Body Parts

[0:00] So, just to recap a little bit from last week, just for a minute, remind you of what I put into your minds last week.

[0:16] ! We came away asking three questions. One was, where do I find strength in time of need?

[0:27] And I suggested that you might look at Psalm 121 to give you some clues. The second thing is, a really, in a way, a really deep question.

[0:41] What does it mean to make Jesus the authority over my life? I think I said that, go to any congregation, really, and say, do you accept the authority of Christ in your life?

[0:56] You know, you ask the questions along that vein at confirmations and that kind of thing. And there are very few people who would say, no, not really.

[1:07] Most people say yes. And my question is, what does that mean when we say yes to questions like that? And the third thing was, do we take the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms seriously enough?

[1:23] Those malign influences that are beyond our vision, we can't see them. But we had the sense that they are doing their malign manipulation of the human race.

[1:41] And so that was something I said you could go away and think about this week. So what's happening at the beginning of chapter 4 is there is a massive transition in the epistle.

[2:01] And it's a transition from belief, the wealth of the believer, as it were, to behaviour.

[2:13] If this is what you believe, this is how you're meant to behave. And that seems a reasonable thesis.

[2:24] I think we would all say that we want to be driven by our values, by the things that we really claim to be the things we believe in.

[2:39] And Ephesians 4, 1 to 16 has a very clear structure to it. First of all, there is this kind of generic call to the church.

[2:53] Massive challenge, I think, for most of us, not least in the age in which we live. Paul says, as a prisoner for the Lord, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.

[3:06] I mean, you think about that. If you think about the fact that despite whatever things there are that are wrong in your life, and there are bound to be some, if you think about those, God has still chosen you.

[3:25] Talked about that when we looked at Ephesians chapter 1. God has chosen you, and in your way you have chosen him. And Paul is basically saying now, if you get that, then this has huge ramifications for the way that you do life.

[3:48] Walk worthy of the calling which is yours. The second thing by way of structure, verses 2 to 5, Paul talks about the unity of the church.

[3:59] And Paul has this, it's a kind of repeated theme in Paul's teachings. That as Christians, we are called together to live in unity.

[4:14] And then ironically, verses 8 to 13, having stressed the unity of the church, Paul then expresses the diversity of the church.

[4:25] And what he means by that is that in every local church situation are Christians. And when we become Christians, God puts the Holy Spirit into our hearts and gives us spiritual gifts.

[4:40] We'll talk a little bit about that in a few moments of time. So, this generic calling to live a life worthy of the calling that God has given us.

[4:51] Second, the unity of the church. Thirdly, the diversity of the church. And then, verses 14 to 16, the maturity of the church.

[5:04] And it seems to me, although it's a very short section, to be a massive kind of issue for churches.

[5:16] That is, you know, when I was a young fellow, I spent a short time working in what was basically an industrial greenhouse.

[5:28] And we grew tomatoes and cucumbers in this warehouse. And it became very clear to me that the purpose of a greenhouse is to manipulate the climatic conditions so that things like tomatoes and cucumbers can grow.

[5:49] And I think, if I might use that analogy to say, I think one of Paul's big ideas about the church was that, not that we manipulate, but that we should create the kind of climate in our churches where people grow up into Christ.

[6:07] I've got a little more to say about that in just a few moments' time. And so, here's the structure. The generic calling to walk worthy of the calling which is ours in Christ.

[6:18] Secondly, the unity of the church. Thirdly, the diversity of the church. And fourthly, the maturity of the church. Verse 3, Paul tells us that the church, the unity of the church, is a gift from God.

[6:38] It's something that's given. He writes there, make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

[6:49] Not make every effort to achieve it, but to maintain it, as it says in some of the older translations of the Bible. And in the lead-up to that verse, Paul talks about the kind of qualities that we Christians in our church communities should model.

[7:07] And again, they're very challenging, I think. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient, bearing with one another in love.

[7:20] Those qualities make no sense outside of relationships. Be humble. I've done so much speaking recently, I can't remember where I said this, but one of the things that shocks me these days is, I have a Facebook account, and I mean, I don't look at it that often, and I think, you know, there are about 1,500 Facebook entries that I've never looked at on there.

