©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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01-30-05 |
Walking Worthy |
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1/30/05 Walking Worthy
We returned last week
to our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
And in that return
we took the morning to walk through
an overview of the first three chapters of the book,
listening to Paul
as he revealed to us
the remarkable relationship
that God has now created between Christ and His people.
It is a relationship that begins with God ...making us alive together with Christ ... and raising us up with Him, and seating us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus...
He draws us to Himself,
removes all of our unrighteousness from us forever,
and then unites each of us with Himself
in the most remarkable eternal Father/child union.
But that isn’t where it stops,
because Paul then goes on to reveal to us
the way in which He forms us into His Church
which He then tells us is Christ’s body here on this earth,
the means through which He accomplishes His work here and now.
And He has done this ... so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.
And if all of that sounds rather confusing and theological,
let me simply state it like this.
God tells us that through Christ
He has created a special relationship between Himself and Christians
in which He now uses us to reveal to the world what He’s really like,
and at the same time accomplishes His work through us.
We are the window through which the world now sees God,
and we are the hands,
and the mouths,
and the hearts,
and the lives through which He reaches out to His creation.
And just so we don’t keep these truths an arm’s length away from us,
let me restate it for you this way.
If you have been thinking that your life simply doesn’t matter much,
that who you are,
and what you do each day has no real significance to anyone,
then your enemy has deceived you into believing
one of the most destructive lies we can ever believe.
We do not live out what is true,
we live out what we believe to be true,
and if we believe our lives and our actions don’t matter,
we will live out that lie
in everything we say and everything we do each day.
Nowhere have I seen the battle for our discovery of God’s truth to be more intense
that right here at this point.
And so often
Satan begins his calculated program of lies
from the day we enter this world.
Some time ago I was talking with a young man in his middle teens
who was born into a family
in which his father clearly wanted nothing to do with his son.
Not surprisingly
within a very few years
the man bailed out on the family altogether.
When I first met the boy
he lived in almost total emotional isolation -
nobody got into his life,
and he didn’t enter anybody else’s.
Over the course of a number of months
I did what I could to build up some rapport with the boy,
and then one afternoon I told him I wanted to talk with him for a few minutes.
Then I told him that, even though he didn’t realize it,
he had been told and then believed some huge lies,
lies that were now causing him tremendous pain and confusion.
They were lies that were told to him during the first few years of his life,
lies that he believed
because they were told to him by the most powerful person in his world at the time,
the person who actually represented the voice of God to him,
his father.
The lies were simple,
but highly destructive
because, with his actions toward him,
and probably even with his words,
his dad had told him that he didn’t matter,
that he had no real value in life,
and in fact it would have been better if the boy had never been born.
Then I told him that, not only was none of that true,
but that the truth was
that God took great joy in His creation of him - he was God’s unique creation in all the world,
and that God thinks about him constantly,
and that He highly values his friendship,
and that He has a special place and purpose for him in this world.
I told him, too, that during the next few years
I believed that God would be bringing people into his life who would tell him the truth,
the truth about his true value as God’s creation.
And then, of course, I vowed to myself that by God’s grace
I would be one of those people.
But my point here is simply that
the warfare Satan rages against our discovering
the truth about who we are in the eyes of God
and who we become in the family of God
begins long before we ever come to Christ.
And with many of us
the first critical steps toward healing
that our Lord seeks to accomplish in our lives
are those steps that introduce us to the truth about ourselves.
And the truth is
that not only do our actions and our lives matter,
but in fact God values each of us beyond anything we could ever even begin to imagine,
and He has strategically placed each of us in this world
and then equipped each of us with the ability to have an impact on those around us,
an impact that will literally alter their lives forever.
And as long as I’ve gotten into this,
I’ll finish the thought
by reminding us of how we go about it.
There was I time in my past
when I believed that ideas were the great keys to change,
and that if I wanted to alter another person’s life for good
I needed to find some way
of communicating to them
the truths they needed
for the changes they longed for.
I no longer believe that,
and for a Bible teacher to say that
is no small thing.
Certainly the ideas are important.
Learning to think correctly
is a crucial part of God’s healing program within us.
