New Unity

[0:00] Paul's letter to the Ephesians, chapter 4, starting at verse 1.

[0:20] As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle.

[0:35] Be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

[0:49] There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope when you were called.

[1:02] One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

[1:16] But to each one of us, grace has been given just as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says, When he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.

[1:35] 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.

[1:51] So, Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and teachers to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

[2:30] Then, we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.

[2:49] Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head.

[3:02] That is Christ. 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.

[3:20] Thanks be to God for his word. For many, many years, I seldom thought about unity in the church. But in 2019, I wrote a book about the disagreement among Christians over what the Bible teaches about men and women and women's ministry, the debate between so-called egalitarians and complementarians.

[3:49] And in the course of writing it, I came to see how important it was for Christian believers to learn how to disagree well and how to maintain unity despite disagreeing about secondary matters.

[4:09] Important because Jesus said so and because the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul to write what he did about unity in this passage which we're looking at today.

[4:23] We've read together Psalm 133, which reminds us with poetic imagery what a beautiful thing it is when God's people live together in unity.

[4:37] When you come into a church fellowship and see that people love one another, care for one another, trust each other, treat each other well, communicate well, speak truthfully and with humility and respect, it's beautiful.

[4:57] That's the life of Christ in action. And it is so different from groups where there's division and strife and backbiting and destructive criticism and broken relationships.

[5:16] You've been doing a series in Ephesians and in chapter 2 of this letter, Paul was writing about how Jesus abolished the great barrier between Jews and non-Jews called Gentiles.

[5:30] He said more about that in chapter 3. Through the gospel, he said, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.

[5:48] Now in chapter 4, Paul has more to say about unity. unity. He's saying it here because his readers in the Ephesian church need to live out the reality that he's been speaking of, the overcoming of the division between Jew and Gentile.

[6:11] And elsewhere, Paul mentions other social divisions that were overcome in the unity of the church. The division between Greeks and Scythians, most Greeks regarded Scythians as barbarians, savage people.

[6:28] The division between free people and slaves. The division between men and women. Some of those divisions don't trouble us so much now in the church.

[6:40] I even had to look up who the Scythians were because I didn't know. And we don't have Jews and Gentiles sitting separately in the church or eating separately. We haven't got Jews one side and Gentiles the other.

[6:53] That's not our issue. But in the 21st century, we have our own challenges to which we can apply the teaching about unity.

[7:03] In different churches, it could be a need to ensure the unity of black and white or of British and foreign or of educated and less educated or of men and women or people who think things should be done in one particular way and people who think things should be done in a different way.

[7:27] To help us with these challenges, Paul gives us three ways of thinking about the unity of believers in Christ.

[7:38] Unity is a fact. Unity is an obligation. And unity as a process of growth together into Christ. So the first way he gives us for thinking about it is unity is a fact.

[7:55] Verse 3, Paul speaks, of the unity of the Spirit. That means the unity that the Holy Spirit creates. The Holy Spirit creates the unity of believers because it's the Spirit who reveals Jesus to us, gives us new life in him, and makes us part of one body of believers.

[8:19] This unity is organic and spiritual. Paul isn't talking here about church organizations and structures or about uniting the administration of different fellowships or denominations.

[8:35] He's talking about the fact of the organic spiritual unity of all true believers in Christ. And in verses 4-6, he goes on, there's one body and one spirit just as you were called to one hope when you were called, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.

[9:02] So the unity of the body, which is God's people, comes from the one God who is three persons.

[9:15] We're used to hearing the persons mentioned in the order Father, Son, Spirit. Paul's order here is the other way around. He starts with the one Spirit who is the Holy Spirit of God, then the one Lord which refers to Jesus, the Son of God, in whom we put our faith when we were baptized, then the Father who is over us and who works through us and who by His Spirit is in us.

[9:44] A commentator I read put it like this, the Trinity is an integral part of this treatise on unity. The one body of believers is vitalized by one Spirit so all believers have one hope.

[9:59] That body is united to its one Lord, Christ, by each member's one act of faith and his or her identity with Him is in the one baptism.

[10:11] One God, the Father, is supreme over all, operative through all and resides in all. So first of all, Christian unity is a fact that God has created.

[10:24] God has made us one through Christ and by the Spirit. But next, since God has created this unity and given it to us, we're under obligation with His help to maintain it.

[10:37] So let's look at unity as an obligation. That verse 3 starts with very strong words. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit.

[10:53] Paul could scarcely have put it more strongly. In making this a high priority, he's following Jesus. If you remember John's Gospel, chapter 17, on the night that Jesus was betrayed and arrested, Jesus prayed for His disciples, Holy Father, protect them by the power of Your name so that they may be one as we are one.

[11:20] and He extended that prayer to His future disciples also. My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message.

[11:33] That's us. That all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in me and I'm in You. So if it's a priority, how are we going to do it?

[11:48] Paul's answers are in what He says immediately after and also in what He says immediately before. He says, make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

[12:03] A bond is something that ties things together or joins them together. So the glue that maintains unity is peace. In Paul's original, there's a bit of verbal fireworks going on here.

[12:18] He doesn't use just the ordinary word for bond. He puts a prefix on the front which means together to make it emphatic. It's S-Y-N like in our word synergy or synthetic or syndicate.

[12:31] So he's saying through the together bond of peace. So peace is not just the glue. It's the super glue that holds things together.

[12:43] And there's a word play because verses one to six are all one long sentence that Paul starts with mentioning he's in prison which means he's in bonds. A prisoner for the Lord.

[12:56] Desmios is the word. As a desmios, he's urging them to make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the syndesmos, the together bond of peace.

