“Called To Live”

Could you hear the voice of one another speaking to our hearts?  Could you hear the voice of God represented in our singing about His Word?

"What more can He say than to you He has said?"

What a tremendous theological truth!  We have everything that we need from God right here in this book and if you have your Bible with you, I would invite you to turn to the Book of Ephesians, Chapter 4.  Now my original plan was to simply look at Ephesians 4: 1-16 for the next 4 weeks, and then move in a different direction, but as I've walked through this book of Ephesians, we just need to camp out here for awhile.  I'm going to do something a little different.  We will be in this chapter, the middle chapter, Chapter 4, for 4 weeks, is the plan anyway.  Then we're going to go all the way back to Chapter 1 Verse 1 and walk our way through this book because I think it speaks to who we are as this church, in this our, what we need to know, be and do, and I think we will find it terrifically helpful, challenging, convicting and life changing.

Before we read this morning, I want to give a little introduction and then we're going to come and read our brief passage in Ephesians 4, and then we'll walk through this message that I hope is a bit introductory as well as helpful for today.  I'd like for us to think for a minute about how we read the Bible.  It is very crucial how we come to read the Bible, how we come to listen to it read, how we come to it when we hear it preached.  There are essentially three ways to deal with God speaking with humanity:  One is to ignore Him.  You can ignore Him because you want to live your own way, or you can ignore Him because you choose to be an atheist.  You just don't believe there is a God, so you ignore him.  There are multiple ways to do that.  There is even a way to be a Christian atheist, you know, you believe that He's there, believe that He speaks, you just choose not to listen to Him and that's the equivalent of a Christian atheist.  That's not the one I'm most concerned about.  The middle one is the most dangerous, I think, and this is the one we are guilty of in our present culture for some reason.  It is when we imagine, you can ignore God or you can imagine God.  And you imagine what God is to be like, you imagine the things that a God that you think about should say and that's the way you come to the Bible.  You open the book and you look for what you think is already there.  In conversation and speaking with somebody else we call that being rude.  But, how many times have we come to the Word of God because we, many of us, have grown up in a church culture and we already know what God is going to say and we look at it with no surprise and no expectancy and to those passages that make the hair stand up on the back of our neck, instead of bowing before them, we just make up what we'd like for them to say.  So, that's not a good thing to do, because when we imagine what God is saying, we have also imagined what a spiritual experience is and instead of seeking the God who has spoken, we seek the experience we have already self-defined.  So, you can ignore God, you can imagine God or you can bow before this God who speaks, believing as most of you do, that this Book is the Word of God and you work hard to learn what you're hearing, then you put in the effort of the soul to love what God has spoken because you love the God who spoke it, and then you make the effort to live it out.

What's the practical point?  The practical point is when God instructs you, even by His inspired scriptures, through the Holy Spirit, He still uses natural means.  You don't have an experience with God by closing your Bible, holding it, kissing it, giving reverence to this leather, the ink and the pages it is written on, and hoping that somehow God is going to give you the heavenly zap, and WHEW! One day you're going to get it!  That is not how spiritual maturity and spiritual life come.  Yes, it is always through the supernatural hand of God, but typically he uses natural means.  What that means is, you, my friend, are expected by God to put in the effort.  The first and greatest command tells us that, "Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one." We are to listen to Him, we are to love Him, and then we are to live for Him.  "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and the second commandment is like unto it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself."  I don't know any mystical way to love my neighbor, do you?  I don't know any mystical way to love God?  Jesus said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments," so the point before we come to the Word is to learn how to read God's Word, because today's preachers, myself included, sometimes are very guilty of making this book look like something it isn't.  We come to you with a sermon and we've all been taught that every sermon has one major point, and that we are to find the point in the Bible and then we know it's most effective to divide that main point into 3 or 4 sub points and put them together so that they support the main point so you can go home remembering one thing.  That's all well and good, but I want you to understand the Bible is a living book, it was written by living people, it is inspired by the living Holy Spirit to people who are living in a real world.  And it's letters.  We are looking at a letter this morning, and the Apostle Paul, I don't think, had an outline quite that clear.  I do believe he had some type of outline in the Book of Ephesians because it's got such a structure to it.  All I'm saying to you is Christian living isn't really that nice and neat.  It's full of bumps in the road.  It's full of things we can't understand and when we come to the Word of God, we're not coming to a religion-psychological magical book of potions that you reach in, grab one out and say "This is the word for the day," and it's going to transform my soul because I've read it and put it in my heart. No when you hide God's word in your heart, it means that you've done the hard work of opening the book, reading the letter as it was written, finding out the truth that is there, and what it teaches about God, what it teaches about me, what it says about salvation, and I begin to think on that in my head and I begin to see the beauty that is there and I begin to get that down into my soul and then I begin to live it out.  Sounds too simple to be true, but that's exactly how you read the Bible.  And that’s what we're going to come to this morning.