[7:48] But I have noticed that increasing number of clergy think that Facebook is a place to kind of do a spiritual version of boasting and self-promotion.

[8:05] And I don't think that's becoming of ministers of the Church of Jesus Christ. I just think that humility is something, I guess, you know, many of us have to kind of put some effort in not to make ourselves the centre of attention.

[8:24] My mother, who I think, she had been a ballerina in her early life, and unlike a lot of people who don't like thousands of people looking at them in rather scantily clad tutus, not that that's ever been my experience, but I mean, I think it kind of, I mean, to do it, there must have been some easiness with wanting people to look at you and appreciate what you were doing.

[9:00] In her senior years, it did become, it did feel like that this woman wants to make herself the centre of attention all the time.

[9:10] She could hold the floor without invitation. And one of the things I will say about my mum was she was converted at the age of 53 from nowhere, really, and the death of my grandmother kind of drew her into this rather dreary kind of middle-of-the-road church, but somehow the pastoral care of the minister there, and she became born again Christian and very enthusiastic, and I've never forgotten this, that when my sister and I went to sort out her home, we found several shoeboxes full of letters, and one of the things my mum took to in the, she got cancer, and it was a kind of slow burn cancer, and I can't remember how many years she had it for, I thought it was longer, Anthony thinks it was about seven years, I don't know why,

[10:11] I thought it was a bit longer than that, but during that time, she was an accredited speaker with Christian Viewpoint, and she would go to Christian Viewpoint meetings and talk about her testimony in relation to having cancer, and very clearly what she said was very powerful, and indeed life-changing from some of the women that went to listen to her, so I don't know whether that was God hallowing her need to be in the spotlight, but certainly God used my mum in those Christian Viewpoint meetings to talk about her experience of having the big C.

[10:56] So these qualities don't make any sense outside of relationships, and Paul tells us, not only is unity a gift from God, but he says that we have to, this is his words, in the old versions of the Bible, the word endeavour was used.

[11:14] It says here in verse 3, make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. The unity of the church is given, but the problem is we have the ability to disrupt it.

[11:31] Those of us who like to gossip can disrupt the unity of the church. Those of us who withhold forgiveness can disrupt the unity of the church. And I remember David Watson saying in his heyday that he, in his experience, this is a guy who's in a different church four or five times a week, he said in his experience, the thing that most inhibited the ministry of the gospel in churches was disunity in the churches.

[12:01] I've experienced that myself. I've never forgotten turning up in a church in Windsor, church wardens were there to greet me, and wandered up to the thing. And they said, can we have a word?

[12:13] And I said, I think you're going to anyway. They said, can you get rid of our vicar? I said, depends what you mean.

[12:24] But, you know, if I'm going to get rid of him, I need very good reasons, not just a, you know, two minute conversation on them.

[12:36] So they then went into this character assassination from this dear man. I mean, he's a lovely guy. And he was getting into old age.

[12:46] He's pastorally very good and in lots of ways. But let's just say he wasn't the most dynamic minister ever to, you know, stalk the planet. And I had to sit them down and say to them, do you know what?

[13:00] I have very little confidence in the future of this church. They said, yeah, we don't either. He's useless. I said, and that's why I have no confidence.

[13:14] Because you should not be disrupting the unity of the church with this kind of talk. So I, then they fastened on to the thing that, you know, like in our world, I mean, whistleblowers always used to get sacked.

[13:29] Now they're kind of honoured people in our society. So they claimed they were whistleblowers and, you know, threatened to lawyer up and all that stuff. I mean, you know, this is the church of God for crying out loud.

[13:45] And Paul then models this unity that he's talked about on the Holy Trinity. Incidentally, if you ever chat to Jehovah's Witnesses and, you know, unless you are biblically confident, I would counsel against that.

[14:02] But they will tell you there's no such thing as the Holy Trinity. And you will never find that in the Bible as one of their favourite punchlines. Well, let me just read this to you. There is one body and one spirit just as you were called to one hope when you were called.

