Resolved to Build and Grow in Love
January 7, 2007 8:58 am Ephesians, Sermon-TextsAn exegetical treatment of Ephesians 4:15-16 addressing the theme of Jesus’ Church, church growth, the members of a church, and The Resolved Church as a church plant. This sermon was originally preached January 7th of 2007 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.
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“Resolved to Build and Grow in Love ”
ephesians 4:15-16
I. the glory of Christ
II. the use of our gifts
III. the love of a body
Ephesians 4:15-16
15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
introduction
good morning everyone. welcome back for those who have been away seeing family over the holidays. last week was an important church family sermon about some changes that are happening here at the resolved and it’s online to either listen to or read if you missed it. this week is the first sunday of the new year and so i thought it would be a good idea to give a sermon addressing the plan for the future of the resolved in this next year.
and just so you know, this is kind of hard for me. there is something the business way of doing things, something about mission statements, and vision casting, and core values and being purpose driven…that really rubs me wrong. it just sort of makes me cringe. it sounds so manipulative and dishonest and strategically scam artist. like tryint to trick you into thinking church is cool. it’s not. well, i think our church is cool. J i just have a really hard time with it.
my wife amy has told me at times that i am extremist. so it’s my tendancy when i don’t like something to, in good extremist fashion, to just to chuck the whole thing and swing in the complete opposite direction. but then usually after time, or maybe it is just as i have got older as i have learned to react less quickly, i start to sort of come back a little bit and re-evaluate and try and see the bigger picture.
a good example of this is when we started this church. some of our friends and supporters wanted to know what our mission statement was, what our plan was…and i just look them in my eye, held up my bible and said “here is our plan. we are just going to preach the gospel and love people.” which, to tell you the truth, i still kind of like and believe. i believe that God’s word and prayer and loving people are enough to start and build a church. when it comes down to it, that is all that really matters. but what i have learned in the last year and half is that having no plan is still a plan and that if i am going to have a plan no matter what then let’s at least put some effort into trying to make it a good one.
so here i am, the guy with no plan giving you a sermon on the plan for the year. J but i’m not going to do it like you might expect. what you often find when pastors give these kind of sermons is really a business speech that they try and integrate with the bible. and so they have four or five points that they randomly rifle through and and as they do they try and give some scripture to support their ideas even when it is a strech…but they feel like they did there job because at least they got some bible in there.
so i’m not going to do that but instead i want to us to work with a passage of scripture this morning that makes some key theological arguments about how a church is supposed to grow. so open your bibles to ephesians chapter 4, we are going to look at verses 15 and 16 today. let’s read the passage and pray.
15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
God you, are not an unintentional God. you did not randomly create the universe, or experimentally give us your Word, or by chance happen to work in our lives. No, you are an all wise God that perfectly designed your creation and the way we come to know Christ and experience gospel satisfaction in our hearts. may we learn from you today in what you have written about how you designed your church to be. amen.
last week we looked at some parts of this very same passage to see how the church, what a church is, is really a body. and in that way it is a metaphor of the church so that it is seen as a living, breathing, organism, that has different parts and is growing and changing as it grows.
today we are going to look a little bit deeper at the way that God designed his church. what it is all about, how it is put together and intended to function and what the goal and result is. so we will see how the church is all about the glory of Christ, is about individuals using their gifts together, and is about love as the glue and strength of the body.
I. the glory of Christ
the first point is that church is all about the glory of Christ. in verse 12, a few verses earlier, ened by saying that saints, or christians, build up “the body of Christ.” so the church or the body is Christ’s body. and here in verse 15 we learn Christ is the head of his body. it reads, “rather speaking the truth in love we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” the church itself is both Christ’s body and Christ is the head of this body.
now i don’t think that paul, the writer of ephesians and same author of the book or romans we are studying, i don’t think paul intended for us to get all confused about parts and whole and how the body is jesus but jesus is also it’s head and how can that work because a body isn’t just a head and head isn’t just a body and that doesn’t really work… no, i think we would be missing it hugely if we got stuck there.
it seems rather that there are two main things we are to understand about the church, the body, and it being all about Jesus. first, it is his. Jesus created the world, then after so many thousands of years, depending on whether you are an evolutionist or old earth creationist or not, Jesus came to earth taking on humanity from a baby on up in order to never sin and go to the cross and die for all of us screw ups who can’t stop sinning, so that we don’t have to go to hell. thank you jesus.
