Axios
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Today, we mark an important moment in sacred time. We gather today to celebrate the greatest event in human history, the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead! We know from the Gospels there were other resurrections or returns from the dead: Lazarus, the dead girl that Jesus said, “Talitha Kum,” and the many who came out of their graves in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus' resurrection is the only thing that guarantees new life! We mark this moment but we live from this moment because this moment guarantees all that we hope for in the life to come and in this life.
Today, we are also marking another moment. Today, we begin to flesh out that part of our mission statement that says, “we want to wholeheartedly follow Jesus.” Last, we began the conversation by saying you need to be part of a worshiping congregation to even begin to wholeheartedly follow Jesus. Today, we are going to start a study of the book of Ephesians. That is right over the next few months we are going to let Paul’s letter to the Ephesians enlighten our conversation about “living wholeheartedly for Jesus.” The entire message of Ephesians can be nicely summed up as, “The Resurrection of Jesus establishes the conditions so that you can live wholeheartedly for Jesus.” In the first three chapters, Paul gives us a heavenly perspective of the power and work of the Resurrection and in the last three chapters, he shows us how the resurrection ensures that Jesus is alive and present in the smallest corners of our lives.
Let’s prepare our hearts to receive God’s word today:
Hafoka-Bah in Hebrew and English.
Ephesians 4:1, 7-8
Therefore I, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received,
Now grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the Messiah’s gift. For it says: When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity; He gave gifts to people.
This is God’s Word for Us Today.
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“Practice Resurrection,” a phrase I got from Wendell Berry strikes just the right note. This passage is the pivot passage for the entire letter of the Ephesians. It nicely sums up what came before and points forward to what comes after. It is a simple, yet, profound truth Paul puts forward: when we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus and enter into what is more than we are.
This truth is always under constant threat. On the one side, is an American form of Christianity that is highly energetic about new birth but not long-term Christian growth. These pastors and their churches organize everything around creating new birth. Don’t hear me wrong, evangelism and mission are critical and important to the Jesus Mission. Go back and listen to my first few messages in this series.
For parents, birth is marked by joy and wonder and accompanied by gifts and smiling faces. The euphoria of new birth lasts a few weeks, considerably longer than it took to conceive the child but it is not indefinite. And eventually, all euphoric parents face the same fatigue because growth is marked by anxiety, panicking emergency room visits, late-night calls to a doctor, worries over friends, conferences with teachers, puzzling over adolescent behavior and misbehavior, and don’t forget that first road trip with friends. Birth is quick and easy, growth is endless and complex.
So, many churches are like maternity wards. They specialize in new birth and try to ride on the constant high of continual new births. But eventually, the birth must lead to growth, or else small babies will turn into adult children. Many of these churches and pastors refer out their growth to books, conferences, para-church organizations, and so forth. The American church on one side runs on the euphoria and adrenaline of new birth - getting people saved, into a church, into causes, into programs but not growing them “into the full stature of Jesus.”
Then on the other side is the congregants who have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions necessary for growth: quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. It is what the psalmist called “the beauty of holiness” (Psa 29:1-2). It is not so much finding God but playing hide-and-go-seek with God. Not finding but being found, and found as a child. A child, like my daughter Hazel, who one day on the way home from school was holding her tongue and trying to talk to it. I asked what she was doing and she said, “My teacher told me I had taste buds. So I am giving all my buddies a name.” What we take for granted, taste buds, became a mystery of wonder and amazement. Congregants don't want this wisdom. One of our great writers Kathleen Norris said, “The wisdom of a child is difficult for us grown-ups to retain. At the very least, we are expected to keep such foolish activity to ourselves.” Congregants want a serious message with timeless principles that make them a success.
By deleting or delegating spiritual formation, the life of prayer, contemplation, the beauty of holiness - growing up in Messiah - to specialized ministries, bible schools, or groups we remove it from the center of congregational life. We disconnect growth from birth and place growth at the margins. Here me again, evangelism is essential. But, if evangelism is essential then growth in the Messiah is necessary.