[14:18] One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. I mean, that sounds suspiciously like the Holy Trinity to me.

[14:30] And it is. And what Paul's saying is the unity of the church, the diversity of the church is modelled by the Holy Trinity.

[14:44] Unity in diversity. And it's a very powerful picture which I suspect is probably, you know, its full impact is not immediately obvious to us.

[14:57] As I said, Paul spent a lot of time talking about unity. So, if you go to 1 Corinthians in your Bibles and read chapters 1 to 3, you will see that this church in Corinth which thought of itself as really in the fast track of kind of local churches, you know, somebody said, that he imagined they had rock till you drop bungee jumping worship and exercising the gift of tongues in worship and all that stuff.

[15:32] And yet Paul said, look, we have a problem here. And in chapter 2, he talks about this business of kind of charismatic leaders taking prominence.

[15:50] So, some people in the church would say, we follow Paul. Other people in the church would say, we follow Apollos. Incidentally, this is a bonus point for you.

[16:04] I read a very good book some years ago written by an author called Hugh Montefiore. and Hugh Montefiore wrote this book and what he was trying to do was, at that time and probably today to be fair, mostly now people accept, even though it says the opposite in the authorised version of the Bible, most people accept that Paul did not write Hebrews, the epistle to the Hebrews.

[16:33] and Hugh Hugh Montefiore had this very, I think, quite intelligent suggestion that the author of Hebrews was Apollos, who it said was eloquent, very eloquent Greek and very sophisticated arguments, you know.

[16:51] Just to say this, if you want to understand the epistle to the Hebrews, then what you need to understand is, this is an epistle written to Jewish Christians who had decided they wanted to follow Christ but were now tempted to go back into the synagogue.

[17:11] And the whole of the argument in Hebrews is trying to persuade them not to fall back and go to the synagogue to stick with Jesus Christ. And it's a wonderful epistle and full of very rich things.

[17:28] So Paul spent a lot of time talking about unity. And of course it needs to be said that Paul had no idea about ecumenism.

[17:43] He didn't have any idea that, you know, the church would unfold and there would be a big break between Roman Catholics and Protestants. He didn't know that Protestants would fall out with each other and Baptists are going one direction, Methodists are going another direction.

[17:59] and the URC, I'm not quite sure which direction. He didn't know anything about that. Though there is some evidence in Paul's letters and in the Acts of the Apostles that he did encourage congregations to take responsibility for each other.

[18:15] If they had a financial need, Paul would say, well let's try and help them out there. But what he's really talking about is the local church of which you are members.

[18:32] So it addresses people like us who are members of local churches. And, okay, you know, if you are ecumenically minded, I mean, there was no kind of churches together in Ephesus.

[18:49] There was the church in Ephesus. And today, because of our denominationalism, we have to try and form some structures that try and get us together to talk to one another.

[19:01] I think, I mean, I may be wrong about this. I have very little enthusiasm for heavy ecumenical machinery. But I think it's really important that churches work together.

[19:16] And, you know, that's why I was delighted when Tim, who was the then chairman of Churches Together, gave me permission to get the imprimatur of churches together in Clevedon to run this event.

[19:33] And Peter Kemba, his successor, has been equally gracious in relation to that. Because I believe that when we get to know each other, when we get together, that can only be good.

[19:48] If we could even plan together, it would even be better. So we wouldn't do duplication. And, yeah, I was saying that, talking beforehand with somebody and saying that, you know, a couple of churches that I'm familiar with, one of which was Philip Gennady's church, who's coming to talk to you next week, and Ed Shaw's church.

[20:15] I mean, there was a time when everybody wanted to set up a church in the centre of Bristol. You know, the sad thing was nobody talked to each other at all.

[20:27] We only heard about this when yet another church showed up and set up. We had people coming from Swansea, you know, called by God to Bristol.

[20:37] I'm not saying they're not. I'm saying it wouldn't have been better if we could have planned all this together. I think we're a long way from that, sadly, and I would love to see an improvement in our town here in Clevedon.