Look at Ephesians Chapter 4, verse 1.  Now I am going to do the dangerous thing of only reading 3 verses because I have the privilege of putting it in context.  We did some last week; we'll do more today.

Ephesians Chapter 4, Verse 1:

Eph 4:1  I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called,

Eph 4:2  with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,

Eph 4:3  eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Now, let me stop.  It doesn’t take an advanced intelligence or an advanced degree to understand the basics of that passage, does it?  You understood what Paul was saying.  You can just look at it and say, "Okay, he's a prisoner, that probably means he's in prison.  Isn't that a great deduction? It is, isn't it?  He was a prisoner in two ways; he was in prison and he was also taken captive by Christ who was his Lord, his master.  There's an urgency in his voice.  "I urge you to walk" (he's talking about lifestyle) in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.  Okay, how do I do that? What is this calling? And then he explains it. If you're going to walk worthy, you're going to be humble, and gentle, you're going to be patient with other people bearing with one another in love.  Now, do you do that?  Oops!

You see how Christians grow?  We learn the foundation about God in Ephesians 1-3, then we learn the application of God's truth in Ephesians 4-6, and if we don't put it to use, then we don't believe what we read in the first place.  I admit that's very difficult living, but that's where your faith grows and that's what we're going to look at this morning.

Before we take off and forget that this letter is old, almost 2000 years, it seems so far away, it seems antiquated to us, could it be applicable to today?  Let me just remind you that there are universal human problems that time, culture nor age ever changes.  That's what the Bible deals with, is you and me as we really are.  In the town of Ephesus where they lived, is one of the seven wonders of the world, where the Temple of Artemis, or Diana, she was a multi-breasted Goddess of Fertility and Sex and if you go to Turkey today, many of our people, raise your hand if you've actually been to Ephesus?  Some of our people have been to this place we're talking about.  You can go there and you can find the remains, they have recently uncovered even the altar of the Temple of Diana that is larger than the Temple of Zeus in Greece.  They have uncovered the theater where there was a riot in the Book of Acts and Paul was almost torn limb  from limb.  There is another smaller theater in Ephesus, there was a huge library there.  We know that there was a center for prostitution in Ephesus and so every day these Christians in Ephesus would get up and go to work and if the kids went to school, they might have to walk by the Temple of Diana.  They might have to walk by the house of prostitution.  The men had to get up and go to work.  They were just like us, did you know some of the bathrooms were heated in the homes in Ephesus of the well to do, and had running water?  Listen, those people weren't dumb, they weren't different than we were.  As a matter of fact, Ephesus was quite a well to do city, the leading city of all the Roman Empire in Asia Minor which is modern day Turkey.  And these people, they probably didn't look like us, but they felt like us, they were concerned about clothes, and they would go to a good tailor, and they would go to a good sandal-maker, and it's just like us. Husbands and wives loved each other.  Husbands and wives fought.  Husbands cheated on wives, wives cheated on husbands.  Children obeyed their parents, children disobeyed their parents.  They had good jobs, they had bad jobs.  They had happy lives, they had unhappy lives.  And in this pagan environment, walking by this huge marble Temple of Diana, the gospel of Christ entered and began with power to change lives, but He did not remove them from living in that place and He asked them to be not a Christian subculture, but a Christian counterculture that shown a light into a dark world.

