That Doesn’t Fit Anymore

SCRIPTURE.

Ephesians 4:25–32 NIV

Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold. Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

INTRO.

Does anybody else have somewhere in your life where you are practicing willful neglect? Let me say it differently, is there anything you know needs your attention that you’re just actively avoiding?

TENSION.

[SP note: share a funny/lighthearted place in your life where you are practicing willful neglect]

Confession: I have a place that has needed my attention for YEARS, that I am actively avoiding…because I don’t want to have to deal with it. And that place is a drawer in my house that is affectionally referred to as the “junk drawer.”

Do you have one of these at your house? The junk drawer is a drawer where I put everything that I don’t know where to put. Right now it’s a collection of semi-dead batteries that I’m apparently saving for later? There’s some 12Stone koozies that I got a couple of summers ago. It’s where I keep our lighter - like the one you light the candles in your house with. I found a pocket knife in there. A ribbon from a gift that I opened - apparently I thought I could use it again? The point is, there’s a TON of junk in there! No matter how clean my house looks, the truth is that there are places in my house that are not.

There are places in my house that I care about, that I work on keeping clean, and there are places that I tend to ignore and avoid. And my guess is that’s true of most families! Maybe your family ignores and avoids the garage. Or maybe it’s the inside of your car. Maybe it’s a random closet. I don’t know what it is that your family ignores and avoids, I just know most families have a place.

So something interesting to consider is this: as we talk about the church being a family this month, do you think that the church family has any places that it avoids and ignores? Is there a place in the church family where we tend to be messy, even if the majority of the house is pretty clean?

In a world of church hurt and pastoral scandals, I think most people would say yes. But, I think they would wrong about where.

And that’s why tonight we’re going to talk about community.

TRUTH.

In this series, we’ve been walking through why we do the things that we do as a church family. The past two weeks we’ve talked about worship and sitting under teaching. And we’re actually quite good at both of those. If you ask most people what their favorite thing about church is, worship and the teaching are pretty common answers. And in large part, I think it’s because we already have a good idea of how to do those. We were made to worship, it comes quite naturally to us. And in the teaching, we’ve been trained to sit under teaching in school. It’s learned, but we know our way around.

But I think that community is our church family’s junk drawer. It’s the place that we tend to avoid and ignore, which is why it tends to be the part of church that gets the most messy.

And so in order to learn about how we can do community well as a church family, I want to take a look at Ephesians chapter 4.

Ephesians was a letter written by Paul to the churches in an area called Ephesus. What’s interesting is that a lot of Paul’s letters are written to a specific church as a response to a specific problem that they were having. But that’s not the case with Ephesians. It’s a general letter written to THE church, not just A church. Paul’s goal for the letter was to help the people in these churches grow to become spiritually mature. It’s divided into 2 big sections: the first half of the letter is all about the gospel. It’s Paul retelling the gospel and reminding his people what they believe. The second half of the letter is all about how the gospel that Jesus followers believe gets practiced in every area of their lives, especially the church.

Where we’re jumping in in Ephesians 4 is the very first chapter of the second half of the letter. Here’s what he says in Eph 4:25-32,

Ephesians 4:25–32 NIV

Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold. Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

When I was in college and was learning to study the Bible, I had a professor who taught me a principle about any time that you see the word “therefore.” His line was “if you see a therefore, you need to go back and see what it’s there for.” Therefore always connects the passage that comes after it to something that was being said earlier.

So, our passage here is talking a lot about how we treat and interact with other people. But we aren’t going to be able to fully understand it until we connect it to the earlier passage that the “therefore” is pointing us to. So, let’s go see what the therefore was there for.

Here’s the passage RIGHT BEFORE - Eph 4:17-24

[SP Note: Keep this passage on the screen and SUMMARIZE, don’t read it directly]

Ephesians 4:17–24 NIV

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

So what he’s saying here is that there was a way of doing life before a person followed Jesus that must be exchanged for a new way of doing life once a person follows Jesus. He uses the example of an old piece of clothing that you take off in exchange for a new one. The old way of living, once you become a Christian, doesn’t fit anymore. You’ve outgrown it. To keep on your old clothes after you’ve outgrown them is a bad look. What he’s encouraging his people to do is put on the new clothes that fit.

So now that you understand there are things that used to fit that don’t any more now that you’ve decided to follow Jesus…THEREFORE…let me tell you what kinds of things fit and don’t fit. That’s what the therefore was there for. And verses 25-32 are Paul walking through a spiritual closet with his people and being like, “that fits! That’s terrible, get rid of that.”

And a LOT of the things in the closet that Paul walks through have to do with how we treat and relate with other people. He talks about:

Telling the truth vs. lying

Letting our uncontrolled emotions hurt others vs. controlling our emotions

Stealing from others vs. giving to others

Tearing others down in the way we talk about them vs. building others up in how we talk to them

Fighting with others vs. having compassion for others

Being bitter and plotting to hurt other back vs. forgiving others

The entire closet has to do with other people. And it makes you wonder: why does Paul care so much about how we treat and relate to other people?

