit and one hope, Now he will use another set of three.

The unities of verse 4—“one body … one Spirit … one hope”—go together. It is the work of the one Holy Spirit to graft us into the one body and give us that one hope.

Verse 5 introduces another set of three: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” These unities are clustered around the one Lord Jesus Christ, just as the first are clustered around the Holy Spirit.

IV. One Church, One Lord

Now Paul gives us the forth thing that unites us.

To hear some Christians talk you would think we are saved by different gods when it comes to salvation.

Some will say something like,

When I got saved my heart was broken and I came crawling to an old fashion alter and it was there that I got saved.

They will go as far as to say,

If you havent had that happen to you, you might want to rethink your salvation.

Use this illustration

John T. MacNeil, Scottish preacher and evangelist, was a pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in the 1920s. They say he used to imagine a conversation that might have taken place between the man who had been born blind, whose story is told in John 9, and the other blind man who was healed by Jesus, whose story is told in Mark 8. The difference between the two stories is that in John 9 Jesus healed the blind man by spitting on the ground and making clay, which he used to anoint the man’s eyes. This did not happen in the case of the man whose story is told in Mark.

MacNeil imagined these two getting together to discuss how Jesus healed them. The man who had been healed without the spittle would tell his story, and the man who had been healed with the spittle would tell his. He would say to the other, “But you left out the part about Jesus spitting in the dust and making clay and placing the clay upon your eyes.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” the first would reply.

The man from John would answer, “It has to be that way, because that’s the way Jesus gives sight to people. You must have forgotten it. He spit on the ground; he made clay; he put it on your eyes, and he sent you to wash in the pool of Siloam.”

“Oh, no,” the man from Mark says, “he didn’t do that with me. He just spoke and I received my sight.”

The first man digs in his heels. “That isn’t right,” he says. “Jesus heals with clay! If you haven’t had that experience, I am beginning to doubt whether you can really see!” Thus originated in the early church the denomination of the “Mudites” and the “Anti-Mudites,” two divisions.

That is what happens when we get our eyes on the modes of how God works rather than upon the Lord who works.

You might not have come crawling and crying to an old fashioned alter but if you came to the place of realizing you are a sinner and that you have sinned against a Holy and righteous God and humbled yourself., Then realized that God sent His only begotten Son to die on an old rugged cross for you and recieved that gift by faith and believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, then guess what, you are saved by the same Lord that saved me.

Romans 10:9–10 KJV 1900

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

Its not in an experience, its in the the Lord Jesus Christ.

He is One Lord!

V.One Church, One Faith

Paul goes on: not only one Lord but “one faith.”

He is saying that because we have one Lord we also have one faith.

we do not believe diverse doctrines where the core of the gospel is concerned.

We believe that God Almighty sent his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to become flesh and die for our sins so that we could be saved

it is through faith in his work, not in anything that we have done or can do, but in his work of dying for us that we are saved.

That one gospel joins Christian people across all barriers of time, nationality, race, sex, and anything else we can imagine.

If we have one faith, then we ought to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder before the world and give united testimony to God’s saving work in Jesus Christ.

I will not stand with a Muslim or a Buddhist

I will not stand with a JW or a LDS

Why because they dont have the same faith as I do. When it comes to the doctrine of salvation, what you believe matters the most I think.

‘By grace are ye saved through faith. and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. Not of works least any man should boast.”

Do you have this faith?

Do You believe that Jesus is the only way?

VI. One Church, One Baptism

Now I could spend a lot of time here talking about how immersion is the biblical way of baptism and how all those that sprinkle are wrong but I dont think that is what Paul is trying to get across here.

I think Paul is attempting to tell them, it is your identification with Christ that unites them.

Have you made a public display of your new life by identifying with the life, death burial and resurrection of Christ?

Have you publicly said, ‘I am identifying with Christ and I am dying to the old life and I have been resurrected in new life?’

Baptism does not save you.

Jesus Christ is the only way.

What baptism does is publicly identifies you with Him.

If you have been born again, you are a child of God, if you have been baptized after salvation, you have made a public testimony to your fellowship with Christ.

Baptism after salvation, unties us as a family, by publicly expressing our allegiance to Christ.

The last thing Paul connects the unity of the church to is...

VII. One Church, One God

Paul wanted to be sure that he got this point across.

There is but only one true and living God.

Some may say, yall believe in three god’s

To that I say, NO!

We serve One God in three persons

You say how is that possible?

This will blow your mind.

I DONT KNOW, but I can tell you, its truth, because scripture proves it.

What I do know is that, trying to explain the trinity is trying to explain an infinite and Holy God, with our corruptible finite minds. You are not going to to it.

We just hold to what the Bible says and preach on!

Until you have made God your only god, you can not truly be part of the unified body.

If my arm had a mind of its own and did not want to do the same thing as my body, that would get kinda scary.

Same thing goes for the church.

If a member of the church, does not have the same goal as the rest of the body, the body wont work right and it would look kinda scary.

Paul is telling them and us that, in order for the body to function right, it must have the same goal.

It can not have anything other than God Himself as the driving force behind their activities.

Paul expands on this

A. Abundant Affection

‌God the Father is a father to all His children.

There are some who take this verse and use it as proof for the universal fatherhood of all people. I must reject that.

You see the words all?

They are in a masculine form, unlike John 3:16.

Here Paul is not referring to all of humanity, he is referring to all those that have or will call upon Christ to save them and bring them into the family of God.

Until you are born again, you are a child of the devil, a child of wrath.

By using the word Father, Paul is letting us know that we all that are in the family of God can enjoy the affection of a loving father.

B. Absolute Authority

“who is above all”

‌There is no other being or thing above God.

What he calls right is right what He calls wrong is wrong.

There is no higher authority then God.

When the whole body of believers understands this and believes it, they will stop focusing on their own agenda and start focusing on God’s.

C. Amazing Activity

‌God works through us and in us.

God does what he does because He is God

God does what He does through us because He is gracious

God does what He does in us, because he is glorious.

God comes into a sinners life and saves him and takes up residence in him for one reason and one reason only.

So that He may get the glory.

John 17:21–23 KJV 1900

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

Does God get the glory when His people fight and fuss?

No, God gets the most glory when we work and worship together as one body fitly joined together.

Conclusion

God has dictated to us that we are to be one body. To be part of that body, you must be attached to the body.

I ask you, are you part of the body of Christ?

Not the local church body, but the body of Christ. The Church?

If not, there is only one way you can become part of the body, and that is by accepting what Christ did for you on Calvary, believing that He is able and confessing that He is Lord.

Wont you come today and be saved?

Believer, wont you come today and ask God to help you forgive or ask forgiveness to those in the body that is keeping you from being in unity?