Latest / HBCWestminster / 1.29.23 Ephesians 4:1-16 Pastor Sam Porges

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1.29.23 Ephesians 4:1-16 Pastor Sam Porges · HBCWestminster

• 0:00
  If you've got your Bibles, open them there to Ephesians 4. We're going to look at verses 1 to 16. As many of you know, I became a dad this last November. Indeed. And my unbiased opinion is that he's the cutest baby in all of the land. He is. But like most new parents, I have become much more germ-conscious.
• 0:26
  And health aware, right? I'm sure you as a parent have experienced that. Hudson, Hudson is his name. He's two months old. His health has become a priority to me. And so we avoid people who are sick. And I wash my hands a lot more than I did. And just as a, amen. Yeah, Liz is like, that's a good idea. It is a good idea. I, as I think a byproduct of washing my hands more, I have not gotten sick.
• 0:54
  this year either, this winter season. So I'm praising the Lord. It's a win-win for everyone. But I care about his health. It's a priority to me. And in Ephesians chapter 4, we are urged by Paul to look out for the health of the body of Christ, to make it our priority. This topic is incredibly important because you, if you are a Christian this morning,
• 1:19
  You directly contribute to the health of the body, and you are directly affected by the health of the body. In these verses, Paul casts a vision for what a healthy body of Christ should look like, and he gives a basic, what I'm going to call, kind of three-step or three-part fitness plan for us to follow in order that we may ensure the body's health. And so I'm going to read verses 1 to 16, and if you would stand with me.
• 1:48
  In honor of God's word, Ephesians 4, verse 1, he says,
• 2:17
  one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore, it says, when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men. In saying he ascended, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And he gave the apostles, the prophets.
• 2:47
  the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all 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, 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 and deceitful schemes. Rather,
• 3:13
  Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ, 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. Would you pray with me? Father, we count it an immense blessing to be part of the body of Christ, and especially part of the body of Christ here.
• 3:42
  We're grateful to be together this morning, and as we look to your word, we ask that you would speak to us. Cast a vision for us by your word for what the body here should look like, how it should function, and how we, as individuals within the body, should contribute to it. Be glorified, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. You may be seated. Well, Paul's fitness plan in these verses tells us that Highland can be a healthy church.
• 4:14
  If we strive for three things, we need to strive for unity, we need to celebrate diversity, and then we need to press toward maturity. And so let's look first at unity. Look with me at verse 13. Verse 13 in your Bibles. He says that one of our goals should be to attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. Unity. What exactly does that kind of unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God even look like?
• 4:44
  In the first six verses of this chapter, he describes three aspects of Christian unity that we would do well to look to. The first is found in verse one and it is our unity of calling. Look with me at verse one in your Bibles. He says this, I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.
• 5:05
  You know, there's something in this verse that we don't see in our English Bibles. And it's the fact that the word you here is plural. It's not singular, right? And you may think, well, why does that really matter? What's the big deal? It matters a lot because it means that this passage is addressed not to you as an individual, but to us as a body.
• 5:27
  In English, right, the word you can be used as a singular or a plural. I could say, you need to do this, or I could say, you need to do this, and it comes out just the same way. But in the Greek, it's not singular, it's plural. And this is important. You may have heard of the Bible app YouVersion. How many of you guys have heard of that? It's a Bible app, YouVersion, right, and you can choose a number of different translations to look at the Bible, and it's really helpful. But I'm going to suggest to you another resource that you should check out.
• 5:55
  on your internet browser it's called y'all version okay y'all version it's wonderful um but the y'all what the y'all version does is it makes a concerted effort to translate second person plural pronouns into different what we could call accents and so when you go onto the onto the browser you can choose a number of different accents the first of which is southern and so
• 6:20
  This verse would look like this. It would read like this. I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge y'all to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which y'all have been called. Right? You could choose Western. I, therefore, urge you guys to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you guys have been called. That's like my native tongue right there. Do we have any people from Pittsburgh in here? Okay. This one I did not get. No one in first service got this either. But this is the Pittsburgh translation, right?
• 6:51
  I therefore urge yins to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which yins have been called, right? You could also choose New York City or Chicago accent. I therefore urge youse guys to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which youse guys have been called, right? You could choose English, you lot. You could choose old English, ye. I urge ye to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which ye have been called, right? Now, the importance of, it's really fun, right? But the importance of all that is,
• 7:19
  It reminds us to read the scriptures through a communal lens rather than our default individualistic lens. And the good thing about that y'all version is it's rooted in the Greek text. It'll have English and then Greek right next to it. And when you hover over the word you, it'll show you what it is in Greek. It's plural, right? And so we're kind of freed from our individualism as we look at this passage. He's talking about you guys. He's talking about y'all, right? Or y'all selves, I think is another.