I think it’s because Paul is trying to point out something, not that’s true of a particular church, but tends to be true of THE church. Which is that how we do community with each other tends to be our house’s junk drawer. How we treat and interact with each other tends to be the place in church that we willfully neglect. For many followers of Jesus, our community with each other looks an awful lot like our community at school, on our team, or at work.

To continue on with Paul’s illustration, most of us are wearing an outfit of how we do community that we should’ve outgrown when we became a Jesus follower. Even in church, we tend to struggle with lying to each other, with allowing our uncontrolled emotions to spew all over other people, with taking from others but never contributing to them, with tearing others down rather than building them up, with fighting with each other, and with being bitter and plotting to get back at each other. That’s the kind of stuff that is fitting for people who don’t follow Jesus, but it looks AWFUL on a person who claims to follow Jesus.

And the reason we tend to struggle with this is actually connected to a principle about the gospel that Paul taught in the first half of Ephesians. Remember, the first three chapters of Ephesians are an in depth review of the gospel story. In a way, the first three chapters teach us about God and the last 3 chapters teach us how to reflect God.

One of the things that Paul teaches about God in the first 3 chapters is that He is a trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is 3 persons in one. So, if that is true of God, then part of how we reflect God is that our lives have a trinitarian component to them. And if you pay attention as you read chapters 4, 5, and 6, you’ll see that Paul applies the gospel to 3 different areas of life: how we relate to God, how we relate to ourselves, and how we relate to others.

The temptation that so many churches face is to emphasize growth and maturity in how we relate to God and how we relate to ourselves, but to underemphasize, or even willfully neglect maturity in how we relate to others.

The point that Paul is making is this: It's impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining socially immature.

ILLUSTRATION.

[SP Note: have a “closet” with you on stage and interact with each “part” of the outfit as you talk about it. I’d recommend having one of your favorite shirts and pairs of shoes, and then buying/borrowing a child’s pair of pants]

Think about it like an outfit. Every good outfit has 3 different pieces that work together: top, bottom, and shoes.

So let’s say you go to the closet and you pick out a really cool top. Then you have a new pair of shoes you’ve been dying to wear. But then on the bottom, you’re still trying to fit into your favorite pair of jeans that you wore back in 2nd grade. Does that outfit work?

Even if the top and the shoes are perfect?

OF COURSE NOT. Why doesn’t it work?

Because the outfit only works if the WHOLE outfit works. If you neglect 1 part of the outfit, the whole outfit doesn’t look right.

APPLICATION.

And if that’s true, then it’s worth taking a moment to look in the mirror to see if we’re trying to wear anything that doesn’t fit.

But let me preface that by saying this: things like lying, uncontrolled emotions, taking but never contributing, tearing other people down, fighting with others, those kinds of things only don’t fit people who follow Jesus. We cannot be surprised with people who don’t follow Jesus when they act like people who don’t follow Jesus. Of course they’re going to lie, of course they’re going to tear other people down, of course they’re going to take and not give…they’ve not outgrown that stuff yet!

What Paul is writing here is NOT a prescription of how EVERYONE is supposed to act. This is a prescription of how CHRISTIANS are supposed to act. Here’s why I say that: the point of Paul’s teaching is for us to look OURSELVES in the mirror and see if WE are wearing anything that doesn’t fit. But a lot of times when we have a conversation like this, there’s a temptation to go to school and start pointing fingers at everyone else and tell them how bad they look. If your first reaction is to leave this teaching and go tell someone else how bad they look, you’ve missed it.

Paul is saying this so that we would take a moment to look ourselves in the mirror and ask the Holy Spirit, “is there anything that I’m currently wearing that doesn’t fit?”

As your pastor, can I lovingly hold up a mirror and point something out that I think many of us are wearing that doesn’t fit? A lot of us are wearing self-righteousness when we go to groups.

Some of us think that we’re spiritually mature because we’re good with God, but we’re completely neglecting how we relate to others. We think we’re mature because we read our Bible and pray and only listen to worship music, but when we show up to group we don't tell the truth in love, we have no control over our emotions, we just show up and take but never work to contribute, we tear others down so that we can feel built up, we’re bitter, we gossip and slander our brothers and sisters, and we give no space for anyone to not be perfect but expect other people to give that to us and are “church hurt” when they just do to us what we constantly do to them.

Groups are not just a thing that we do to waste 30 minutes at the end of service. Groups, just like worship and teachings, are part of how God grows us up into spiritual maturity.

So I want to pause right now and take 2 minutes for you to sit with God and just ask Him, “is there anything that I’m currently wearing that doesn’t fit?”

Pull up a note on your phone and write down what comes to mind as you sit with God.

[2 Minute timer on screen. Worship instrumental playing in the background]

Now that you’ve had a moment to look in the mirror, maybe tonight would be a good opportunity for your group to take a look in the mirror together.

Maybe tonight you need to make a decision as a group - what are we going to put on when we're in group? Because the truth is that your group could feel a lot like hell if you decide to keep your old self on each week. But I also believe your group could feel a lot like heaven if you decide to put on the new self each week.

Let’s pray.