But in recent years
I have come to realize
that there is something else that has far more power to heal,
something else
that has far more power to bring about change,
something else
that is far more central to the fulfillment of our calling to be the Body of Jesus Christ here on this earth
than all the teaching,
and the precepts,
and the ideas,
and the doctrinal truths in the world.
It is something
that God is seeking to accomplish through each of our lives right now,
something that, when we finally see it,
and grow in our ability to fulfill it
will bring a meaning and a sense of purpose to our lives
as nothing else can ever do.
It is our learning how to love
those people that God has entrusted into our care.
And as soon as I say that
I know we have a problem
because that word “love” is used to mean all sorts of different things in our language.
So let me restate it this way.
The kind of love I’m talking about here
is the kind that brings about three things within us.
First, we choose to enter the other person’s life
without judgement,
without condemnation,
without a standard they must first fulfill before we will fully allow them into our lives.
Second, we accept them
and choose to care about them
just the way they are.
And third,
we look for the needs in their lives
and then seek to meet those needs through our words and through our actions.
That’s the kind of “love” I’m talking about here.
And if your wondering where in the world I came up with such a definition,
I borrowed it from God.
Because that is exactly what our God did for us
when He loved us.
First, He entered our lives
right where we were,
without judgment,
without condemnation,
without a standard we had to fulfill before He would allow us into His life.
JOH 1:14 And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,
and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of
grace and truth.
JOH 3:17
"For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world,
but that the world might be saved through Him.
Then, having entered our world,
He accepts us into His life just as we are.
Do you know why we have such a detailed account
of the life that our Lord lived with His disciples
during the few years He walked among us?
There are a number of answers to that question, of course,
but one of the big reasons
is so that, through them and what we see happening between them and Christ,
we could see what we can now expect in our own relationship with Christ
when we place our lives into His hands.
And when I was putting words into Peter’s mouth,
this is what I heard him saying
about what was going on between him and his Lord.
Most of all this man became our friend, a friend who knew us fully and loved us completely just the way we were. Certainly his friendship produced profound changes in each of our lives. But they were not changes we attempted to paste on in order to be “good disciples of the great Teacher.” They were changes that gradually infiltrated our lives the more we relaxed in his unconditional love and acceptance.
I sometimes think the greatest
gift the Master ever gave me was his permission to be myself. It was a gift he
gave me most of all through all the things I never heard him say. I look back
over an endless stream of stupid things I said and did during the months I
spent with him. Yet not once did I ever hear him say, “Peter, you’re such a
fool!” or “Peter, you blew it again!” or “Peter, just once would you try
thinking before you speak!” or “Peter, I’ve had it with your endless
egotistical stupidity—get out of here!” Amazingly, he seemed well content to
have me forever blundering along at his side, knowing the only thing that would
transform my life was the discovery that even my worst failures would never
separate me from my Master’s love.
That is the same pattern He now lives out in our lives today,
and it is the same pattern He calls us to duplicate in our relationships
with those He places into our lives.
He enters our world,
He accepts us into His life just as we are,
and then, third, He reaches out to meet our needs with His actions and with His words.
That is what He was doing on that cross.
And that is what He continues to do
with His every action toward us,
and His every interaction with us each day.
And it is through our duplicating this same pattern of love
in our relationships with those around us
that we fulfill our calling to be the Body of Christ on this earth.
And as that process is lived out through us,
...the manifold wisdom of God (is) made known through the church...
That’s the relationship established by God with us,
a relationship in which He does through us
what He did for us when He was physically here.
It makes for great theology,
and it certainly points us in the right direction,
but if we stop there
it doesn’t get us where we need to be.
To know that we are now the body of Christ here on this earth,
and that He is now seeking to love others through us is great.
But what does that really mean?
How, in practical daily living,
do we go about being the body of Christ
and displaying the manifold wisdom of God?
Does it mean that we stand on street corners
and preach sermons
and hand out tracts?
Does it mean that we build and fund huge Christian empires
with massive church facilities
and world-wide outreaches?
Obviously each of us who come to Christ
have been given the highest calling
any human being can ever be given -
the calling of literally displaying the reality of God Himself to our world.
But how do we do it?
Well, Paul knew that, unless he kept writing,
and unless He went on to explain to us
just exactly how this thing plays out in our lives,
we would very likely get all religious on him
and start pouring our lives into building those “Christian” empires.