The Resurrection of Jesus establishes the conditions so that you can live wholeheartedly for Jesus. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus and enter into what is more than we are.
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Therefore I, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk worthy (Axios) of the calling you have received… - Eph 4:1
Therefore I, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received,
We must begin at what is the center. An urgent plea towards one single word: “worthy,” axios.
At the center of Ephesians, the heart of Paul’s urgent plea is the Greek word axios on which the whole letter pivots. Axios is a word with a picture in it. Axios is a set of balancing scales, the kind of scales formed by a crossbeam balanced on a post, with pans suspended from each end of the beam. You place a lead weight of, say, one pound in one pan and then you weigh out a pound of flour or peppers in the other pan until they are in balance. Balance means equilibrium. The unknown weight of the flower is being measured against the known weight in the other. When the two items are in balance they are axios - worthy. They have the same value, or, in this case, weight. These items can be as different as lead and flour but they now are worthy of each other. They make sense together.
The items balanced in the Ephesians scales are God’s calling and human living.
Therefore I, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk worthy (Axios) of the calling you have received… - Eph 4:1
Therefore I, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received,
I urge you, Paul writes to walk worthy of the calling. Why is this plea so urgent? We can only guess. Whenever that word “urge” is used in the Scriptures it means there is an urgent message God’s people need to hear because they are under assault from an enemy: sin threatening the life of righteousness, evil looming outside the door, culture pushing its influence into the center of the colony of heaven. For the Colony at Ephesus, something - sin, evil, culture - is threatening their Axios.
For Paul, it is urgent that our walking and God’s calling are in balance, we are whole. When we are at Axios then we are living maturely, living responsibly to God’s calling, living congruently with the way God calls us into being. Axios, worthy - living wholeheartedly for Jesus.
Everything in Paul’s letters centers on being Axios, worthy. The letter is divided into three chapters of heavenly theology designed to ground you in God’s calling (1-3) and then your walking (4-6). Here is where most people fail to achieve Axios. They are measuring the wrong things on the scales. On the one hand, some people don’t measure their walk against God’s call. Instead, they measure their walk against their human potential, their success, failures, their past, their friends, their spouse. This will never reach the Axios that produces resurrection living. And, if experience has taught me anything it will produce false results, pain, and sorrow. Nor can we turn the calling of God into an abstract principle. The calling of God is not an impersonal idea. The calling of God is his personal presence calling you and me into the beauty of holiness, the wonder of relationship. We cannot become Axios so long as we treat God in an impersonal way. Axios requires demands insist on knowing God in a personal way. God calls; we walk.
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I…urge you to walk worthy (Axios) of the calling you have received… - Eph 4:1
Therefore I, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received,
Calling. God calls us. We do not call ourselves. Karl Barth said it well, “For we do not find the Word of God in the reality present to us; rather, the Word of God finds us in the reality present to us.” He finds us to call us not to give us a lecture, not to condemn, not to shame but to enter into what it is more than what we are. God calls; we walk.
Adam broke God’s command thus broke intimacy. Axios was destroyed and intimacy was lost. God called Adam again and began the process of creating Axios. Abraham was called by God to leave his country. Abraham walked, and walked, and walked to Moriah where there with a knife to his son’s throat he reached Axios and God halted the knife and he became the father of faith. Moses was called and walked. He walked to the burning bush, walked out of Egypt through seas to freedom, and found moments of Axios. Jesus on the shores of Galilee called four (Andrew, Peter, John, and James). Jesus kept calling, they became twelve. He walked with them. Walked everywhere listening, learning, asking, obeying, failing, praying, always walking with their master to Jerusalem until they abandoned him. After he rose from the dead they heard his voice, his call, and began walking again and they became the company of the Holy Spirit. Jesus called Saul, it was not easy, but after blindness, he began walking. Like Moses, Saul learned the name of the one calling him, “It is I Jesus whom you persecute.” Saul became Paul and life for Paul was different, it was Axios.
