Sermon Tone Analysis

One Lord

August 12, 2007

*Ephesians 4:1-6*

* *

/One hot day, Herman Trueblood, all clean and cooled off by a nice swim in the ocean, saw a sweating man and his two sons trying on a hot day to push his disabled car up an incline.

Two voices started yelling at each other inside him.

One said, “There is an opportunity for service; you ought to help them push.”

The other voice protested, “Now that is none of your business.

You will get yourself all hot and dirty.

Let them handle their own affair.”

He finally yielded to his better impulse.

He put his shoulder to the task.

The car moved and kept moving./

/A simple thing then happened which Trueblood never forgot.

The father stuck out his dirty hand, and Trueblood stuck out his dirty hand.

The father said, “I am very glad that you came along.

You had just enough strength, added to ours, to make the thing go.”/

/“Years have passed since that hot day, but I can still hear that man saying, ‘You had just enough strength, added to ours, to make the thing go,’ ” Trueblood reflected more recently.

“There are many thousands of people struggling to get some heavy load over the hill, and I probably have ‘just enough strength, added to theirs, to make the thing go.’

”/

*/In other words, we’re to Bear One Another’s Burdens, working together for Kingdom purposes!/*

/ /

Please turn in your Bible to Ephesians, chapter four and we’ll read verses 1 through 6: /“I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing forbearance to one another in love.

being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”/

Why do you think Paul starts this section with “therefore”?

What is it there for except to point backward to all Paul has talked about in chapters one through three.

He now points forward.

Notice, he starts by calling attention to the fact that he is a prisoner?

/"I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord."

/I think the answer is that he wants them to feel the truth that it is worth it.

Walking worthy of our Christian calling (the calling to glory and everlasting joy with Christ) is worth being imprisoned for and worth dying for.

Writing from prison means that what he writes is dangerous.

It is not a nice, middle class way to solve your problems and be comfortable.

Real, radical Christianity is risky and unpopular and dangerous.

Jesus had given many warnings that following him was dangerous in the short run and safe in the long run.

For example, he said, in Luke 21:12-13:

/“They will lay their hands on you and will persecute you, delivering you to the synagogues and prisons, bringing you before kings and governors for my name's sake.

It will lead to an opportunity for your testimony.”

/

There is something very powerful about a testimony from prison where your life is at stake.

That's the power Paul wants to put behind these words.

The power we feel when we hear Richard Wurmbrand tell us of Tahir Iqbal, a Muslim convert to Christianity who was imprisoned December 7, 1990 in Lahore, Pakistan, and died in prison July 19 this year.

He was a paraplegic and confined to a wheel chair.

When asked about the possibility of being hanged he said, "I will kiss my rope, but will never deny my faith."

That kind of talk from prison is like a stiff wakening winter wind in the face of our drowsy, television-soaked, comfortable kind of Christianity.

It wakes us up and makes us dress spiritually for the winter battles.

That's what Paul wants to happen when we read his testimony from prison.

He wants us to wake up to all we have in Christ.

He pleads with the church to walk worthy of our calling.

Specifically, he emphasizes  be /"diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace"/ (v.3).

We walk unworthily of our calling in Christ if we disregard the unity of the body and don't expend every effort to safeguard what Christ died to obtain.

/"Be diligent,"/ Paul says, /"Be eager, be earnest" /to keep the unity given by the Spirit of God and obtained with the blood of Christ (2:16).

This is Paul's prison burden for the church at Ephesus.

If we have any empathy for a suffering church, it should make us say, Yes, unity is utterly crucial.

How, brother Paul?

How shall we achieve unity?

His answer is found in verse 2. The character traits that will preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace are humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and love.

So he says that a life worthy of our calling will lead to unity of the Spirit  /"with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing forbearance to one another in love."

/If you are humble you will be gentle, and if you are patient you will be forbearing or tolerant of one another’s weaknesses or idiosyncrasies.

And if you are gentle and forbearing in love, you will be a peacemaker and a unity preserver.

So be diligent and eager to be a humble and patient person by the power of Christ.

But beware of a modern mistake here.

Humble does not mean wishy-washy when it comes to truth.

Forbearing does not mean saying: truth doesn't matter or unity at all cost.

It is a great mistake to confuse humility with weakness to uphold truth.

But many today do confuse them.

They think that the only humble demeanor is the uncertain, vague, iffy demeanor – the smiling saint with no convictions..

Is that what Paul meant?

When he speaks of meekness, does he mean weakness?

*No!*

The only way to preserve the unity of the Spirit is to be certain in your grasp of truth.

He didn't seem to be that way.

I think G.K. Chesterton put his finger on our problem fifty years ago in a little book called Orthodoxy:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place.

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is the part he ought not to assert--himself.

The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason.

I think that's right because later in this chapter Paul says he wants Christians to not be babes any longer blown about by winds of doctrine but to come to the unity of the knowledge of the Son of God (4:13-14).

The humility that leads to unity is not uncertainty and doubt and vagueness and confusion.

It is the demeanor that says: I am not the center; truth is the center and I submit to the truth and go where it leads.

I am not king; God is king.

My will is not the law; God's word is the law.

I don't tell God how many faiths are acceptable to him; he tells me.

I don't define the foundation of the unity of the Spirit; God does.

That is what he is doing in verses 4-6.

Here he gives the unity that we are to pursue - the unity of the Spirit has nothing to do with our definition of truth and everything to do with God’s definition of truth.

We are humbly to recognize God’s truth and submit to it and rejoice in it and live it out.

*Amen!*

Now, let’s look at verses 4 to 6 more closely.

/“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”/

We have one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father.

This is the foundation of our diligent efforts to preserve the unity of the Spirit.

Our unity  rests on the oneness of God, the oneness of faith, the oneness of baptism and the oneness of the body.

Those things are one, no matter what you or I do.

They are fixed.

Our task is to walk worthily of them.

And what is a worthy walk?

We know it is our task as believers to walk worthy of our Lord.

But what exactly does that mean?

I’m going to venture a guess here that besides being humble and forbearing and loving and unified in truth, it means following the Great Commandment to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, and all of your mind.

Do you agree?

And if we love our neighbor as ourself, wouldn’t we want the best for them?

And isn’t the best – Jesus?