So, to make sure we get it right,
he goes on, then, to lay out for us in careful detail
just exactly how we go about fulfilling this great calling given to us.
And so, after laying out the doctrine of who we are and what we’re called to in chapters 1-3,
he then begins chapter 4 with these words:
EPH 4:1
Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy
of the calling with which you have been called...
And it is that phrase
that tells us where Paul is going in the rest of this letter,
and also that assures us
that he is going to explain to us
just exactly how we go about doing what we’ve been called to do.
And I have to tell you
that I really do love phrases like this one when we find them in God’s conversations with us.
You do see what He’s doing for us here, don’t you?
He’s making us a promise.
He is telling us that we really can walk in a manner worthy of our calling.
He is telling us
that we really can know an approach to life
that brings the kind of fulfillment we long for.
He is saying that ten years from now,
or twenty years from now
we won’t have to look back with regret
because we poured ourselves into an approach to life that seemed right but did not deliver.
And implied in our calling to walk in a manner worthy
is the assumption that none of us have done it right in the past.
That’s a given of everything our God says to us.
He knows exactly where we came from
and who He’s working with.
EPH 2:1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins...
In fact, just so we keep this statement that Paul makes in 4:1 in perspective,
let’s back up to the last sentence in chapter 3
and remember the context in which he challenges us to walk in a manner worthy of our calling.
Just before Paul calls us to this worthy walk
he makes sure we do not lose sight of the basis upon which this whole thing is based.
And so he says,
EPH 3:20-21 Now to Him who is able to do far more
abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works
within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all
generations forever and ever. Amen.
It’s not us doing it for God.
It’s not us trying to change ourselves.
It is HIM who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to His power that works within us.
It is, now and always,
Christ in us - the hope of glory.
And the reason is clear.
You see, we can’t change ourselves,
not really.
Oh, we can summon up a certain amount of self-discipline,
and we can focus our energies on some goal if the reward is sufficient,
but we cannot change the things within us that really matter,
the things from which our behavior really flows.
(How are you doing with those New Years Resolutions? :)
We cannot change our fundamental values in life.
We cannot change our self-concept - the way we see ourselves.
We cannot change the way we see others or the way we respond to them.
We cannot change our fears,
or those damaged places deep within us that cause us to hide,
or to run away,
or to lash out in anger.
We cannot heal ourselves .
But God can,
and when He does
it produces a response within our spirits that causes us to cry out, “...to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.”
And this worthy walk Paul calls us to
is not something we do for God,
it is something He does through us
as we accept the goals He lays out for us
and trust His life through us.
Don’t ever fall into the misconception
that the first half of Ephesians presents what God has done for us
and the second half presents what we should then do for Him.
From beginning to end
it’s all about Him -
what He has done for us already
and what He then seeks to do through us each day.
And as we move into the second half of this book
there are two things I want us to see
in preparation for what we’ll be getting into.
The first is the truth I’ve just stated -
that this call to walk in a manner worthy of our calling
is built upon Christ’s healing process within us
that then equips us to fulfill the calling.
And whenever we find ourselves struggling
with anything we find presented in the worthy walk described for us in the second half of Ephesians,
our first response should be
to bring the struggle back to our God
and cry out to Him for the healing we need
for the life He’s called us to lead.
And the second thing I want to point out
in preparation for the second half of this book
is that what we are going to see here
is going to look very different from what we may have expected.
Keep in mind that what Paul is going to present to us
is the description of how Christ now seeks to live through us
in a way that then allows the manifold wisdom of God to be made known through us to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.
And what we will see here
looks nothing like the hyped-up religious antics
that are so prevalent in the empire-building “Christian” world.
Unlike what we hear blasted at us
through too much of the Christian radio and TV broadcasts,
there is no call here to great world-wide ministries.
In fact what we find
is radically different from what we might expect.
How do we proclaim the reality of Christ
and allow the manifold wisdom of God to be seen through our lives?
Well, that’s what we’ll get into next week,
but let’s just take a tiny peak
by reading the first thing on the list.
EPH 4:1-3 Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore
you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one
another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond
of peace.
The first thing on the list
is our learning how to live together with one another
in the true unity of the Spirit.
We’ll pick up our study here next week.