Now, we don't have the Temple of Diana here, but I did notice that all the cheeseheads were at the temple of Lombardy Stadium in Green Bay with snow falling yesterday.  It was a great religious worship service with umpteen thousand people sitting in freezing cold weather with snow falling.  Who won?  I didn't see.  Green Bay won! Okay!  Go for the cheeseheads!  You know if it snows here, we're liable to call off church? 

How much has the Gospel of Christ gone into your life? How much is it real? Because this book is about reality.  This is no about some plastic religion that coats us with good clothes and nice words.  It changes our lives.  It tells us about the Son of God, who, from before the foundation of the world, decided in the Godhead that he would die for our sins to give us new life, and this book is going to tell us about it.  So, let's do a flyby of the Book of Ephesians so we can put into context what God, through his apostle, was saying to these people.

By the way, just so you can have the Bible clear in your head, Jesus was dead, resurrected, and ascended into heaven, He's gone from earth. But He taught His apostles everything they needed to know and gave them His Holy Spirit so they could remind the church of the things that Jesus taught, so when you read the words of Jesus and you read the words of the apostle, it's one and the same.  We don't have apostles today.  No one speaks like they do; however, on the morning that this letter arrived in Ephesus, word had to get out that they had a new word from God through his apostle that founded the church, and the flyby is that we're just going over in an airplane so we can see the high peaks of the mountains and the first thing you see is the work of God in Ephesians 1-3.  We're going to come back and look at this in detail, but it describes in as clear a form, in a compact manner as anywhere in the scriptures, all that God has done to make you fit for heaven as well as to be your Lilly of the Valley to take you through the Valley of the Shadows here and now.  It is more than we can comprehend; the Bible even tells us, He can do for us more than we can imagine or ask for and we're going to dive into that.  That's Ephesians 1-3. 

In Ephesians 4-6, he talks to us about our walk in life.  What He's doing is He is taking the indicative.  What He says is true about what He's done and then He's making imperatives off of that.  He says, "This is who I am, this is what I've done in you and because of that, this is how you are to live."  That's why Christianity is real.  It's based on reason and truth of the work of God.   And so we can understand what the work of God is, it describes, and I'm borrowing some words from John Stott, whose commentary on this book is excellent, he describes in the first 2-3 chapters that we are given a new life and in that new life we are given also a new society, an entire new humanity.  He's taken in the vision of God working in eternity past all the way to eternity future when there will be one humanity and everybody, believe it or not, will walk in humility and love, and in our walk in life for today, because God's already done that work of giving us new life and putting us in a new society, presently called the church, He has new standards for us to live by and new relationships to be built.  It can be said of this book that it goes all the way back way before time to the very mind of God, to think and talk of things that are in God's mind that no human knows, He's told them to us, and it comes all the way down to your living room.  Yeah, you've got that right.  He talks to husbands about how they are to live with their wives, and wives about how they are to live with their husbands, and fathers with children and children with fathers, and employees with employers.  Wow!  So, it matters for us today. 

But why new standards?  Let's go right into our text, Chapter 4.  Why, if we've got new life and new society, are there new standards?  Well, because Christianity is a faith, but it is a faith in the objective work of God and the objectivity of the fact that there is a God and this God has a certain character, He has a certain way, He's always been that way, He is that way now and He always will be that way, why are there new standards?

1.                 Because there is one God.  "Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One."   In Ephesians 4 it divides itself; the 16 verses we wanted to look at, or the whole chapter should I say, divides itself this way.  That there is one God and that should lead His people to unity; they should be a unified people to represent Him.

2.                 This God is Holy and that leads his people to purity. 

So the two chief marks of these new standards are unity among his people and purity in our lives. 