• 7:49
  Something in there. But Paul reminds us that all believers share the same calling from God. And we talk about being called to different things, don't we? That's kind of part of our Christian vernacular. God is calling me to this. But what this passage says is that all Christians have the same calling from God, namely to trust in Christ for the forgiveness of sins and to walk in newness of life. And although salvation occurs in individual hearts, right? When I got saved, it happened here.
• 8:17
  Although it occurs in individual hearts, God has not saved us to be alone. Once saved, we are incorporated into the gathering that is called the church. And in that gathering, we get to live out the shared reality of our calling. And so the first aspect of our unity is a unity of calling. The second one, which is seen in verses two to three, is our unity of conduct. Look at verse two with me. He says,
• 8:45
  eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. He says, because you guys all share this one calling from God, there is a sort of lifestyle that we should all share because it flows out of our one calling and it is our conduct. In these verses, he tells us that we should be humble like servants because that's what we are. We should be gentle with one another. Another way of putting that would be have self-controlled strength.
• 9:15
  Gentleness is not weakness. Jesus was gentle, but he was not weak. The scriptures describe him as where there would be a bruised reed, he would not break it. And where there's just a smoldering wick of faith, he wouldn't blow it out. Jesus says, right, come to me, all of you who labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest. That's what we should be like. Gentle and humble of heart. So he says, be humble, be gentle. Next.
• 9:44
  He says, be patient as you bear with one another in love. Patience, as John Chrysostom, who was an early church father, described it as, it means to have a big and a wide soul. I love that. The person who isn't patient, they have a small, cramped soul. There's no room in their heart for the imperfections or stumblings of anybody else.
• 10:09
  But to have a big and a wide soul means, okay, I see imperfections, I see stumblings, but you're still welcome here. I'll patiently bear with you instead of just getting annoyed by you. And lastly, he says in verse 3, this is interesting. Look at verse 3. How does he start verse 3? What's the first word? Eager. Eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond.
• 10:39
  He says that we should sow peace, not division. Now, church, imagine just for a minute being part of a body where no one is humble, no one is gentle, no one is patient, no one is loving, and no one is peaceful. Imagine the hell that that gathering would be. Unity in the church is not even possible without these attributes, right?
• 11:12
  It's not even possible without humility, gentleness, patience, and peacefulness. And if this is your heart this morning, you say, okay, I do want to treat people with gentleness. I do want to be humble. I want to be patient with people. I want to have a big and a wide soul, right? I want to be, I'm eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. If that's you, then do we not also say, must we not also say that there's no room here for gossip, right?
• 11:43
  Because that doesn't sow seeds of unity, it sows seeds of division. There's no room for conceit in a group that is following Ephesians chapter 4. The question that we should wake up with on Sunday mornings is, is my heart ready to worship the Lord with my brothers and sisters? Not, what am I going to wear today that gets people to look at me and make me look really good? There's just no room for that, right? Because we're humble, we're not conceited, there's no insistence on our own way.
• 12:11
  Like, I want them to sing the songs that I want. I want the sermon to be like this. It's about me. No, not at all. There's no backbiting, right? All those things breed division. They don't breed unity. And so he says, because you have shared one calling from God, there should be a unity of conduct among you. But then the thing that fuels those, the theological truths that fuel those, is our unity of confession. It's our unity of confession. Look at verse 4. He says,
• 12:51
  This is our unity of confession. You should know that there are massive, eternity-shaping theological truths that bind you together. In those verses I just read, what was the one word that's repeated over and over again? One.
• 13:11
  right? One Lord, one faith, one baptism. He's stressing our unity of confession. He says that you and I are part of the same body and filled with the same spirit, and we share the same hope of the same Lord's return, and we have been baptized into the same body of that same Lord, and we have been adopted into the same spiritual household by the same Father. You guys, God has given us plenty of reasons to be unified with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
• 13:39
  And is not this message of unity important for today? It is. Because division is the norm. When we look out at our society, we don't see unity. We see division. And sadly, a lot of times when we look at the church, we don't see unity either. We see division.
