One Body, Many Contributions

Bible Reading

Ephesians 4:1–16 NLT

1 Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. 2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all. 7 However, he has given each one of us a special gift through the generosity of Christ. 8 That is why the Scriptures say, “When he ascended to the heights, he led a crowd of captives and gave gifts to his people.” 9 Notice that it says “he ascended.” This clearly means that Christ also descended to our lowly world. 10 And the same one who descended is the one who ascended higher than all the heavens, so that he might fill the entire universe with himself. 11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. 14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.

Le’s pray. Lord, help us to hear this word to your church, and to apply it to ourselves in the way you intend for us. We know that you want to build us up by your word, and so we listen with open hearts and minds. Amen.

Team Exercise

As always, I want to communicate what Paul is teaching us in this passage as powerfully as possible. Sometimes that needs more than words. Today’s passage marks the beginning of the “application” part of Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, so it’s doubly important to properly apply this to our own lives. To achieve that, I thought a little “team building” exercise would help.

No, I’m not going to ask you to fall into each others’ arms, or climb on ropes, or whatever.

Rather, I want you to come up with a team for a new business. Here are the businesses:

A restaurant

A GP’s practice

A furniture maker

Now, I’ll count around dividing people into pairs doing one of those three businesses, and I’d like the pairs to come up with they list of people with the required skills in order to make this business work. You’ll have a few minutes to come up with the list, and then we’ll see how we went.

Everyone got that?

OK, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 1, 1, ...

[A few minutes later]

How did we go? What people do we need to set up a restaurant? What people do we need to set up a GP’s practice? What people do we need to set up a furniture maker?

Now, each of these businesses has a single purpose, right? But can any of them thrive with just one person?

That’s right. These businesses may have a single goal, but they have a diversity of skills and employees. Real teams are like this. Most importantly, the church is like this.

One

Ephesians 4:1–6 NLT

1 Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. 2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all.

If you look again at Ephesians 4:1-6, you’ll see that Paul applies the theology of his first three chapters via a key theme: unity. We, the church, are now united in our common faith and the one Spirit who dwells in all of us and who reconciled each of us to Christ. Because of that we should behave as one people.

Remember that the early church was built on vast diversity. The division between Jew and Gentile made the division between Democrat and Republican look like a brotherly squabble. And the gulf between slave and wealthy patron was greater than any division in modern Western society. And yet these groups were expected to show long-suffering forebearance to one another in love. Why? Because the one Spirit joined them together in a bond stronger than any conflict!

Paul is calling on the Ephesians to recognise the theological foundations of their faith: they are all recipients of God’s grace (one faith), they all come into the church through the same mechanism (one baptism), and they are all under the same loving authority (one Lord). There is no room for “special treatment” based on your ethnicity, economic class, or ability.

But at the same time, Paul knows that every Christian comes to the faith with their own history. This history does not vanish, it continues to influence how we think, what we value, and how we live (or “walk” as Paul puts it). And so we must be patient with one another, recognising in each other a precious child of God, equally as valuable as we are, despite their differences.

And those differences won’t all disappear. God values some of our differences. Unlike Darth Sidious (who was evil) God doesn’t want a clone army. In fact, God gives gifts that are not all identical, making us even more distinct than we already were.

Gifts for the Church from Christ

Ephesians 4:11–13 NLT

11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.

Why did Jesus give gifts to the church? So that every person in the church could do the work of the church: loving God, one another, and their neighbours.

What are these gifts? Well, I feel a little embarrassed saying this, so I’ll just quote Paul, they are “the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers.”

In recent years, most people in the Christian church have more-or-less assumed that this group of people are the people who do the work of the church. Paul, however, doesn’t think so. He asserts that this group is there to equip every person in the church to do the work of the church.

In verse 7, Paul said that Jesus has given each one of us a special gift, and then in verse 11 he explains that these gifts are the various servants and teachers of the church. Does that mean that every Christian is an apostle, or a prophet, or and evangelist or a pastor or a teacher? No, of course it doesn’t! (And we can see that in the early church there was no such expectation). What it does mean is that every Christian is given one or more of these types of people to equip them to grow in Christ. In other words, we all need to be part of a church. It is impossible to be a solo Christian!

We can’t be a Christian on our own because we need different people doing different tasks to help us all grow up together until we are full representations of Jesus.

And remember: we are all gifts from God to a fallen world. Some of us are gifts whose role is to equip others. Others of us are gifts whose role is to love our neighbour in our workplace or home. But we are all gifts to the world: light, salt, a city on a hill, the growing body of Christ. Let us never forget that!

Closing

So, to close, I’d like to read Paul’s final words in this section.

Just a note, as you listen to this, think about the pronoun “we.” In the individualistic West, we hear that word as “me, you, him, her, etc.” But it means more than that in most cultures, and certainly here in Paul’s letter. It also means the group, the body of which we are all a part. So “we” means all of us, but it also means the church as one organism.

As a pastor-teacher in Renew, my goal is to equip each of us and all of us to be God’s ambassadors in the world. So I agree wholeheartedly with Paul when he says,

Ephesians 4:14–16 NLT

14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, we pray that you would make us fit together perfectly. Help us each to do our own special work, helping each other grow, so that the whole of Renew is healthy and growing, reaching the world with your love. Amen.