[20:52] Paul spent a long time talking about unity, and just a final point on the unity of the church. Do you remember that Psalm 133 verse 1, where the psalmist says hundreds of years before Paul put pen to paper in prison in Rome, how good and how pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity?

[21:24] I mean, I don't quite get the analogy there. It says it's like the oil on Aaron's beard. I don't want to think about that, but the point is there is this call in the New Testament for local congregations to work hard at maintaining the unity which is our gift.

[21:44] Why is it a gift that's given? Well, Paul's argument would be once we become Christians, once we become baptized Christians, born-again Christians, whatever phrase you want to put next to that, we are all in Christ.

[22:00] That means that what joins us is far greater than that which divides us. So how can we endeavor to maintain unity?

[22:12] I think that's a very important question. I mean, these are just my potentially pathetic ideas.

[22:25] The first thing I would say is church unity is made a lot easier when we have an agreement on what the ultimate source of authority within the church is.

[22:37] I have no doubt in my mind that the primary source of authority in the church is this book. I'm not going to quote you from the 39 articles, but in theory the Church of England is committed not to believe or indulge in any practice which is, and I quote the 39 articles of religion, repugnant to God's word.

[23:04] And yet, I see Church of England churches certainly, I think, indulging in very repugnant conversations about how, you know, we will exist into the future.

[23:21] But I think unity, one of the primary bases of unity is we have to have some agreement on the ultimate source of authority in the church. I mean, I don't know, I've never done a poll on this.

[23:34] I don't know how many Roman Catholics would say, if you ask them that question, well it's obvious, it's the Pope. I don't know if they would say that in the 21st century, but I mean, in days past, loyalty to the Pope was everything.

[23:50] Secondly, there has to be a commitment to knowing one another. I've never forgotten when I was first in a local church ministry, and people who'd been in the church for years would comment on somebody else who'd been in the church for years.

[24:06] And they'd say, do you know who Mary is? And I'd say, which one? They'd say, that one who wears that ridiculous hat on Sundays. I said, do you know her name?

[24:18] No. How long have you been coming here? Well, since I was eight years old. How old are you? 75. I said, you don't know her name. And I thought to myself, there's work to be done here.

[24:31] So knowing one another is good for us. It helps us. Well, I think this, you know, this psychologist wrote a book and said, the trouble is when you get a bit older, you don't like anybody.

[24:50] And what he meant was, if you think about people generically, you know, you go to the airport and you see the pathetic way people have to queue, even though they've got a seat on the plane and all that stuff.

[25:03] Or, you know, you see a big pile of fly tipping and you think, oh, you know, this is the human race and I'm part of it. And I'm sure that those of you who've worked in kind of services like paramedics and the police have, you know, seen terrible behaviour from human beings.

[25:23] And what the psychiatrist is saying is, we generally, you don't like other people. In fact, I think he uses the phrase that generally we hate people. But within that, there are people who are very important to us.

[25:38] And I don't think the psychiatrist is quite right. But what I do know is that a commitment, not just to Gordon Jones and his excellent book written years ago, you can't get hold of it now, but he said, too many churches behave like a kind of snooker table where the balls on the table just kiss off each other.

[26:04] There's no commitment to really get to know one another. I used to think that one of the wonderful things that happened in the church where I was is we used to have weekends away together.

[26:20] And they were just very special times. I mean, I can't tell you how special they were in terms of people getting to know one another. And I remember once we were at this place called Pilgrim Hall in Sussex.

[26:35] And in the middle of the night the fire alarm went. I tell you, you really get to know parishioners when you see what they wear in bed. We had this city slicker with us, Mike.

[26:50] I don't know how he managed this, but he managed to get out of bed and get down within about 90 seconds and he's got a three-piece suit on, shirt and tie. So, agreement and the ultimate source of authority, a commitment to knowing one.

[27:05] And thirdly, I think, and again, not many churches have a very formal process for this. And if they do, I would say nine times out of ten, it's not a very biblical process.

[27:20] But what churches need to do is provide a just forum for interpersonal disputes to get sorted out and sorted out soon.

