Walking Worthy of Our Calling

Summary

This sermon emphasizes the importance of maintaining unity within the Christian community, urging believers to embody humility, gentleness, and patience in their interactions with one another. By understanding their calling to live in harmony, listeners are encouraged to actively engage in strengthening relationships among fellow believers, reflecting the unity of the triune God.

Transcript

Psalm 133 A Song of Ascents. Of David.

¹ Behold, how good and pleasant it is

when brothers dwell in unity!

² It is like the precious oil on the head,

running down on the beard,

on the beard of Aaron,

running down on the collar of his robes!

³ It is like the dew of Hermon,

which falls on the mountains of Zion!

For there the Lord has commanded the blessing,

life forevermore.

 

Sermon Text

Ephesians 4 I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ² with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³ eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ⁴ There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— ⁵ one Lord, one faith, one baptism, ⁶ one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.^[1]

 

The clear instruction we received from this passage in scripture is that we are called to walk in a manner worthy of our calling.

That is the clear admonition of this text.

That we as Christians are called to walk in a manner worthy of the calling that we receive from God. Obviously, that compels us to ask the question, well, what is our calling?

 

Well, before we answer that question, I want us to consider the reality that we’re all sinners here.

All of us here are sinners. We sin in one way or another. And because that is true, we naturally move away from one another. Sin at its essence is divisive. If you recall the story of Adam and Eve, what is the first thing that Adam and Eve do after they sin? They hide. Why? Because sin necessarily separates. It is in essence divisive.

 

Why do you think the first story after Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis? What’s the story?

A fight between two warring tribes? Is it a fight between two opposing political parties? It’s between two brothers. And so, sin is by nature divides between Abel and Cain.

 

There was, I mean, no politics to argue about, no inheritance to fuss about, no favoritism to complain about, but yet here, Cain takes it upon himself to kill, of all things, his brother. He could’ve yelled at him, he could’ve admonished him or he or he could’ve done anything but he decides to kill. And so, sin by its nature separates us.

 

Just think about it. Especially those who have been married. Who have you argued with the most in your life? Has it been your boss or a coworker? It’s often, if we’re honest, our spouses when there are disagreements. Sin by nature is divisive.

 

And so, God in undoing sin, he is bringing us together. And so, for that to happen, there’s vertical reconciliation between us and God. And then there is horizontal reconciliation. It’s the shape of the cross. The vertical, between us and God, and then horizontal. We’ve been reconciled to each other. That’s the cross shaped gospel.

 

We just read in Psalm 133. It says that there is a blessing when we dwell together in unity. And it says, at the end that God has determined that blessing be there: life forevermore.

Where? Were people dwell in unity, forever. So, sin by nature separates us. God and his mercy is gathering us from all tribes, language, and tongues to bring us together in Christ.

 

And so, Paul here is helping us understand that we are to call, we are called to walk in a manner worthy of our calling. And so, we saw last week that we have received this beautiful redemption. The focus of that redemption is to unite all things in Christ. And that’s why Paul says in Ephesians 2:19-22.

 

He says so, “you Gentiles are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” That’s reconciliation language. He continues, “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, (God’s word) Christ himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together.” Notice the language of reconciliation “[the household of God] grows into a holy temple in the Lord.”

 

So, we, as God gathers us, [we] are a holy temple and there, God has sent his Spirit to dwell.

And so, our calling if this is true, our calling is this, we’re called to live in the unity that God has accomplished through Christ. If God is purposing to gather all things in Christ, then our calling is to live in a manner that exemplifies, exhibits the unity that God is going to one day fully manifest. In other words, the church is called to be the manifestation of the unity that we are going to experience for eternity. We display god’s manifold wisdom.

 

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. Local churches are embassies of heaven. If you go to Botswana and you go to the US Embassy in Botswana, the values of this nation and the laws of this nation are also in Botswana, in in that embassy. In other words, that embassy, even though it’s in a land that doesn’t have our constitution, that doesn’t have our values, that embassy does.

It’s an outpost of the United States of America and we as a church are an outpost of heaven.

 

So, this morning, Paul is going to challenge us this morning. This is the main point of the sermon. He’s gonna challenge us to this: We must fight to maintain our spirit produce unity. I’m using that word fight purposely because the aggression that we should feel, the competition that we should feel, should be towards unity and not division. The competition that we should exhibit, the enthusiasm that we should exhibit should be towards unity and not division.