Now, hang with me just a minute.  I know I'm throwing a lot at you, but why am I doing that?  To avoid doing what I talked about at the beginning, making the Bible look like a spiritual magician's hat, into which I the educated one and the magician pull out spiritual tricks and throw them to you that you can swallow whole and all at once you're going to be ready.  It's so you will understand that this is worked out in real life.  That the people who first read this are just like you!  Some of them had financial problems, some of them marital, some of them health, and they saw this as the Word of God and they did the work to look at it, to take it in, and to live it out!  And part of that is not just to the individual, it is to us as a whole because you will see that has the biggest effect on the community, not your life as an individual, but our lives together.  So, if this one God leads to unity, then tell me about that unity.

Let's look at it quickly.  We're going to look at 4 things over the next 4 weeks and here they are:

·                     This unity of God's people:  Today we will find out that it depends on the reality of our character and conduct.  That's the message for today.  We're going to get to that, I'm going to lay it out for us and the weight, my friend, is now on your shoulders.  Though it's addressed to God's people as a whole, the weight of today's message rests on our shoulders as individual believers in the body of Christ, you cannot point your finger at someone else.  This very text causes you not to do that because you’re the one who is supposed to be humble and meek and long-fused with other people who irritate you.  

Did you know there are people in the church who are irritants? You might be one of them!  I bet you can name the people who irritate you, can't you?  You know, we are going to look at one of the verses in the Bible tonight that says "We are to provoke one another to love and good deeds." I've met a lot of provocative people in the church and they provoke people to do things, but it might not be love and good deeds.  If you know irritating people, do you know what they are there for?  Your sanctification! [Laughter]  Because I can promise you that you are here for someone else's sanctification!  [Laughter]

This unity in God's body depends on the reality of our character and our conduct.  This unity arises out of the unity of God.  We will get into understanding the triune nature of our God next week, that He is God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, but he is one and we reflect Him.

·                     This unity of the body is enriched by the diversity of our gifts.  We're not cookie-cutter people.  We're as unique as we can be, but that comes together and enriches the body.

·                     If we're going to be unified, it will demand the maturity of our faith.

Now that we have looked at all those things, now that we have at least thought about how do we read the Word of God, let's talk about the reality of our character and conduct.

Have you ever been a hypocrite? Go ahead and say "Yes." So have I.  Have you ever met any hypocrites?  Yes.  Has anybody ever told you the reason they won't go to church is because it is full of hypocrites?  The next time they tell you that, call them a hypocrite, because everywhere they go it's full of hypocrites.  Are there any liars at work?  Any people at work that don't put in a full day's work? That's a hypocrite.  That's my job, I love my job, they ask for 8 hours a day, I'm going to give them 7 ½.  That's a hypocrite.  The church is full of hypocrites, my friend, because our aim is perfection and we're never going to make it until we get to glory.  God asks for perfection.  People don't come to church because of who we are, we want them to come to church because of who our God is! [Amen!] That being said, our role is to reflect Him as best we can, because as someone wisely said, "You may be the only Bible someone ever reads." You and I are to reflect our God. 

So Paul leaves the foundation standing on it and begins to talk about the application. All that he asks today is based on all that God has done in your behalf, but he's getting down to the reality of our character and our conduct. 

Ephesians 4:1:

Eph 4:1  I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called,

Eph 4:2  with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,

We were talking about this in staff meeting and Lisle says, "How in the world do we do that?"  I know people are going to be asking, "How do we do that?"  You come to the Bible, you read the letter as a whole, you find out all that God has done for you and you learn it and you love Him more, and you look at that and say, "I've got some work to do."  That's how you do it.  There is no magic potion, my friend, you have the Spirit of God within you.  You've been made partaker of his divine nature.  Jesus Himself is meek and lowly in heart and we have Him in us to live Him out, but if you don't put the effort in, it ain't gonna happen!  So, there are three things that help us understand this reality of our character and conduct, whether we're measuring up or not, and I'm not afraid to use that word, you've heard me, you can't measure up to God, you're saved by free grace, but grace is not there to excuse our laziness.  Grace is there to expect our fruit if you're saved!  Is it really possible to have the Holy Spirit of omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God take up residence in your heart and Him stay invisible?  Thank you! It's impossible.  Now, we stumble and fall, but fruit of some measure will come the more we bow before God, heed His Word, love Him and live it out, the more fruit will be born. 

