One body, one spirit, one hope...

 Read Ephesians 4

You belong to the Lord.  He is your Master, Savior, and Friend.  By his blood we have been made right with God.  That should bring out an amen, hallelujah, or praise the Lord, but how will we respond. Paul has something to say about that.

I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.

We have been called to be a disciple of Christ Jesus.  How do we respond to this call? Are we ready to live up to this call?

What are some possible responses to this wonderful gift of mercy and grace? Paul gives us some.

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

So what’s all this unity business?  We all have different gifts and talents and abilities.  Doesn’t that mean we are all on separate courses?  We might be, but we have much in common.  Again, consider Paul’s counsel.

There is 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.

How can we be unified as one?

·       One body

·       One Spirit

·       One hope

·       One Lord

·       One faith

·       One baptism

·       One God and Father of all who is over all and in all

Consider also that grace has been apportioned to each of us as Christ deemed appropriate.

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.

What else has Christ given to us as he deemed appropriate?  Faith and gifts.  There are extended discussions on those in Paul’s other letters.

We are not all given the same.  There is no equal rights distribution.  Christ gives us what he knows that we need.  In the context of grace, some may have ventured farther from God than others, but he knows what we need to come home.

Our apportionments are different, but we are to be one body with one Spirit and one hope and one Lord.  We are of one faith and one baptism and know that God is our Father and over all, and our Father put Christ over all of us.  How do we get to this oneness?

We have talked before that the work of this age has been entrusted to the church.  Within the church, there are some specific assignments but all are called to something and all are called to unity.

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.

The goal is unity in the faith and in the knowledge of Christ the Son and all that he is and all that we are in him.  Remember, that’s how Paul started this letter telling his readers who we are in Christ.

Paul also uses a unique term—the fullness of Christ.  Christ lived, loved, healed, taught, rebuked, died for our sins, and rose from the dead.  We know these things but do we know him.  In the fulness of living a life given to Christ, we will come to know Christ more and more.

Paul is talking about maturing—growing in our faith and hope and as the body of Christ.  Too often churches dwell in infancy as believers.  We should grow and mature in our faith.  We are blessed that we grow in grace—that God will never disown us.  He loves us and will keep on loving us.

One indicator—and I spent more time on this in our First Light Service—is that we can speak the truth in love.  It’s easy to speak the truth in condemnation, but it is a sign of Christian maturity to speak the truth in a spirit of love.  It takes courage and a genuine desire to help others as God wants us to help them.  Sometimes speaking the truth is essential, but delivering the truth in a spirit of love is effective.

Remember this lesson from Paul’s letter to the Galatians .  We should all carry our own load but if someone who is trying is also struggling, we should help lift part of his burden.

If someone gets off course in her race of faith, we should gently call him home.  We are about invitation not condemnation.

Paul reminds all that we are saved by grace through faith.  It’s not by abiding by the law.  It’s not by circumcision.  There is no Jesus Plus salvation formula.  It’s all by the love of God so don’t try to earn salvation by means of the law.

That might be a dead horse as far as we are concerned, especially as we didn’t grow up in the synagogues. Perhaps Paul’s warning to believers not to return to their pagan ways is closer to our history.

Don’t go back to being your old self.  You are a new person.  Live as the new creation that God made you to be in Christ Jesus.

Paul got a little didactic and directive here.

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.

We are not people of falsehood but of truth.

Anger does not control us.  Love does.  Giving anger a foothold can lead to sin.

We don’t steal.  We work.

We don’t curse.  We encourage.

We don’t make God’s Spirit who lives within sad by our ungrateful choices.  We live by the Spirit.  We produce the fruit of the Spirit.

We are not brawlers.  We live by kindness and compassion. 

We are no longer the old person.  We have taken off the old self and put on the new. We are a new creation.  Lord, help us to live as this new person you made us to be.

Amen.