Walk Worthy
Sermon Notes
It’s great to see you today! My name is Zack and I’m the Executive Pastor here at City Awakening. I’m happy to be able to preach today as we continue to press forward in The Story. We’ve been going through the entire Bible and we are getting to the home stretch. Starting next week will take a 4 week break and shift our focus to generosity. We typically teach a generosity series every year around this time because we think it’s really important to keep a build an outward mindset in our church and our lives. I’m excited about this series because we’re going to be giving you some great practical next steps each week you can take to stretch yourself in generosity.
But for today, I want you to think about a time you were invited to a special event (party, ceremony, business meeting, etc.) Ladies, I know that you immediately start thinking about what you’re going to wear, even if it’s six months away. Guys, you’ll figure it out the night before… If it’s a work thing you might have to start preparing for a special presentation you’ve been asked to make. You don’t want to mess that up because you’re going to be representing the company, and you want to prove that you’re worthy of the job. I remember one time I got invited to pray at the grand opening of a Walmart. I don’t usually have to spend a lot time preparing for a prayer, but that one I had to think about. It was weird, but still I didn’t want to make a fool of myself or our church (not CA). But the point is when we get invited to be a part of something we usually respond accordingly. If you think about it, this happens in all arenas of life. When you accept a job, you’re expected to uphold a certain set of behaviors. When you’re on a team, the coach usually holds his players to a certain standard, on and off the field. We have to act like we belong.
The interesting thing is that the Bible gives us a similar principle when it comes to living as followers of Jesus. In a very real way, we’ve all been invited off of the streets as lost wanderers and into the Kingdom of God, to sit at the table of the Father. We don’t deserve to be there! In fact, Jesus paid the entry price that we could never afford ourselves. But if we accept that invitation we should start living like we have a place at the table, not like we’re still eating off the streets. The Bible tells us that in Christ we have a new life. We’re going to dig into what that means today, but here’s the Big Idea: Every Christian is called to maturity in Christ through unity in the body and purity in the flesh. This is the way the Apostle Paul presents this idea for us in Ephesians 4, which is what we’re going to be studying today. I want to invite you to go ahead and open your Bibles to Ephesians.
We made a shift last Sunday into the era of the early church. After Christ ascended into heaven, he left the disciples to build his church, which they did…very successfully. But as we discussed last week, the church wasn’t perfect, and the people that make up the church weren’t perfect….they still aren’t perfect. So a lot of the New Testament is made up of letters to various churches addressing issues that they were having. In Ephesus there wasn’t so much a problem at this point in history, rather just a lack of knowledge and maturity among the congregation. These were primarily Gentiles who were making a major lifestyle change and they needed more direction and encouragement. In the first 3 chapters of Ephesians, Paul really lays out a solid theology for the church on who God is and who they are in Christ. When we get to chapter 4, there is a shift from the indicative to the imperative. In other words, Paul moves from the doctrine of God and his people, to the application of what this means for their lives. And that’s what we’re going to focus on today. We could spend several weeks in Ephesians 4, but we’re going to be taking a high view of what’s covered today since we only have one sermon to cover it.
Look with me at Ephesians 4:1:
Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received,
This is a typical way for Paul to refer to himself, as a prisoner or a slave of Jesus. It’s his way of saying that his life is not his own. He belongs to his Master and lives by his commands. In the previous chapter he says he’s a prisoner of Christ, and here he says he’s a prisoner in Christ. It seems like a subtle difference, but I love the distinction because now, as he’s getting into the implications of the theology he just laid out in the first 3 chapters, he makes a clear statement about his union with Christ. His life is hidden in Jesus, which is how he’s able to actually apply the theological truths to his life. We’re going to come back to this idea of being “in Christ” through the whole chapter because it’s a major concept. The phrase “in Christ” appears something like 80 times in the New Testament, which shows that our union with Jesus is vital to Christian living. Until we can begin to grasp that, we will have a very difficult time moving what’s in our heads to our hearts and ultimately to our hands. Here’s the doctrine as summarized as I can make it:
Our belief in Jesus means that we are united with him in his death and resurrection. Romans 6:4 says, “Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.” We’re united and we don’t stop being united with him…ever. So our Christian growth that follows salvation is not a “God then me” approach. God did all the saving work, now it’s up to me to do the rest. It’s also not a “God not me” approach; meaning God saved me and he’ll grow me however he wants. I can just sit back. But it’s also not a “God plus me” approach. God does some plus I do some. That’s close. It has to be a “God in me” understanding, which is that God does everything to save me, and by his Holy Spirit he unites me to his Son. In speaking about our growth, Jonathan Edwards said, “we are not merely passive in it, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest, but God does all, and we do all….We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active.”