So what's the reality of our character and conduct?  Paul is in prison.  He's also captive by Christ, that he says, based on all these things I've heard of you, I'm urging you to walk and walk is the topic for the next 3 chapters.  Walk is your lifestyle, and he says, I'm urging you and I'm asking you, is there any sense of urgency in your life about following Christ?  Are you hungry for Him?  Do you sense you need Him?  The only thing that drives that for me is when I see His beauty and what He's done for me through his grace in Chapters 1-3.   So we've got to go back to those, but I look at our lives and I want to take our spiritual pulse, I want to take our spiritual temperature and say, "Where's the urgency?"

[I can guarantee there was a lot of urgency in the second overtime in the UK / Vandy game yesterday.]  In the records of eternity, do you think it matters?

I'm so glad God gave us athletics and I'm so glad Paul enjoyed them.  His writing is full of allusions to them.  He was an observer.  But he also said "They do it to obtain a perishable wreath; we an imperishable." 

In between time outs, I flipped channels and watched some extreme sports guys; some were skiers and some were surfers and they talked about the work ethic of this young surfer from Puerto Rico, I think is where he was from, and his passion to find the greatest waves in the world. Where's the urgency?

Somehow he saw the beauty of the waves, somehow it captivated his heart, he had the genetic capability to be a good surfer.  Can you see, do you see, do you sense you need of God? Is there an urgency there?

Second, is it there because of His calling?  Look at the words:

Eph 4:1  I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling….

Forget the urgency, forget the walking if you don't have "the call."  What is "The Call?"  It's a word used in scripture that describes what God does to those He saves.  God always takes the initiative.  You find that when He urges them to be eager to maintain the unity of the spirit.  The unity of the spirit is already there; it's our work to maintain it. It is the calling of God in our lives we find in this book when he reaches out to us, way back from before time and calls our name in a way so powerful that He comes into our dead hearts and gives us life!  He begins to transform our soul, He gives us new tastes for His beauty, and He says upon that I'm urging you to walk in this manner.  This is an impossible lifestyle without God's Spirit in you.  But do you know that?  Do you have reason, and are you depending on His resource to get this done?

So we come to the Bible and we see because this is the only place to learn what God has done for us, and then when we learn it, are we exercising our faith to draw out from God Himself the resources for me, for you to be humble, gentle, patient, and bear with one another in love?  I don't know about you, but I need God's help to do those things.  But, what's it going to be?  What's it going to be if we take God seriously and over a 12-month period, each of us becomes marked with humility?  That word was disdained in the Greek culture until Jesus took it and remade it.  It spoke of the cowering nature of a slave, it's lowly-mindedness, and he combined that in Himself perfectly with gentleness. That's the picture of a domesticated animal.  For us to understand it, it's like taking the harness and putting it on a powerful horse, and then one small person can control the power of that horse.  It's the word meekness.  It's the strong personality under control.  It's there for the service of others, not self.  Only done by the Spirit of God, and with patience. The word is makrothumia, (Greek Word Study- "patience" μακροθυμια ) It's long-fused.  Got a quick trigger?  Yeah! 

I was shooting a muzzleloader sometime ago with my buddy, Jim Orrick, and the first time I shot it, he didn't tell me it had a hair trigger.  Thankfully, he put a lighter load of powder in it or it would have probably cut my eyebrow.  About the time I'm aiming it, BLOOOSH!  I know some people who are that way with their temper; they are really quick-fused, or they have a hair trigger.  This word is long-fused, and it particularly references our relationship with people who are irritants to us; that's what it is specifically focused on.  And in that context we are to bear with one another in that sum of all Christian virtues, love. 

Is there urgency? Is it because of His calling on you?  And are you putting in the effort?