[27:34] And, see, I think the Bible has a way to deal with this and what the Bible would encourage us to do, you can read about this in the Sermon on the Mount, is firstly, if we have a dispute, we try and sort it out together.

[27:51] If we can't sort it out, we go to one of the elders of the church, whatever that means within your denomination, and ask them to help you sort it out. And the third thing is, and this remains both an incentive and a threat, is that if the elders and you can't sort it out, it becomes a congregational matter.

[28:16] And, I mean, in my view, that would need to be a kind of organised process for sorting disputes out. What happens in most churches is interpersonal disputes never get sorted out.

[28:32] It's a terrible thing, isn't it? There are people, I can tell you this, you know, I've been around more churches than most of you had hot dinners. There are people in churches who've hated each other for years.

[28:45] Hated. wouldn't talk to them, wouldn't go around their house, would never do anything like that. And of course, this starts from a very obvious and pertinent observation.

[28:58] You've noticed that we're all different. You may have noticed that there are people and just on, in terms of visual presence, you've decided you don't like them.

[29:12] that's a kind of given of our fallen humanity, I think. But to recognise difference, which is what I'm coming on to now, I think is really helpful and important.

[29:26] And to give thanks for difference. I'm not here talking about a secular model of inclusion. I'm talking about a biblical understanding of how we might improve the unity factor in our churches.

[29:43] So Paul talks about the unity of the church and then he goes on, and this kind of does your head in a bit, he goes on about the diversity of the church.

[29:55] What Paul is talking about here in verse 7 is the diversity in our giftedness. He's talking about spiritual gifts, what the Bible, the Greek refers to as charismata, where our word charismatic comes from, although these days the word charismatic has been applied to a certain kind of leadership.

[30:24] And Paul in Ephesians 4 doesn't particularly talk about gifts in the same way that he talks about them in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12.

[30:39] But what he does do is he talks about what I would call orders of ministry which are given as gifts to the church.

[30:51] And it says it was he, that is Jesus, who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers to prepare God's people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all know, all know, sorry, all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God.

[31:21] If you wanted some homework, I mean, just take a glance of what Paul outlines in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 in terms of gifts. And I mean, some of you, you know, I know that your kind of weird meter starts to flicker at even the thought of spiritual gifts because you think of people speaking in tongues or people prophesying stuff.

[31:44] And these are not unimportant gifts. In fact, Paul encourages us to seek the higher gifts. But, here's the thing.

[31:57] Some of those gifts are what you might call ordinary gifts. So, in Romans is the gift of administration. I can tell you from my experience that a church that gets its administration right is rare, but it's brilliant.

[32:23] And people who have gifts of administration should be valued just as much as people who have got gifts of prophecy or discernment or these things. And do you good to read through those gifts?

[32:37] Incidentally, I don't think they're meant to be an exhaustive list in either case. Because one of the most important areas of gifting that I discovered was important in the growth of our church were people who had this natural gift of hosting.

[33:00] People whose homes you could go into and you would feel welcome and these incredible people who can rustle up a meal from nothing in about 20 minutes and put it on the table.

[33:14] It's wonderful. People who have that gift are a real blessing to a church, particularly a church which wants to get house groups right. so there is a diversity in our giftedness and Paul I think has this big idea that churches work best when all the ministries that the church feels called to do are done by people who are gifted to do those ministries.

[33:45] I mean, imagine that. I won't tell you the full story about this guy, but we had a guy called Cyril in my church who, when I first went there, we used to do prayer book even song and it was pretty well attended, about 75 people in the congregation on a Sunday evening, which compared to the rest of the deany was pretty good.

[34:09] And up the front there was me in my cassock and surplus and hood and what have you. And the only person in the choir was this guy called Cyril.

[34:24] And he used to stand right next to me and sing loudly and on the basis that he, the first thing he would tell you when you entered the church was, I've been in the choir for 55 years.

[34:39] You're like, on the same principle that if you gave a monkey a typewriter, eventually it would type a word, you would think that with all the hymns he'd sung and all the tunes he'd sung, he might occasionally hit a right note, but no.