It’s this union with Christ that gives us the new identity that we talk about so often as Christians and that Paul really wants to drive home to the Ephesians. Your identity is composed of various layers. On the outside people can see what kind of clothes you wear, what kind of car you drive, the food you eat, etc. Underneath that is you personality, what type of family you were raised in, what you do with your time. Another layer is your friendships, your spouse, your children that are all a big part of who you are. Deeper still are your beliefs about the world, God, the Bible. And an even deeper layer is your personal thoughts and secrets, your sins, things about you that no one knows. But as author Dane Ortlund points out, if you keep peeling away the layers at the very core of who you are as a Christian is “You are united to Christ. That is the most irreducible reality about you.” It’s the part of you that can never change and as 2 Timothy 1:8-9 tells us, it was set in place before time began. Timothy says God called us to a holy calling which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.
So you see this union with Christ is a big deal. It’s critical to the rest of what Paul is going to say. Being united with Christ means that our souls are joined to him in the most intimate way.
With that in mind let’s look back at the text.
Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received,
This brings us back to the idea we started with. To walk worthy refers to how you conduct your life, and the calling (or the invitation) these Ephesians have received is the Gospel itself. In the original Greek there’s a little bit of a play on words as Paul is calling them to living worthy of the calling. This urging applies to us as well. If we say we believe the Gospel, then we should be living like we have received the Gospel.
The question that raises then is what does it mean to live worthy of the Gospel? He tells in the rest of the chapter.
Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
The key phrase here is to keep the unity of the Spirit. Pastor Louis spoke last week about the importance of the Church being united and not allowing divisions to come between us. I think sometimes we hear unity and immediately limit our thinking to disagreements and broken relationships, and that is certainly part of it. But there’s a lot more to unity. Paul points out four different components of unity here. In verses 2 and 3 he’s speaking to our attitudes. We’re supposed to be humble, gentle, patient, and bear with one another…which really means to put up with one another. I like that he throws that in there because the truth is that we’re not going to agree on everything and sometimes other people just rub us the wrong way. You know what I’m talking about. There are just some people that you don’t prefer to be around, but as Christians we are called to bear with them. That’s ultimately the fruit of humility, gentleness, and patience…being able to put up with people you aren’t naturally drawn to. I always imagine Jesus putting up with the people in his life. You know it would have been easy for him to get annoyed. He really was better than everyone, but he was always patient and compassionate. It’s hard, but in Christ we can bear with one another. We’ll see why we should in a minute, but first look at first 4.
4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope at your calling— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.
Here Paul is addressing unity in doctrine or theology. It’s important for us to remember that we serve one God and we share the same faith in one Savior, and we submit to one Lord. Sometimes we can get caught up on minor issues, even in doctrine, that suddenly put us in camps. We have the pre-tribulation camp here, the post-trib camp, the reformed camp here, the arminian camp here, the lights and smoke machine camp here, the hymns and choir robes camp over here…. Some of these things are worth conversation and consideration, but at the end of the day we need to make sure we are united on the major issues and handle the secondary issues for what they are…secondary. But this also requires that we know what it is that we believe and why, which is often overlooked when we’re forming opinions. This is one reason we encourage you to go through our Growth Track sessions even if you aren’t sure you want to join our church. We spend time going over our core beliefs (the majors) so that we can make sure we are united in our doctrine.
So we are to pursue unity in our attitudes, our theology, and, next, our ministry. Look at verse 7:
7 Now grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift….11 And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ,
Not only should we be united in our attitude and beliefs, but also our actions. We have all been given the grace in Christ and through the Holy Spirit to serve the body. Paul mainly points out the leadership gifts in these verses - apostles, evangelists, pastors, teachers - which are specifically given to equip others. But we talk about this regularly at City Awakening, that ministry is not limited to pastors or church leaders. In fact, this verse shows that our job as pastors and teachers is to equip the masses (you all) so that you can do the ministry. Each person has a role to play. I can tell you that right now about 55% of our church is actively serving on one of our ministry teams, which is great! I’m thankful that these people have found a way to use their time and abilities to serve. That also means that about 45% of our church is not serving on a regular basis. We’d really like to see that number decrease. Our staff and elders are actively studying and praying through our leadership development process right now in hopes of equipping even more people to find their place in ministry. We want to see each person engaged in something because you’ve all been given the grace to do something. You can invest in our kids ministry, student ministry, worship team (we need instruments!), community outreach, evangelism,…photography. It’s not that we need you; it’s that God has invited you be a part of his Kingdom. By encouraging you to serve, I’m really just inviting you to walk worthy of the calling you’ve received.