God calls from the Bible and we walk. The Hebrew word for Bible is Miqra. Miqra is a Hebrew noun from the verb qara “to call” for example “he calls to you so you will hear him and talk to him.” We use the word Bible and think “book.” But the Bible is not a book to carry around and read for information on God, the Miqra “Bible” is a voice to listen to. I like that the Bible is a voice to hear and be obeyed, gets on the path. Fundamentally, the Miqra is a call: God’s call to us. He finds us, as Barth said, through this ever calling, speaking text.
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I…urge you to walk worthy (Axios) of the calling you have received… - Eph 4:1
Therefore I, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received,
The proper response to calling is walking. Walking, following the call is what we do. We hear and we obey. The walking does not start with thinking. God is not an idea. When my wife called me on Wednesday and said, “Michael, I am outside the house. Come to the car and I will take you to the auto-shop to get your truck.” The first thing I did not do was exegete her sentence: is the verb “come” in the imperative or is cohortatively implying a gentle suggestion. When she said “outside” did she mean that metaphorically or literally. My wife is not a philosophical principle to be pondered, she is a living being to be heard and obeyed. God is not an idea, He is a living being to be heard and to be obeyed. And our obedience is not a trained Pavlovian response to a stock stimulus: “sit and you get treat.” The call takes place within the personal texture and complexity of our lives. And responding to the call is not perfected through repetition like swinging the bat at a ball in baseball. Just repeat, repeat, repeat until repetition equals perfection. The call is varied the circumstance varied, each call of the Miqra, the Bible, is unique, unique to you. Our obedience is not generic, based on some generic principles like, “Filling a Great Position Does Not Necessarily Make You a Great Person.” When the Miqra of God finds you, it finds you personally not generically.
The call comes into our ears beckoning us into some bright but unknown future. It beckons us into a way of life just beyond the horizon of our experience. The calling brings us into a way of life that is new and full of promise, blessing, the life of new creation, a resurrection life.
When the calling and walking are in equilibrium, we are Axios worthy. The thing about the balancing scales is they do not provide us with a picture of something static. Something that when once achieved it just sits there and never moves. Paul’s use of this metaphor is brilliant, it keeps us eyes-wide-open, delicate, sensitive to our connection between the calling and the walking. That is what it means to grow up into maturity in the Messiah, to live wholeheartedly for Jesus. Axios.
We don’t try to get to Axios alone. That was the problem of too many mystics who abandoned the community to try to find deeper experience alone in wildernesses. Even Elijah had to be told to get off that lonely mountain and go and find Elisha. We don’t walk alone, we need the friends of God. Private worship while alone in semi-paralysis before a TV screen is not mature worship. Maturity develops in friendship with the friends of God, not just our preferred friends.
We need a Steel Magnolia community. The film is about the bond a group of women shares in a small-town southern community, and how they cope with the death of one of a young mom, daughter, and beloved friends, Shelby Jackson. At that graveside, we see a bond that somehow can make the grieving loss of and agony of Shelby’s mother M’Lynn (played by Sally Fields) bearable. A group of friends as bright and chipper as Clairee to the town curmudgeon and Drum Eatenton's nemesis Ouiser somehow help a grieving mother walk out the death of her daughter. She reaches Axios not alone but because of community.
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How is Axios “worthy” possible? Many have wandered this path and gotten lost. Many have shipwrecked and others like the Evergreen Shipping Vessel got sideways and stuck for days, months, and some for years. Paul gives us the necessary fuel, condition for Axios: the resurrection
Now grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the Messiah’s gift. For it says: When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity; He gave gifts to people. - Eph 4:7-8
Now grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the Messiah’s gift. For it says: When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity; He gave gifts to people.
Paul in good Jewish fashion has been meditating on Psalm 68. There is no doubt in my mind and in most biblical scholars' minds, that the entire letter to the colony at Ephesus has been influenced and shaped by Psalm 68s influence on Paul’s imagination. He has heard Psalm 68 as a psalm of victory for the Messiah Jesus and for God’s people.