[34:55] Perish the thought. And it's a great story, I won't bore you with it, but I actually found out that what he loved was a kind of odd job man by mentality and I said to him, you can be the odd job man around the church, you know, as long as you promise to leave the choir.

[35:16] And he did. And he just became a different guy. I mean, he had some stuff in his life which was really hard to live with. But that's Paul's idea.

[35:29] You know, Paul talks about the church as the body and what he sees in the body, I know this gets a bit harder when you get older, but what he saw is a kind of unity in the body.

[35:41] So Paul's line is, you know, the foot can't say to the mouth, I'd prefer to be a mouth. And I just want to give a little time, sorry about this, there's I think two problem verses in this little passage from Paul.

[35:58] All this stuff about ascending and descending. What does he ascended mean except that he also descended to the lower earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens in order to fill the whole universe.

[36:17] Well, there's general agreement that when Paul's talking about ascended there, incidentally, this quote comes from Psalm 68 and verse 18.

[36:31] And I'll just read that to you. This is Paul quoting from the Old Testament scriptures.

[36:44] Here we go. Psalm 68 in verse 18. This is Paul writing it, sorry, this is David writing in Psalm 68.

[37:00] When you ascended on high, you led captives in your train and you received gifts from men, even from the rebellious, that you, O Lord God, might dwell there.

[37:15] So, Paul slightly bends the meaning of this because it says here that you receive gifts from men.

[37:27] Well, actually, the thrust of Paul's comment is that God gives us the gifts, not the other way around. But, so there's general agreement that the word ascended refers to the ascension of Jesus here.

[37:41] Incidentally, Jews who listened to that psalm would have related it to the story of Moses. led his people out of captivity and into the promised land.

[37:57] He led captives to be set free and then become captives of Jesus Christ or captives of God in Moses' case.

[38:13] There is, you may have heard this, but there's a reference, people refer here to the idea that when Jesus died he went down to hell on Easter Saturday and preached in hell for 24 hours and then was raised from the dead and the rest is, you know, you know the ending to the story.

[38:38] The only New Testament reference I can find to any idea that Jesus preached to the dead is in 1 Peter chapter 3 and verse 19.

[38:52] Some people say that the ascending and descending thing refers to the Holy Spirit. Jesus ascends into heaven and the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, descends to earth and brings gifts in Acts chapter 2.

[39:08] In my own mind that's probably what Paul was talking about. And then the final thing that people say about this gets worse is Paul here having a tilt at this heresy called Gnosticism that believed that because God was absolutely perfect and because human beings are absolutely terrible, there was no way that God could come down as a man.

[39:37] The idea, the very idea revolted them. And so some people feel that Paul here is just having a kind of jab in the direction of Gnostics.

[39:51] Purpose of spiritual gifts to glorify God, to edify the church by building up the body of Christ, verse 12b, and thirdly to save the world. To save the world by service and by the preaching of the gospel, not either or, but both and.

[40:11] There are some problems I think that go with the gifts that Paul talks about. One is we can get obsessed with particular gifts.

[40:24] I've met several people in my life who have been obsessed by getting a particular gift. It's become a kind of, gone beyond a passion to an obsession.

[40:38] some of that has been fostered by a church, which generally I have a lot of respect for, the Pentecostal church, but their idea is you go to a Pentecostal meeting, at the end of the meeting, it's like an auction that the gifts of the spirit, you decide what gift you'd like and you come forward and the pastor will lay hands on you and that's it, you've got it.

[41:01] I don't think that's quite right because I don't think we're all meant to have the same gifts. And again, I think this is really wrong, the idea that I'm only truly a Christian if I can speak in tongues.

[41:19] I think that's not right and my argument for that would be that these are gifts, we're not all meant to have all the gifts, we're all meant to have some gifts but not all the gifts.

[41:34] And I think there's a confusion there with the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, patience, kindliness, all that stuff. Those are the kind of values that all of us should have.

[41:46] How might I discover my gifts? Well, my advice would be talk to somebody who loves you enough to tell you the truth. And there's a reason for that.

[42:00] And the reason for that is people can be deluded. Sometimes we think we're good at stuff we're really not good at.