And there’s a major reason all this unity stuff matters. It’s the 4th thing Paul says about it. Look at verse 13.
13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness. 14 Then we will no longer be little children, tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, by human cunning with cleverness in the techniques of deceit.
The aim of our unity is our growth and maturity. You think any of us could reach a stature measured by the fullness of Christ on our own?! I’ll admit it, I can’t. It’s always amazing to me when people argue that you can be a Christian without being apart of a church. Technically, yes I guess. But that’s like saying you can be married without living with your spouse. Why would you want to? I’m certainly not going to become a better husband by living on my own, and that would open me up to a whole world of temptations and just general self-centeredness. We need the church in order to keep an upward trajectory towards maturity in Christ. A test I like to do sometimes is to ask myself where I am spiritually compared to 1 year ago. Do I feel like I’ve grown in the past year? And why or why not? If the answer is not, it’s probably due to one of two things: 1.) a neglect of my personal Bible study and prayer, or 2.) distance between me and other brothers (and sisters) in Christ that can help me grow. I need to have people that ask the hard questions, say the hard things, and whose regularly presence and intimacy in my life helps keep me on track. That type of unity leads to maturity. In verse 15 Paul goes on to say,
15 But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ. 16 From him the whole body, fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament, promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part.
Speaking the truth in love refers to the type of transparency and accountability I was just talking about. It leads us to grow in every way into Christ…who is the head of the body. We find the body metaphor throughout the New Testament. Christ is the head and his followers are all the different parts - hands, feet, bones, muscles, etc. It’s such a great picture because each part of the body is so intricately connected. I don’t know if any of who have ever been to The Body Exhibit. I’ve actually been twice, and it’s so incredible to see the cadavers so meticulously displayed. Some show just the circular system, or the muscular system, or digestive system, but as you walk through you see how closely they all fit and work together to make our bodies work like they do because they all connect back to the head. That’s how we’re supposed to function as the church, with Christ as the head, linking us all together.
So, we see that unity is a big part of walking worthy of our calling, but there’s another piece that has to be addressed as well, which brings us to the therefore in chapter 4. Assuming we’re walking in unity and growing in maturity, therefore…..Picking up in verse 17:
17 Therefore, I say this and testify in the Lord: You should no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thoughts. 18 They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them and because of the hardness of their hearts. 19 They became callous and gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity with a desire for more and more.
You can’t live like you belong to God and like you belong to the world. The Gentiles, as a people, lived a certain way. They worshipped a lot of different gods and had a lot of immoral practices that went along with that. This caused their hearts to be hardened as they gave themselves over to sin. And, not surprisingly, they were never satisfied. It’s not hard for us to relate to this. We can look around and very easily see the same pattern of living today. We can even be drawn to ourselves, just like some of these converted Ephesians were. After all, it's hard to change your lifestyle; to break old habits. But Pauls point is that we have been invited into a different way of living. He says in verse 20:
20 But that is not how you came to know Christ, 21 assuming you heard about him and were taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to take off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires, 23 to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.
The meaning of verse 20 is that this is not a new idea for these Christians. They’ve already heard this before when they heard about Jesus and his teaching in the first place. Nobody teaches the Gospel and says it’s ok to keep living in those old patterns of sins. If there’s not a call to repentance, something is off. Even non-Christians know that Christians are supposed to live differently. So this should be a reminder for the Ephesians, and for us, that we should be putting off the old self and putting on the new.
The word self maybe translated as flesh in some of your Bibles, and it more literally means man or even face. In Christ we are to take off the face or the person we were and put on the new person. I just had a birthday this past week, and as I’m getting older I can see my skin aging. I have sun spots, my feet and hands are calloused, I have crows feet at my eyes, not to mention my gray hair. I’m getting worn. But then I look at my three year old. Her skin is smooth and soft, there’s not a wrinkle, spot, or scar on her. Her skin is pure. It’s hard to imagine my skin used to look like that. It’s drastically different. And that’s kind of difference there should be between our old self and our new self in Christ. Our new life is created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth. So, our maturity in Christ includes unity with the body, but also purity of the flesh…putting on the new self.