Psalm 68 is a Psalm of Victory. It started off by requesting God to arise and scatter His enemies. And guess what? He rises and scatters his enemies. And that act of God attracts the worshiping community, levies, dancers, priests, Israel, the nations, angels gathered at His heavenly sanctuary and the end of the Psalm concludes that God gives away power and strength (Psalm 68:35), “God, You are awe-inspiring in Your sanctuaries. The God of Israel gives power and strength to His people. May God be praised!”
God, You are awe-inspiring in Your sanctuaries. The God of Israel gives power and strength to His people. May God be praised!
Back to Paul. - Eph 4:7-8
Now grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the Messiah’s gift. For it says: When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity; He gave gifts to people.
Paul makes at least six changes to the original Hebrew text. My sense is that Paul has been listening to the song of Psalm 68, has absorbed it and meditates, and prays on it. He adapts it to the resurrection of Jesus. He understands that Psalm 68 is the text that gives the necessary condition for the Axios to be possible. Psalm 68 assures that we don’t try to achieve Axios by our own strength but by the strength and operation of the Trinity in the practice of resurrection.
I want to highlight three of the changes that are the most important to understand. Paul’s translation runs,
When He ascended on high, He took captive captivity; He gave gifts to people.
His first adaption makes Jesus the subject of the verb “ascended.” The Psalm text had Elohim, God, as the subject but Paul has Jesus as the subject of the verb ascending. He thus makes this psalm of victory a witness to the resurrection of Jesus and without a blush acknowledges that Jesus is Elohim, God.
His second adaption is that Jesus took captive captivity. Psalm 68 said, “God had taken many captives” meaning he had taken lots of prisoners in his war. Paul again sees the resurrection of Jesus as taking away once held all of us in captivity: namely, sin, the devil, and the corrupting power of the flesh. Jesus' resurrection was a deathblow.
The first two changes prevent us from seeing Jesus' physical resurrection and ascension to just a throne in our hearts. He does reign in our hearts but it is so much, much more than that. He now rules over all power, principalities, rulers, and names that can be named and he also rules in your heart! And he dealt a deathblow to Satan, Sin, and the Flesh. If we do not know these two things we will never walk worthy, Axios, because Satan will create fear of the fall, sin will distress you during the walk, and the flesh will fight you every moment. Knowing this is knowing that greater is He who lives in us than He who lives in the world and the power that lives in me is the same power that rose Jesus from the dead.
The last adaption Paul makes is “he gave gifts to people.” The psalmist had said, “you receive tribute from people.” That is fitting for a King who just won a universal victory for people to bring gifts. The Magi brought gifts to Jesus in anticipation of his rule. He does accept our gifts but here Paul has made an adaption. A resurrection adaption. Jesus gives us gifts. Paul wants us to see Jesus at the right hand of God not as the king who receives gifts (although he does that too) but as the king who gives gifts. And what gifts did he give? He tells us (Eph 4:11-13),
And He personally gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the training of the saints in the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into a mature man with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.
And He personally gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and teachers, for the training of the saints in the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into a mature man with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.
Through his resurrection, he gave us the gift of one another so we could become Axios, “worthy.” He gave us one another so that we could practice resurrection living. I will come back at a later time in this series and teach you much more about these gifts of apostle, prophet, and so-on but for now just know that you are his gift for someone else so they can become Axios, “worthy.”
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The resurrection was not ever meant to just be a spectacular show to amaze you like a magician pulling a damsel out of a magic hat. The resurrection is so much more than that, it is everything. It is the centerpiece of history and the cornerstone that gives us life and communicates the presence of Jesus to us now, here, in the present. When we understand the resurrection correctly we understand that it is God’s way of creating Axios, equilibrium between God’s calling and our walking. It is what gives us the ability to live wholeheartedly for Jesus.
So today, we mark the resurrection of our King who took captive captivity and gave us gifts. Today, we mark our desire to practice resurrection living, Axios, worthy, God’s call, our walk coming together in equilibrium. And today, we mark this new season of growing together in God’s word to us in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
I want to live this way, the Jesus way and I want to do it together with you.