 

So, the main point is we must fight to maintain our Spirit-produce unity.

 

And so, look at again at Ephesians 4. He says, “I therefore.” And when you know that’s like the normal question, whenever you see a “therefore,” you ask, why is it therefore or something like that. I forget how it goes but “therefore,” always presupposes that the apostle is drawing on what he has said previously. And what did he say previously? He says that he is praying that our hearts will be full of love. Why? Because…well that’s not the only thing he says. He says that we are united, that God is gathering all things and uniting all things in Christ. That we were dead in our trespasses but now have been reconciled up to God and in in chapter 3, he says that the church displays God’s manifold wisdom and then he prays that the church would be full of love and it the reason he prays for that is because what he’s going to command that they do net requires love.

 

That’s why Harold when he was doing the confession was speaking about love. Love is hard and love can only be genuine if it’s Spirit empowers and so he says, “therefore,” making a transition from the doctrinal section of the letter to the Ephesians to the practical section.

 

Then he says, “I exhort you.” And that has a sense of authority. Paul is saying, “I’m telling you, not as an inferior, but as a superior, as an apostle I’m telling you what you are to do.”

 

And he tells them, “you must walk in a manner worthy of your calling.”

 

And again, the calling that we have received is to walk in unity. That means our lifestyle has to be compatible with what God is doing. Say for instance, you ask a doctor, which has a calling to seek the well-being of his patients. So, a doctor walking in a manner worthy of their calling would be to uphold the Hippocratic Oath.

It it would be to show compassion and mercy and to help those they are tending to.

Just imagine if the doctor just comes in and says, “Well, I think this.” And you respond, “well, I’m actually feeling this.”  But he don’t care and says, “I think it’s this and this is what we’re gonna do.” You’d be like, “wait, wait a minute.”

 

That that’s a doctor not walking in a manner consistent with their calling. They’re called to help not to come and bulldoze the patient.  Or imagine a judge. Just imagine if the judge is inventing laws or making judgments that are unconstitutional, not upholding equal justice. They would not be walking in a manner worthy of the calling and when we walk in this unity, we are not walking in a manner worthy of our calling.

 

Our calling is to walk in union with Christ and by extension, union with his body.  How do we do this? How do we do this?

 

Well, I want us to consider first the mindset of unity, the mindset of unity.

The mindset of unity is found where Paul says in verse two, he says, the mindset that we have to have is that of humility, gentleness, and patience. That is the mindset that we’re supposed to have as Christians. A mindset is, a belief, an attitude, a way of thinking that shapes how one lives.

If you think about history, and you think about, for example, Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had a mindset that failure wasn’t something detrimental but failure got him closer to the goal.

He had a mindset of perseverance and that’s why he says, “I have not failed, I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” That is a mindset.

 

He could’ve said, he could’ve quit, you know, at the hundredth time but he said, “I found ten thousand ways that don’t work, that don’t bring about the light bulb. But he persevered, he had a mindset.”

 

We as Christians have to have a mindset. What is our mindset? Our mindset is that we have to be humble, gentle, and patient. And the one who exhibits this the best is God himself. And that is our example par excellence. If we don’t look to Jesus, we don’t get the full grasp of what we are being called to.

 

You see, humility, gentleness, patience, those were, you know, bad words in in in the in the Greco Roman world. You wanted to be powerful? You couldn’t be humble. You wanted to be prosperous. You couldn’t be gentle. You wanted to be successful in life. You couldn’t be patient.

Those these were liabilities in that culture. Yet, Paul is saying, these aren’t liabilities. These are our mindset. We hold on to humility, gentleness, and patience.

 

But just think about Christ being God, Amazing Love is what we sang earlier. “How can it be that you are our king should die for me?”

 

And just think about that. The second person of the trinity takes to himself human flesh and he experiences death. You can say God died. Just think about that. That he took the form of a servant and sought our good. He is the king of, not the world, not a nation, not the world, but the universe. He sought to do us good. He put our needs before his.

 

He was gentle. The Bible describes Jesus in Matthew 11 as the one who is gentle and lowly. He is kind and compassionate. He is the one who exhibits tender care for his people. So, those whom he call to himself, he doesn’t berate them. He doesn’t crush a bruised reed. He deals with us gently and compassionately.