For the next 7 verses Paul goes on to give this contrasting look at the old self verses the new self. To summarize he says to:
Put away lying and speak the truth.
Be angry, but do not sin in your anger.
Stop stealing and do honest work.
Don’t use foul language, but only say things that are good for building others up.
Don’t be bitter and mean towards others, instead be kind and compassionate, forgiving one another.
That type of transformation is obviously not a one-and-done change. It is the continual work of being renewed in the spirit of your mind, as he says in v. 23, as we daily battle against the desires of our former self. And if we step back and look at this in light of the whole story of the Bible, since that’s the goal of this year’s study, then we can see the creation, fall, redemption, and restoration pattern that takes us all the back to Genesis and the garden of Eden. At the macro level, God created a perfect creation but man sinned against God. God implemented his plan for redeeming his fallen creation and is in the process of restoring it to its perfect state, which will be completed at Christ’s return. On the individual level, we see our own story fit into this pattern as we recognize that we are sinners, we accept Jesus as our redeemer, and begin the journey of complete restoration. And at the most micro level, we experience this on a daily basis within the process of our growth and maturity that we call sanctification. We start out the day good, focused, feeling close to God, but as the day goes on we get pulled away. Sometimes it’s in small ways, other times, big ways, but hopefully we come to a point where we recognize our hearts being pulled away and then we take time to repent and accept God’s forgiveness again, putting off the old self and putting on the new to walk in a manner worthy of our calling. We might go through that multiple times in a day, but that’s ok because it leads to growth. What we don’t want to do is get stuck in the fall. We don’t want to allow our hearts to be hardened to our sin.
That old self may seem insurmountable at times, but you don’t have to surmount it on your own. Remember you are in Christ. It’s at the very core of who you are. Your union with Christ goes deeper than any habitual sin you have. Which is why Paul can say in Romans 8, after describing his own battle with the flesh just a few verses before, that “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” We are no longer bound by our own lack of righteousness, but we are identified by Christ’s righteousness and the purity of the truth.
I love that Paul points out that the truth is pure. The reality is that there are two competing powers in our lives, good and evil. Evil is dark, corrupt, and full of lies. Satan is known as the Father of Lies or The Deceiver. His whole tactic is to get us to believe the lies that God isn’t real, that he doesn’t love us, that we are better off on our own. But God is good. He is full of light and He is true. In fact Jesus said that, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Walking worthy of our calling doesn’t start by following a specific set of behaviors or rules. I think what Paul and the other Biblical authors want to communicate is that the invitation to follow Jesus is really an invitation to take on a new identity all together and it has to start with the truth because ultimately our actions are dictated by what we believe. If we believe that we really have already been made pure in Christ, then our lives will start to reflect that truth. Too often we get held up by how we feel…what we feel we deserve or don’t deserve, or how we feel about what we did or didn’t do. That just keeps us trapped in a perpetual cycle of sin, shame, and guilt because that’s where we think we belong. But it’s not. Our union with Christ means we have been born into a spiritual incubator. Babies are put into incubators because it protects from everything that could harm them from the outside, and it gives them an environment where all the conditions are perfect for them to grow and thrive. Jesus is our impenetrable incubator. Nothing can get to us except what he allows, and in him we have everything we need to grow and thrive. Only in him can we walk worthy of the Gospel calling.
I hope that you see the big idea of this entire passage. Every Christian is called to maturity in Christ through unity in the body and purity in the flesh. We don’t come to Jesus and continue to live the same way we did beforehand. Pastor John Stott says that, “Because God’s people are called to be one people, they must manifest their unity, and because they are called to be a holy people, they must manifest their purity.”
If you’re a skeptic today and the Christian life just seems daunting or oppressive to you, then I hope that you see that it’s not supposed to be. It’s actually freeing, because we don’t come to Jesus and receive a rule book to follow. We come to Jesus by accepting his invitation to belong and to take on his identity as our own. And the invitation is there for you today to be united with him; to have the old washed away and to be made new in Christ. If you’re ready to accept that invitation today, then make sure you talk with me or one of our other leaders before you leave today. We’d love to celebrate that and pray with you!
If you are a believer, then take this truth and walk worthy of your calling. Paul carries this teaching into the next chapter by telling the Ephesians to, “be imitators of God, as dearly loved children…” If you belong to God, act like your Father. How does this message challenge you to live differently? What would it look like if you started living like Paul saw himself, as a prisoner in Christ? Rely on your union with Christ to carry you forward into maturity, and thank God that he’s not done with you. He wants to do more than you could ever ask or imagine.