• 14:01
  I recently read this funny story. There was this Christian guy who was stranded on this island, and years later, this boat was driving by, and they saw smoke coming up from the island, and so they decided to go check it out. And upon their arrival, the rescuers jump out of the boat, and they walk up to this guy, and behind him, they see two churches. And they say, what's going on? And he says, well, that's the church that I go to, and that's the church that I used to go to.
• 14:29
  And it's kind of funny, but it is a little bit sad as it reveals the heart of many modern Christians where the attitude is one of separatism and not unity. Where so many Christians define themselves by what they aren't rather than what they are. Like I see them over there, we're not that. And I see what they believe and we're not that. And I see this church over here, we're not them, right? Rather than defining themselves by what they are. And what verses four to six offer to us is a way of defining what we are. We define ourselves by what we are, not by what we are.
• 14:59
  don't believe, right? Within Christianity, even outside of these walls, we can unite with other believers, whether they call themselves Baptist or not. If they hold to the confession in verses four to six, we can say, okay, we're brothers and sisters, right? Even though we may believe different things on peripheral issues. And so Paul says, when we recognize our unity of calling and then we take ownership of our unity of conduct,
• 15:29
  And we believe our unity of confession, the whole body grows into the health that God would have for it. And so that's first. He says the fitness plan, step one, aim for unity, right? It's important to realize as we talk about this that unity in the church does not mean uniformity. It doesn't mean uniformity. We don't all put on the same uniform so that all of our differences are lost because we're not all the same.
• 15:55
  Within our unity, we celebrate diversity. Now, diversity is one of those buzzwords today, isn't it? Oh yeah, it is. Everyone's talking about diversity, but what I've noticed is that the diversity which the culture pushes is often only a skin-deep diversity, right? It's much more about what you look like and not necessarily about who you are. The diversity that the church celebrates.
• 16:27
  obviously includes ethnic diversity, right? We rejoice in that because it's part of the beauty of God's creation in us. But it does go deeper than that. It does go deeper. We're talking about not a diversity related to our skin color, but a diversity related to the spirit that is within us. That's what he's describing in these verses. God has given us varying gifts, abilities, and talents that can be used for the benefit of the body. Look with me at verse 7.
• 16:57
  So verses four to six is that confession, right? One Lord, one faith, one baptism. Verse seven, how does he begin? But, okay, but grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. And then in verse 11, he describes some of those different spiritual giftings, right? This passage is describing what is called, or what are called spiritual gifts. The theologian Wayne Grudem has defined a spiritual gift as any ability that is empowered by the Holy Spirit and used in any ministry of
• 17:28
  the church. Verses 8 to 10 here describe Christ as this, oh, something happened. I clicked the wrong thing. That's my bad. Verses 8 to 10 here describe Christ as this victorious king who has gone to war, he has won the victory, and then he brings the spoils of war back to his people and distributes it among them, right?
• 17:56
  But it's interesting, what does verse 7 say are those spoils? It's not material goods. It's rather his grace. His grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of his gift. And check out verse 11. What does he give to the church in verse 11? People. You catch that? The gifts that Christ gives to us is people. Highland, you are the prize that Jesus has won. You're the prize.
• 18:33
  In his victory over death in the cross and the resurrection, you're the prize. And then in his grace and by his wisdom, he gives us to one another so that we can build one another up. It's interesting. Although we hold to a unity of confession of the spirit, what we see is a diversity in the manifestation of the spirit. Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 12. Paul writes this. Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit.
• 19:02
  And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord. And there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. And then verse 7, here it is. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. What he's talking about here is what are called spiritual gifts. And did you know that God has individually and uniquely wired you with spiritual gifts that he intends for you to use for the building up of the body here? You're gifted by God.
• 19:33
  And you are a gift to this body. God doesn't want you sitting on the sidelines just coming and then leaving immediately when service is done. He wants you to contribute. He wants you to get in the game. He has so much more planned for you than just coming here and consuming. He says, no, be a contributor. And so let me ask, are you using the gifts that God has given you? Are you using them?
• 20:03
  if you're like, dude, this is the first time I heard of spiritual gifts, that is totally okay. There are things like spiritual gifts tests that you can take that can help with where you might be gifted, but also come up and talk to us. If you're not sure where to get plugged in, we have, as I'm sure you've seen, volunteer...