Oh, Tony, I don't feel like being humble!  I can hear the minds almost of you dear women who are at home with your children, especially those of you who have 3, 4 or 5 little ones.  You're wondering as Joie did years ago, will I ever be able to carry on an adult conversation again in my life?  Her other description was that "You get so tired that end of your hairs hurt!" [Laughter]  You wonder what your purpose in life is, and the last thing you feel like being is humble because you're humble all day long wiping noses and bottoms of little babies.  Does it get any humbler than that?  And your husband comes home and the toys are all over the living room floor and he looks at you and says, "Haven't you done anything all day?"  [Laughter]  I would almost give you pastoral permission to slug him!  [Lots of laughter]

You know, Tony, you don't work where I work.  I work with 10 different people and 9 of them are jerks, and they curse and swear and cheat and walk all over people who are humble.  Do you expect me to be humble?  I'm too tired of this world.  Humble people are doormats!  Do you think Jesus was a doormat?  Do you think people walked on him?  Do you want to know the truth? He wasn't a doormat, but he did get walked on. 

Are you really willing to put in the effort?  Gentle? Self-controlled, meek? Patience? Bearing with one another in love? Now, why would we do that.  Let's look at the results in the church and I think it will begin to make divine and Biblical sense.  We live in a different world and some of us need to wake up, simply recognize and admit that we really do live in the information age.  Soon children will come out of the womb with a cell phone on their ear!  You know it wasn't that long ago that they were nonexistent, and you still ask that silly question, can't we have life without cell phones?  Why does my child have to have a cell phone?  Can't they live without one?  I mean it's not like air and food, is it? YES!  [Laughter]  It is!  [Laughter] Thank you.  [On screen behind Pastor Tony the PowerPoint said "Please silence all cell phones"]  I knew what I said wasn't that funny!   That is reason to believe that we cannot live without cell phones. 

My favorite story of cell phones in church, though, is when Rick Davidson was standing here preaching a funeral and I heard his cell phone chirp!  I knew what that meant, he forgot to turn it off, and his isn't just a cell phone, it's a 2-way radio and do you know what Rick's full-time job is? Construction!  Those people don't talk nice sometimes!  [Laughter]  I watched the beads of sweat start rolling down… He was waiting for one of his buddies, "Hey Rick, where in the world is the concrete trucks?" Oh, he doesn’t do funerals with his cell phone anymore!

What are the results?  You know in this cyber world we live in, relationships are at a premium.  People hardly even know how to talk to one another.  If they do… you know, my children have a new cell phone, some of them, and you know when you text and you use the strange new language that has been developed, you know, it's a weird world when text is a verb, but use some initials like LOL = laugh out loud.  The phone can translate that and say, "Laugh out loud"   out loud to you?  We're weird!

But, do you know what the world is looking for?  They don't want a phone to talk with them, they don't want text messages.  That's the make-believe world of cyberspace.  They want flesh, eyeball to eyeball, touching to touching, they want a community that is authentic and safe and if we are humble, genuinely humble, real humble people, not some kind of mock humility, if we are tenderhearted, if we are bearing with one another in love, if we are meek and patient, don't you think that the church could provide what this world is dying for?  Can you see the reasons behind that?  What's the result in church? It's an authentic community.  How does it become authentic?  Because every person who listens to what God has done for us in Christ becomes secure in Christ. It doesn’t matter  if I look good today or what you think about me.  It matters what God thinks about me.  I know what he thinks about me in Christ, I, then, am secure to love you, be humble towards you, because I have Christ in me and I'm accepted in the beloved, and it really doesn’t matter  if you accept me or not because Christ has and I am secure.  You put that in the middle of 500 people who are that secure and we're free to love each other.  That's what being authentic is!  And when you are also authentic, you can be safe with each other.  Because an authentic Christian knows that they are not perfect, that they will sin and stumble and they can come to their brothers and sisters and they can be restored; they won't be shot!  That's safe!

Do you have somebody you're safe enough with to tell them your worries and your fears or your sin?  The Bible plainly says, "Confess your faults one to another that you may be healed."  You don't do that in an unsafe, insecure environment.