[13:10] So he's saying if we maintain peace in the fellowship, that's a strong bond which maintains unity. A bond as strong as the bonds which kept Paul imprisoned.

[13:22] In effect, he's saying look, you have a choice between peace or strife. If you choose peace, you'll maintain unity.

[13:36] If you choose strife, you lose the unity. But is it really possible to have peace instead of strife?

[13:47] Even if we agree on the basics of the faith, people will always have disagreements and different ways of seeing things. There will always be secondary issues that we see differently and want handled differently.

[14:02] In those circumstances, how can peace be maintained in the fellowship? Paul gives the answer in verse 2. Be completely humble and gentle.

[14:15] Be patient, bearing with one another in love. In other words, be like Jesus to one another.

[14:28] He was gentle and lowly and patient and loving. You be gentle and humble too and patient and loving. Because of the impact that Jesus has had on our world, we may not realize how extraordinary Paul's words would have sounded in the first century.

[14:50] Nowadays, we're quite accustomed to the idea that humility is a good thing, a virtue. It means not being proud. It means treating other people as if they're more important than yourself.

[15:03] In the ancient world, there was a lot of teaching about virtue, especially from philosophers. But humility, that wasn't seen as a virtue.

[15:14] Humility was considered a weakness. To the ordinary Roman or Greek or the person in Ephesus, humility was something to be avoided, something to be despised.

[15:29] But Jesus changed that. He showed what a wonderful thing humility is. He was the most important person and yet he treated others as more important than himself.

[15:42] He came alongside the outcasts and the little people. He put himself out for other people. In the end, he gave his very life for others.

[15:52] Now, imagine a disagreement within the fellowship of the church. Imagine those who are on each side disagreeing, being proud.

[16:06] Isn't that how disunity starts? Each side is sure they're right and not only they're right, they're better than the other side. But if those who disagree are humble and gentle and patient, bearing with one another in love, then disagreement can be handled well.

[16:30] The bond of peace can be maintained and so unity is preserved. We started with unity as a fact.

[16:41] Now we can see how unity is also an obligation. We didn't create it in the first place. It started with God, but it's in our power to destroy it if we don't maintain it.

[16:54] Proud and defensive attitudes destroy unity. To keep the unity of the spirit, we must maintain the peace of good relationships.

[17:06] And to maintain the peace of good relationships, we must treat each other with humility and gentleness and patience and forbearance and love.

[17:16] So that's unity as a fact. Unity is an obligation. We could stop there. But if we did, we would have a flat and unrealistic picture of unity as something static and fragile like a piece of glass.

[17:36] It's either whole or it gets broken, one or the other. But the truer picture is of unity as something dynamic and relational and growing.

[17:50] What Paul says in verses 7 to 16 shows us that we also need to understand unity as a process of growth together into Christ.

[18:02] In this next section, Paul talks about the diversity of gifts that Christ has given to his people, the church, and how mature unity comes from everyone working together.

[18:16] That is, from Jesus working through everyone. Verse 7, but to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.

[18:30] And then verse 11 names some particular gifts that Christ has given. The gifts of being apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. And Paul says what all these gifts are for, to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

[19:02] So the diversity of gifts helps to produce unity. It's a process. We are equipped, we serve within the church, in the world, we are built up until we reach unity, the unity of being as a body like Jesus Christ.

[19:25] And then verse 14 to 16, he says more or less the same thing again, but in different words to convey what it's like, this process of growth into unity with one another and with Christ.

[19:36] Verse 14 onwards. Then, we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.

[19:50] instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ.

[20:05] 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.

[20:18] Paul's using here a metaphor, not based on how we think about the body, but based on ancient medical ideas. In ancient medicine, growth was thought of as coming from the head.

[20:31] Of course, food and water enter the body through the head and there was also understood to be a kind of internal flow in which life and nourishment was sent from the head around the whole body so that the body would grow.

[20:48] But every part must work together and make its own contribution so that the body matures into the stature of Christ the head. From him, that is from Christ the head, the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work.

[21:12] So the goal of unity is to be like Christ. to be like him as individuals, of course, but much more than that, to be like him as a united body of believers.

[21:29] This is a wonderful picture. What could be more attractive, more wholesome, more life-giving than to be like Jesus? We tend to think of spiritual maturity in an individual way, but there's more to it.

[21:44] love. There's not only individual maturity, but corporate maturity, maturity in how we behave together, how we act with love and humility towards one another, how we relate to one another.

[21:57] No one can claim to be spiritually mature if they're not relating well to other believers. That little phrase in verse 15, speaking the truth in love, is rather important.

[22:11] to speak truth without love is a sign of immaturity. John Stott makes a vivid comment about people who take unloving delight in correcting their brothers and sisters.

[22:28] He puts it like this. When they think they smell heresy, he says, their nose begins to twitch. Their muscles ripple.

[22:41] And the light of battle enters their eye. They seem to enjoy nothing more than a fight. So how can we sum up?

[22:57] In the light of Paul's teaching in this passage about speaking the truth in love, about being completely humble and gentle, patient, bearing with one another in love, and about making every effort to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

[23:18] I'd like to suggest a rule of thumb on how to disagree well. My suggestion is always be more gracious than the person you are disagreeing with.

[23:34] I'll say that again. always be more gracious than the person you are disagreeing with. If we do that, we're cultivating unity rather than causing disunity.

[23:54] We are responsible to God and to one another for our words, for our truthfulness and transparency, and at the same time for our love and our graciousness and humility.

[24:13] So let's give thanks to God for the spiritual unity that he has created because we are one in Christ. And let's be mindful of our obligation to keep that unity by living in peace with one another, with humility and love, and let's be continually creating a safe and loving community, a fellowship of people that is growing into the maturity of being like Christ together.