 

He is also patient. He is a patient God. We are reading through the Bible, and those who are reading are beginning to see Israel and their stubbornness and their rebellion against God. Yet, again and again, God is merciful to his people. He is kind. He is patient. One of the best expressions of patience is found in Exodus 34, where God reveals himself to Moses. “I, I, the Lord am compassionate, abounding in steadfast love and mercy.” That’s the God that we serve and that’s the mindset.

 

If we are gonna move towards one another and not away from each other, our mindset has to be that we are humble, gentle, and patient with each other. This is the mindset that we are to exhibit as Christians. Like Edison, we must be willing to endure resiliently for the sake of our unity in Christ.

 

Church, we must fight to maintain our Spirit-produced unity by having a mindset of unity.

 

But you ask yourself, how do we exercise this mindset? Paul uses basically two participles.

So, remember grammar, you have the main verb, walking worthy, and that main verb is now modified by these two participles. So, how do we walk worthy? Number one, bearing with one another at the end of verse two, in love. Bearing with one another in love.

 

Do you all recall the story of Hosea? And how he in chapter three of Hosea he is told, “Go love a woman who is loved by her lovers.” His wife had abandoned him and gone to the to be with other lovers and yet God tells Hosea to go love this woman who has abandoned him and has gone into prostitution and then he says, “just as I love Israel, that’s the same love I have toward Israel.” God was bearing with Israel in love.

 

You say, “Well, that’s disgusting. That’s terrible. God did this for Israel.

 

And so, this is the manner of our unity. First, the manner of our unity is we first bear with one another in love. And the second, it it says in verse three, “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bondage of of peace.”

 

The keywords here are “eager to maintain.” The word “eager” is like being almost in a crisis.

The exhortation is be throw yourselves wholeheartedly to maintaining this unity. Like, exercise yourself. Sweat a bit Maintaining this unity. It’s not, you know, you know, La-Z-boy kind of maintaining unity. It’s, you know, in the gym, squatting type of maintain. You’re exerting energy is what the apostle is saying here.

 

The other keyword is maintain.  Maintenance presupposes abuse. I remember having a discussion with my boss and he was complaining. I did something that he didn’t want me to do, and he got a little upset at me. And I said, “Well, you know, at least I did it.” And he replied, “Well, if I did it, it would be done right.”  And I basically replied by saying his tools were never used. In other words, he wasn’t exerting himself at the work and I was just telling him to calm down. “I’m exerting myself. I’m doing this maintenance. I’m working towards this project, and you haven’t used your tools in a long time.” Maintenance presupposes use and that we’re working at something, and that effort is being expended.

 

To stay in that same kind of realm, I used to work at Moody as an electrician and there were two crews and I worked on both. One was new install and one was maintenance. On which one do you think I liked to work on the most? It was new install. Why? Because when you do maintenance, it is hard because you gotta deal with mistakes that were done by people who did half jobs in the past or you have to, you know, tear out something that is all messed up. Maintenance is always harder than new install. But Paul is saying, “We must maintain.”

 

We must observe ourselves in maintaining the unity that the spirit has created upon us.

And so, since the church has been this is a quote by commentator O’Brien.

He says, since the church has been designed by god to be the masterpiece of his goodness and the pattern on which the reconciled universe of the future will be modeled.

Believers are expected to live in a manner consistent with this divine purpose to keep this unity must mean to maintain it visibly. We must maintain the unity.

 

I don’t know if you recall that the Australian crocodile guy. Y’all remember that guy back in the early 2000’s? When he would encounter a difficulty, he would say, “danger, danger, danger!” And so I wanna address three dangers. Danger, danger, danger.

 

The first danger is direct sabotage. This is when you and I participate in disunity purposefully.

Proverbs 6:16-19 says, “there are six things that the Lord hates.” And hate is a strong word.

Proverbs continues and says, “Seven [things] that are an abomination to [God].”

“Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, a hand that sheds innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and notice the seven one, the one who sows discord among brothers.”

 

When you sow discord among brothers, when you sabotage unity, you are working not against a leadership. You’re sabotaging God’s work of bringing us together. That’s why the Bible sets out a pattern for how to address particular grievances. Matthew 18 shows us that if you have a complaint, address your brother. If that brother doesn’t listen to you, bring one or two or three more. And then if they don’t listen to you, then bring it to the church.

 

It is dangerous thing to work against what God, is accomplishing. It’s a dangerous thing to work against what Christ died to accomplish. And so, there’s direct sabotage where you, participate in disunity by actions, and then there’s the opposite, which is passivity.