[42:13] And so I think we need to be careful with that. And the second thing is envying other people's gifts is not an attractive characteristic in local churches.

[42:34] Ignorance. Paul says, I wrote to you because I don't want you to remain in ignorance about spiritual gifts. Well, that ignorance, I'm afraid, goes on in the churches today.

[42:47] And I just want to refer to something that I meet hordes Christians. Some of them really long-standing and faithful Christians, who will say to me stuff like, well, I don't really get anything out of church today, but I still go because I'd rather go than feel bad about not going.

[43:12] and I think probably everybody in the house tonight understands a little bit of why that is.

[43:25] But just imagine for a moment a church where the ministries that the church was called to were looked after by people who were gifted in that area.

[43:38] I think I got to the somewhat radical view that I would rather not do a ministry in church rather than do it with people who were not gifted to do it.

[43:54] And the trouble with that is it means there's got to be some tough and grown-up conversations. You know, I was fairly young when I became a vicar for the first time and I inherited five licensed lay ministers all licensed to preach.

[44:20] I had to tell them all within six months you're not going to preach here anymore. None of them left. They all seemed to readily accept that preaching wasn't their gift.

[44:36] It's a slight understatement and there was just one of those people who I would put on for the eight o'clock communion service who I thought did a very good homily particularly if you're ex-military because nearly all his stories came from his time in the army.

[44:52] They had no good stories as a matter of fact. And then on the maturity front, just very briefly but not unimportantly, Paul imagines that all these gifts, all these orders of ministry are given to build us up, that we might attain the kind of unity in Jesus that he envisages.

[45:20] Paul in these 16 verses gives us a vision of how the church is supposed to work. And you know this, growing up doesn't come that easily when it comes to our relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

[45:38] The process of sanctification can be very painful. I do remember that when some of our daughters were young, they'd go to bed and then they'd appear about an hour later and say, Mummy, I can't get to sleep.

[45:56] And Mummy would say, why? And they'd say, my legs are aching. And I don't know whether we ever consulted a doctor, but the general theory on that was that these are growing pains.

[46:11] Have you heard that phrase? Growing pains. Well, when we grow in the faith, there's some pain. It's not all easy going, partly because to grow in faith, we're going to have to stop doing some things that we did and start doing some things that we weren't doing.

[46:30] Maturity doesn't come easily. Thirdly, I think the maturity of the church, and this was critical in the early church and doesn't seem to even be an issue today, I think there needs to be a willingness to call out wrong teaching in our churches.

[46:48] That can cause mayhem, believe me. And finally, in verses 15 and 16, you get a great answer to the question, whose church is it anyway?

[47:02] These last verses refer in a, I think, spectacular and wonderful way. So the whole point of growing up into maturity is that one of the outcomes of that is we will no longer be infants being tossed back and forth by waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men.

[47:29] See, Paul's already talked about the destructive power of the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, the malign influences. He's talking about human beings here. Human beings who will distort the truth.

[47:44] He says, speaking the truth in love, you might want to ask a question about that. Really important but really difficult. We will in all things grow up into him who is the head, that is Christ.

[47:58] From him the whole body joined and held together by every supporting ligament grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work.

[48:11] can you imagine a church that was so safe in the company of one another that we could speak the truth to one another in love?

[48:26] I've heard a load of Christians speak the truth but not very kindly. And I've had a lot of loving Christians who know that some truth needs to be added to the conversation but for whatever reason don't add it.

[48:39] no speaking the truth in love is I think really important and the thing is you don't have to like it. You know I think Anthony and I have been married long enough for her to feel she can speak the truth in love, well mostly to me.

[49:05] And I would love to say to you that my testimony is when she speaks the truth to me love I fall to my knees and thank her for her wonderful insight and input into my, no I resist it initially.

[49:21] Now go away and think about it and darn it she's right. So look I'm going to draw a line under it there there's so much more I could have said on these 16 verses to try hand.

[49:37] Help you have a renewed vision of what the church could be like. And the only way that will happen is if you get that vision and work towards it in your own walk with Jesus.

[49:49] what do what do