but the church is his. some today have claimed that jesus never intended to start a church. but i disagree. in matthew 16, jesus is hanging out with his 12 disciples and he starts asking them what people think of him. and so they start telling jesus that people think he is this dead guy reincarned or something but that everybody disagrees over which dead guy he is. some think john the baptist, some elijah, some jeremiah…but it’s a debate. intersting there was debate about jesus even when he was still around. J
but then jesus turns directly to his disciples and asks them who they think he is, and peter looks at him and says, “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God (Mat 16:16).” and Jesus replies and says, “you are peter, and upon this rock I will build my church (Mt 16:18).” and whether or not you think the rock is peter or peter’s faith (i happen to think it is peter since peter preached on the day of pentecost when the church first started), it is clear that Jesus intended to start a church.
and here in ephesians 4 we learn that the church is comprised of people, throughout all time, who believe in him and follow after him. as verses 4 and 5 of this chapter say, “there is one body and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.” that is what many have called the invisible church, all the believers throughout the ages that together comprise the body of Christ. so what we have in specific groups of people, like we do here today, are smaller group expressions of that larger whole. the visible church. so there is the invisible church, all belivers across the world and across all time. and the visible church, specific groups of believers that are together pursuing Christ.
so that is first thing about the church, christ’s body, being all about jesus. the second thing is that he is its head. jesus is the head pastor. the senior pastor. he holds the supreme authority and leadership and is the supreme example we are following after. as verse 13 says, we are all trying to “attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
that is why i made the glory of Christ as my first roman numeral. not only because Christ is infinitly glorious because he planned from eternity to create the world and then to come into it one day and be a man and then die all in order to save me, which is amazingly glorious…but also because there is a “measure” or “stature” of “the fullness of Christ.” in Jesus there is a glory so inexaustible that it is sufficient to gaze into for real and lasting joy. it is superbly satisfying.
a few times in this letter to the ephesians, paul is writing and he just stops and either erupts in praise or in prayer. this glory of christ as the head makes me think of his prayer for us in the last chapter, chapter three, when he says, “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you being rooted and grounding love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph 3:14-19).” what a prayer. that is what i am after. that is the resolve of my life. the glory of Christ. something begins with knowledge and then surpasses it and fills with all the fullness of God himself!
so church is first and foremost all about the glory of Christ. second it is about the use of our gifts.
II. the use of our gifts
let’s read verse 16 again, “from whom (that’s Christ) the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. notice that word, “equipped.” do you see it?
now look up a few verses at verse 7, “But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” so, by grace Christ gives each and every one gifts. read verse 11, “he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers…” those are foundational and overseeing gifts. apostles and prophets are writers of scripture and evangelists, pastors, and other teachers are elder or overseer gifts intended to function together to lead a church under the head pastorship of christ. i don’t have time to defend that here today, so if you want more on that there is a sermon titled “resolved eldership” that justin and i preached together and you can read or listen to that online. but it’s just sort of in passing and not the main point of this sermon.
so, these leader gifts are given and then verse 12 continues, “(in order) to equip the saints for the work of the ministry for building up the body of Christ.” so verse 12 and verse 16 are very similar in that they both talk about christians being given or equipped with gifts that build up the body of Christ.
two main points here. first, everyone is given gifts. every person on this planet is unique. and everyone is given a gift by Christ. just as every person on the planet has a different fingerprint eveyone one of us has a different gift. some of our gifts may look similar but they are each unique as each one of us are unique from each other. have you every thought about that? how many billions of people there are on the earth and how every single one of them, even though some may have similar skin color or backgrounds, each are uniquely different. like so many truths the physical is a picture of the spiritual. each person in this room has a spiritual gift given by Christ himself to you when you began to embrace him as your hope for this life and the next. there is something unique that Christ has made you especially capable of doing. do you know what that is?
so that is my first point. the second point is that each of these gifts that we have are not fully realized until they are being used in conjunction with other people’s gifts in the church. let me say that again, it may be one of the most important things i say today. here it is, “these gifts that we have are not fully realized until they are being used in conjunction with other people’s gifts in the church.”