 

Passivity is a way that you just take it easy. Going back to maintenance, mechanics here in the room will know what PMs are. I don’t know if anyone else would know what PMs are, but PMs are preventative maintenance.

 

I remember having a car I would wait until the low oil light would turn on before I did my oil change. And one time, I was with a friend. He was sitting in the car. He’s like, “Why is your low oil light on?” I explained to him, you know, “I just wait until the low oil light is on and that’s when I do the oil change.” He’s like, after he almost hit me, he was like, “don’t do that.

Like, you’re gonna mess up your car.  You’re gonna ruin it.”

 

And so, preventative maintenance is, it is anticipating something that will potentially go wrong.

So, passivity is the lack of preventative maintenance. It’s like when you pass by a house and the bushes are overgrown, there is no preventative maintenance. It takes time to mow the grass, trim the bushes. So, PMs are necessary to prevent problems.

 

Now, PMs can’t solve everything, but it is a way that you prevent disunity from happening.

One of the reasons unity is not maintained in congregation is not so much by direct sabotage. It’s not like we are going out and sowing seeds of discord, but we’re passive. And passivity is detrimental to unity.

 

Ladies, just imagine if you’re the only one planning dates, planning vacations, taking initiatives with the kids, or setting goals for the family and your husband has checked out. That would be detrimental to the relationship. Or vice versa if the husband’s doing all this. So, we must be proactive in maintaining unity.

 

When there is low engagement in our lives with one another, there is a lack of maintaining preventative maintenance in our unity. We can actually work against our unity when we passively engage with one another with no intentionality.

 

One example of this, and I was encouraged, not too long ago where Evy and Roseanne visited several ladies of our congregation. And you can say that that’s preventative maintenance.

Why? Because they are seeking to maintain them. These are ladies who are haven’t been able to attend, and they were providing maintenance for them in the sense that they were being loved.

 

There is an investment by these women, and this leads me to the third danger.

The last danger is privatization. We live in a world that is very individualistic and we just like our to isolate ourselves. And so, we live lives unknown by others or we try to live too private of a life. No one knows our struggles, our discouragements, our uncertainties, our doubts, nothing.

This is why I think Paul commanded hospitality for the church, so that they can throw themselves into knowing each other in relationships. Paul doesn’t command the church to do this just because. Paul is doing it intentionally and a reason for this is to know one another, we have to live life with one another.

 

There’s a guy at this gym that I go to and he’s pretty cool. Every morning, he says hi to me and I say hi back. I feel our relationship is great. But if you ask me what his name is, I don’t know.

Why? Because there’s a way to be related to someone where I just don’t know who they are.

And when we are so private in our lives that we guard ourselves against the intrusion of the body of Christ, then we are in danger of not maintaining the unity of the spirit.

 

Paul, when he goes to Thessalonica and he’s preaching to the church there, he tells them that he not only shared his the gospel with them; he shared his very life.

Paul, his struggles, his hardship, his joys, his laughter, his sorrows, his anxiety, the things that caused him pain. He shared it with the Thessalonians. He didn’t just share the gospel with them.

He shared his life with them.

 

That is the beauty of the church, that we’re known.  One of the hardest realities in life is to live our lives unknown by people. In the church, we known by God but we’re also known by his people.

 

So, if we’re gonna fight to maintain our spirit, produce unity, we must understand the manner of our unity: Bearing with one another in love and eagerly maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

 

Lastly, in verses four to six, Paul anchors our unity in this theological oneness, this foundation.

He uses the word “one” seven times. And he says that our unity has a Trinitarian anchor. The anchor of our unity is Trinitarian.

 

He says, “One body, one Spirit.” And then he says, “One hope,” and then he says, “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” So, you have the Spirit and the Lord is Jesus and one God and Father of all.

Our unity is anchored on the triune God of the gospel who is one God in three persons and so as a congregation, we reflect the unity that God shows us in his triune nature when we maintain, when we eagerly maintain the unity that the Spirit has produced in our lives.

 

So, this morning, you are being invited to walk in a manner worthy of your calling. God is calling you to live in the unity that you have been called to. The question is, will you fight to maintain our spirit produce unity? Will you throw yourself into this glorious work? Will you find our unity to be good and pleasant? Will you believe that it is in this place, in the unity of the church, that God sends forth his blessings forevermore? Will you fight for our Spirit-produced unity?

This is the exhortation and that’s the question. Let us pray.

^[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Eph 4:1–6.