• 20:21
  bulletin boards, essentially, in both bathrooms and then in the fellowship hall that are updated every week with where we need people to serve in the church. And so if you're thinking, okay, I do want to get jumped in, I just don't know where, come up and talk to one of us or check out those boards and we'd be happy to plug you in. Paul in verse 11 continues by listing five types of leaders that God raises up in the church. He says apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. When the church began 2,000 years ago,
• 20:51
  The church needed leaders who would go to different places and establish gospel presence. They needed leaders who would speak the words of God, who would go and take the message of Jesus out there to unbelievers. They needed pastors, shepherds who would look after the souls of all these new believers, and they needed people who would teach correct doctrine according to what the apostles had taught. And in the last 2,000 years, this need of the church has not changed. We still need
• 21:21
  these leaders. And notice in verse 12 what their combined role is. What do all these leaders do according to verse 12? What do they do? They equip the saints for the work of ministry. And who are the saints? You! Yes, you are the saints. You are God's holy ones. The job of these leaders and the job of Highland's pastors and elders is to equip you for the work of ministry by giving you the tools you need.
• 21:55
  to build each other up, and to be effective witnesses when you leave this building. That is our job. We want to equip you with the tools that you need. This is one of the reasons, or the major reason, why we have things like the Foundations class on Wednesday nights and Friday mornings. It's a basic systematic theology, but my goal in that class is to equip you with the knowledge of the Son of God that you need to minister to one another, to the body here, and to be confident as you go outside and speak the gospel to those who don't know.
• 22:24
  We want to equip you with that, right? This is one of the reasons why the preaching here not only includes information, but also application. We don't just want to do a data transfer to you, like this is the biblical knowledge you need. We want you to apply it to your life. As James says, we don't want to just be hearers of the word. We want to be doers of the word.
• 22:45
  Equipping you for the work of ministry is why we do retreats and conferences and events and why we do things like the Thinking Biblically About Education seminar that is coming up in just a few weeks. Now, I'm the adult ministries pastor, and this is one of my events, so I'm going to promo this real quick, okay? This little paper is out in the lobby in the fellowship hall. This is information on a seminar we are hosting here in just a few weeks. If you guys have been following up with the news, you'll know that
• 23:13
  public education is on the table for discussion right now. A lot of people are wondering, what's the role of a school? Is it a public school? Is it a government school? What do we do if the school is teaching things we don't like? Where does homeschooling fit in all of this? We've seen private schools in the last few years, their attendance has skyrocketed and public schools are closing.
• 23:37
  This is what our culture is talking about, education, and it's our responsibility as the people of God to think biblically about it. And so for a Friday night from 6 to 9 and then a Saturday morning from 9 to noon, we're going to talk about it. And I'm bringing in one of my professors from seminary who is a really engaging teacher, really knowledgeable on this subject. He is going to lead us through that. And so I would encourage you guys to come.
• 23:59
  On the back of this little paper, there's a QR code that goes to Church Center. If you are coming, please sign up on Church Center so we know how many materials to prepare. And I would specifically encourage a few groups to come. If you're a parent or a homeschooler or a teacher, you should come. This will be worth your time. And if you're here and you're just thinking, I just want to think biblically about education.
• 24:22
  then you should come. And so the reason we do stuff like this is to equip you to think biblically about everything and to be effective Christ-like Christians in the world, right? If you guys left the bulk of ministry up to your pastors, the body would not adequately be built up because ministry would bottleneck at us and our offices, right? We've got 400 some odd people who come to Highland, four full-time guys.
• 24:51
  We can't do it all, but this passage says it's not up to us to do it all. We're here to equip you, and the bulk of ministry actually falls on your shoulders. And we believe, verse 12, with such conviction that it has made its way into the mission statement of Highland. I'm sure you guys have read this at some point, but Highland Baptist Church exists to communicate the life-changing message of the Lord Jesus Christ by equipping the saints for the work of ministry. There it is, through the preaching of God's word and the empowering of the Holy Spirit.
• 25:21
  We want you to have the knowledge of the Son of God and then to be empowered by the Holy Spirit to serve one another. This empowering of the Spirit not only means grounding you in the faith, in what you should know, biblical doctrine, but also it means allowing you to use your gifts that God has given you. That's our desire for you. And so we aim for unity, right? But then we celebrate diversity. Now I want to say one more thing about this diversity.
• 25:50
  We not only celebrate diversity in our spiritual gifts and our abilities, but also in our theological backgrounds. Over the last, I don't know, four or five years, Highland has experienced something kind of unique. We're getting more and more people from different theological backgrounds and cultures all uniting here together to worship Jesus. It's really interesting. Here at Highland, we have Baptists, ex-Catholics, Charismatics, ex-Jehovah's Witnesses,
• 26:22
  Pentecostals, Reformed, and on and on I could go. You Highlanders have come from a variety of theological traditions and church cultures, and there's something really good that happens when we meet together, when we break bread together, and we rub elbows with one another and say, okay, you and I are united under the banner of Christ, but we have different opinions and thoughts on a number of peripheral issues.