you see, here is the thing… a lot of the gifts that Christ gives, are functional gifts that you use outside the church. some are specific spiritual gifts that the bible talks about and some are functional gifts. the functional gifts are what a lot of you are in the process of trying to figure out in life. what i am going to do for work? what i am going to do with my life? you are trying to discover what gifts Christ has given you but what this text teaches is that when you find out what that gift is, there is a spiritual side to it and it is more than a side but a source, it is a spritual thing that drives you and that spiritual source has some relation to the church and if you are not using for the church in some way there is level of satisfcation and fulfillment that you are missing out on and will not experience until you begin to use your gifts properly.
okay, so how does that play itself out? well…i think there are two sides to this. one is that we have a great tendency as sinful human beings to compartmentalize our lives. where there is church life and then there is outside church life and we keep the two separate and they don’t have anything to do with each other. but that is not how God designed us to be. it doesn’t work. you can’t be happy as a christian trying to live that way. it is miserable. they are meant to be interconnected. we are meant to have as jonathan edwards said, “a God-entranced view of all things.” so we are meant to see our jobs as spiritual things and we are all meant to contribute to the church in some way and those are not to be two separate things but are meant to flow in and out of each other.
look at three phrases in this verse: “joined” “held together” “working properly.” do you see how Christ designed his church? a bunch of different individuals with different gifts, that have a place inside and outside the church, and these gifts join and hold together and make the body work properly. when that happens we are very happy people. so that is one side, that every person has something about them that uniquely enables them to give to the church in some way.
here is the other side. i think we, as the church, the body of Christ, in time and history may have limited our scope on what church can be. here is what i mean. God calls some people to be mechanics, some doctors, lawyers, farmers, cooks, computer programmers, hair stylists, and all kinds of things. that is a given. there are people who do those things and enjoy them because that is what God made them to do.
but what if we didn’t see those professions as things that only existed “out there” and then there is church “in here?” what if the church itself owned and operated mechanics shops, hospitals, farms, restruants, bars, music venues, hair salons, retail stores and all kinds of things. why have we drawn up such hard lines? now i’m just speculating, but i can’t see a reason why not. i’d like some day for the resolved church to own and operate all kinds of business. as christians, who know the creator and are empowered by the spirit of Christ, we should be able to put out the best businesses out there. and think what it would be like if good, strong, solid, people loving people christians were the ones running these business?
but that is probably a few years out for us as far as the resolved is concerned. so there are two sides to gifting and if the side to our gifting is that each person has something about them that uniquely enables them to give to the church in some way, the second side is that each person has something about them that uniquely enables them to give to the community in some way.
now, i know a lot of you are still trying to figure out what you are good at, what you like, what you are going to do with your life, what your gifts are, and how you want to contribute to church. and that is okay, it is a process for sure. unavoidably. a lot of times you may have a plan of what you think it is and it doesn’t work out and you end up unsure. so where do you fit in this?
here is where i think you fit. when you do figure out what your gifts are, there is a responsibility that comes with it. just because you are gifted in something doesn’t mean it will always be something easy with no effort. there is a responsibility that comes. you have to work hard in it. the cool thing is that i think you will usually find a drive or passion to do it even though it is hard at times. that’s God’s spirit in you.
so here is what i have to say. between now and that time…what you can do is work on being a comitted person. you can work at working hard at something and you can try a lot of things. you can experiment. whether it is in the church or outside you can try a lot of things to see what you like and what you may be naturally good at. there is nothing unspiritual about that. yesterday i was hanging out with jake and brian at longboards and we were meeting to talk about church stuff but it was also kind of fun because we went to longboards to do it and so we got to watch some of the playoffs. but jake asked me that famous question you hear a lot in christian circles, “how do you know what God’s will for your life is?”
my answer was and is simple. at the beginning of romans 12 the bible simply says to worship God and then as you are doing that in your life, as you are comitting to that, you begin to discover God’s will for your life. romans 12 calls it presenting yourself as a living sacrifice then you will begin to understand what God’s will is for your life. so where i see you who are in process still about your gifts, is simply to pursue God, serve him inside and outside the church, work at breaking down those lines, and try a lot of things. God will make it clear in His time.
III. the love of a body
okay, the last thing i want to look at this morning is “the love of a body.” this was my best attempt at giving a mission vision sermon which really has just turned out to be an exegetical sermon on ephesians 4:15-16 with a lot more applicational insight than i usually give. but i’ve made it through the whole sermon up to this point avoiding the two words which were really the reason why i picked this passage to preach on…the words “grow” and “build.”
obviously, this next year at the resolved church, we want to continue to grow and build. but usually when we think of those terms in relation to a church and especially a church plant, a new church…you think numbers of people. but look at this passage. what does it say about building and growing? “we are to grow UP in every way into him” “when each part is working properly, (it) makes the body grow so that it builds itself UP in love.” up. interesting. it doesn’t seem to say anything about growing externally in numbers or that building a church means more and more people coming.
why is that? i know paul was all about that. he spent the whole latter half of his life starting new churches and talking to people about Jesus. at the end of this very letter he asks for prayer and says, “(pray that) words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel for which i am an ambassador (Eph 6:18-19).”
so what is the deal? here is the thing. i think this is what’s going on. the way a church is intended to be started, the way the gospel really spreads and takes root in our lives and in the lives of people around us…isn’t so much through tricks and gimmicks and clever marketing and aggressive entrepeneurialship. no it is through growing up in Christ together. so the way we are to grow out, the way a church will be built numerically, is when its members are passionately focused on growing and building themselves up in Christ.
do you get that? the way the resolved church will grow and still be a real church and not just a sunday morning event, is by us growing spritually in Christ together. as we grow up we will grow out. yesterday, brian gibbs who recently has really stepped up in helping out with the audio and visual things that go on here, he said it good… he said as we grow vertically we will grow horizontally. that’s good. i like it. john piper says it another this way, “missions exists because worship doesn’t.”
now we are a very missional church, or at least try to be. it is a big part of who we are to reach out in love and be accepting of all kinds of people no matter who they are. that we befriend non-christians and live life with them. we are not about making some nice neat and tidy christian club.
last week we watched the UFC fight at my house outside with chuck liddell and tito ortiz and we had a big mix of people there. there were some people that were from other churches, some from our church, some friends of mine that hate church and were getting high while we watched the fight. that made some people uncomfortable. being a christian and being the church isn’t nice and tidy. it’s about loving God and loving people unconditionally.
just don’t get it mixed up…missions is to flow out of worship not the other way around. i can’t say enough, “be missional.” love people unconditionally no matter what race, sexual preference, visual appearance, financial status…go befriend the world. but just make sure you are doing that because you are being driven by your worship of God.
if you think, “oh, cool. here is a church that is okay with me just living my life the way i want and i can still go feel at home and feel a part of thing and they love me…” yes those things are true…but not our worship is not to flow out of our lives and we think that the way we live our lives is okay because it’s “mission.” it doesn’t work like that. worship is our life. i am fighting for us to see being a body together as the main thing of our life that everything flows out of. where worship isn’t something we just fit in but instead where we begin to see that everything is about church.
okay, so the way we grow out is by growing up. and there is a whole stream of things we could talk about in regards to how we grow up. in our text, we already talked about gifts and using them and the last thing here is love.
we have two references two it. in verse 15, it says we are to speak the truth in love. which is a contrast to the previous verse where the opposite of doing that is called “human cunning” and “craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph. 5:14). the second reference is this all inclusive reference at the end of verse 16, that says we are to grow and build in love.
look at the first reference, “speaking the truth in love.” there is the plain, natural, obvious meaning you catch right away because we know when we are speaking unkindly to someone. but i think there is something even more here because of that word, “rather” we see at the beginning of verse 15. we know already that this “speaking the truth in love” has to do with us growing up together, joints and parts working together in the body. so how is that contrasted in verse 14? let’s read it, verse 13 ends talking about maturing into Christ and verse 14 begins, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”
what is that? to be tossed to and fro? carried about by every wind of doctrine? we don’t have time to get into the greek and the historical cultural background here. but simply put, it is fairly easy get the picture here isn’t it? a person who is constantly changing from one thing to the next and then giving some sort of supposedly spiritual reason to justify it when really they are just doing what they want because they want to and are crafty and cunning enough to convince themselves are their friends that it is okay. i know because i’ve been that person before. and what that person needs a good, loving friend, to speak the truth to them in love. and those are hard conversations but they are the ones that really bring about deep bonds of friendship and brings significant growth in our lives.
and lastly the second reference…to grow and build in love. i was hanging out with john bale this week who recently started helping rickey with the setup and tear down here, and we were talking about how in greek there are four different kinds of love and so you can be a lot more specific than in english. the greek word for love here is agape, that sacrificial family love that Jesus defined with crystal clarity in dying on the cross for us.
the word that is used here for “building up” in verse 16 is interesting because the first half of the word in greek is the word for house, oikos. you really could say, “making a house of itself in love.” and we have these mixing of metaphors but it seems to go together really well. a body, that is making itself a household through love. the body of Christ is a household family.
that is what we are here, a church family. and as a family we love one another deeply. and i think that for that to happen there has to be openness and honesty and intimacy. and the truth is that just isn’t going to happen here on sunday mornings. it takes time for that to happen, time spent together other than for an hour and half or so once a week with a whole bunch of people. it just isn’t going to happen that way.
that is why it is my prayer that in this next year we would see more mid-week groups form. the monday night girls things has been going so well and i hear from several of you girls how much you love it and how it has been so good for you. in talking to sue the hope is that in the next year another girls group would form out of that one. beginning in february, i will be teaching this theology of the resolved class, which is really just like an introduction to the resolved church. it will be in a classroom at the CSBC school up the hill. and i’m praying that after that is over a guys group and maybe another co-ed mid-week group, i don’t know…
what i do know is that we need time during the week to get together and talk about how we are doing, what’s going on in our lives, what we are learning or struggling with spiritually and then pray about it together. really caring for eachother. that’s agape love. it’s what we need. something about the whole “small groups” thing has always rubbed me wrong. i don’t know why so much stuff seems to rub me wrong. maybe when it just feels forced and i don’t see the reason why it is needed. but i do know that we have a spiritual need and a scriptural mandate here to grow and build in love. and i don’t know how else that is going to happen.
so think about it. who are you getting together on a weekly basis to have spiritual conversations with? who could you do that with? it is part of how we are “joined and held together.” it is how we become strong and happy in life. a twig is so easily to snap when it is just by itself but put together with a bunch of other twigs and and bundled and tied together those twigs become strong. we need each other.
conclusion
okay, let’s conclude this sermon. being a church is about the glory of Christ, the use of our gifts, and the love of a body.
in the past 10 years that i have been doing christian ministry here is what i have often seen. there is often an initial excitement that comes with the hearing of the Word of God but then it often wanes and extinguishes. instead what we need is passion, conviction, togetherness, and intimacy. we always act according to our greatest desire and so what we need is for our desires to change.
often there is a lack of comittment to God or church or spiritual things or whatever. that comes from mis-understanding the unity of a body and how we need each other and how each person is so valuable. the wrong response to a lack of commitment, if that is you or you have a friend that comes to mind, is that you come down hard on them…that only breeds some legalistic requirement where they will come out of obligation or fear. so you can you can say too much but not saying anything can be just as unloving. what is needed is grace and support, like justin has taught us so well, to look at a person and think long-term and to be there with them through their struggles and failures and encouraging them to follow after Christ. the biggest need is a change of desire where church is seing as something that is a privilege to be a part of and that brings great strength to one’s life.
i was talking to my wife about a number of things and she said that it just seems that when it comes down to it most people simply just don’t “want to go to church.” now besides the whole thing about how we don’t go to the church but are the church because are a living body…i thought about that for awhile and this what i came up with. it seems there are four reasons, maybe there are more, but these are the four i thought of: 1. we don’t think we need it. 2. are feeling driven (that being tossed about by every wind of doctrine) 3. rebellion (where we don’t want to do what we know we should) 4. we think if we are just spiritual we can have our “own church.” what are the responses to those reasons: 1. church is necessary for survival and joy. 2. we need to be conviction driven. 3. we need to humble ourselves and our pride and the idea that life is all about me because it is all about God. 4. we need each other. there is no such thing as being a christian without being part of a church. when you join to christ you join to his family.
those are my thoughts. resolved to grow and build in love. i realized a few nights ago that i hadn’t made any new years resolutions. when i was a college pastor we used to do this thing on new years where we would write a letter to God and then seal it and the church would mail it to you a year later. i haven’t done that for awhile. but this is the last thought i want to leave you with. if growing as a church means growing up spiritually, how do you want to grow individually this next year and how can your church family help you to do that?
as we move to the table this morning, let’s think about that. let’s think about this verse and what gifts Christ may have given us and let’s think about how marvelous his glory is. our head, Jesus Christ. as John the Baptist said, “behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
let’s pray.