• 26:47
  So when it comes to the core of Christianity, man, we agree, right? But there are some things we disagree on. Let's talk about that. Let's search the scriptures for it. Let's sharpen one another in our faith. It's really good. And so we want to cling to unity and diversity here. And in fact, that combination of unity and diversity was the whole idea behind the establishment of universities. Think about the word university is literally a combination of unity.
• 27:16
  and diversity. University. The idea was that under the name of one school, you could have a bunch of students come and study various disciplines, but they all do it under the name of that one school, right? Well, in the same way, in the church, we all come together under the banner of the gospel. We rejoice in it, but then you guys are all gifted very differently for the building up of one another.
• 27:38
  And so we've got unity, diversity. The last part of Paul's fitness plan here is to attain health through maturity. Look at verse 13. He says, We should seek to be a church defined as mature.
• 28:07
  He says, seek mature manhood. The church must not remain like a spiritual nursery. Now, there's a time in every Christian's life when they are what we would call a baby Christian. You just get saved. You may not know a lot of doctrine. You're just getting your life in line with gospel living, and you need a lot of direction, and that is totally okay, and we rejoice in that. And it's fine to be an infant, but it's not fine to remain an infant.
• 28:35
  My son, as I said earlier, is two months old. And we just had his two-month appointment last Monday. And the doctor told us he's been gaining about a pound every week since his first appointment. And let me tell you, man, the chunkier he gets, the happier we get. We're just like, yes, those two go up the graph at the same rate. But if Hudson wasn't growing, we would assume that something's wrong, right?
• 29:07
  In the same way, if the church is not growing, we need to assume that something is wrong. And I'm not talking about numerically, right? That can be a part of it, but I'm talking about our depth of knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and our love for Jesus. If we're not growing in those things, something is wrong. Spiritual infants, Paul says, are tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.
• 29:33
  Spiritual babies aren't well established in the truth, and so their faith is really shaken by false teaching. They haven't yet developed their sense of doctrinal discernment where they can hear something that is said and say, okay, this is true and this is not. They haven't developed that sense yet. When the winds change, they change. And there will always be spiritual fads and emphases and slogans that come and go, and some of them will be true and some of them won't.
• 30:00
  There will always be false teachers that seek to take advantage of people by itching their ears and just telling you what you want to hear. But the mature believer stands firm and is able to see through the lies like a rock in the ocean against which the waves continually crash. They do not move. And this is what he says we should aim for. Mature manhood. It's interesting that Paul directly links spiritual maturity to doctrinal orthodoxy.
• 30:31
  Right? Notice he says be mature and then in verse 14, so that you're no longer tossed by the waves of bad doctrine. There's this idea floating around in some Christian circles where spiritual maturity is gauged not by what you believe but by what you do. Like it doesn't really matter what you believe as long as you're serving the poor and helping widows and orphans.
• 30:55
  then you're spiritually mature. Now, we do hold to the book of James, which says that true religion means to minister to widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world. But church, is doctrine important? Yes. Yes, doctrine is very important. Do you have to know certain things to be a Christian? Yes, of course you do, right? It's not just I serve the poor and therefore I go to heaven.
• 31:25
  No, you have to know certain things to be a Christian. Bad doctrine leads to hell. Doctrine matters. Orthodoxy, he says, orthodoxy means right doctrine. It's part of your spiritual maturity. But we must not only have orthodoxy, right doctrine, we must also have orthopraxy, right practice. We just looked earlier in verses two to three at our unity of conduct in which he describes some of this right practice. But here in verse 15,
• 31:53
  He gives us another essential element of right practice. Look at verse 15. He says, Rather, speaking the truth in love. Speak the truth in love. Doing this causes us to grow up. It causes us to grow up, and it's an essential part of our practice as Christians.
• 32:18
  We must be careful to have both truth and love because we've all met someone who loves to tell people the truth but does not do so in a loving way. It's not helpful. And we've all met people who love people and have a lot of compassion but they're not committed to the truth. We must have both because love without truth is a lie and truth without love is just noise.
• 32:42
  As we speak truth, doctrinal errors are corrected and you and I are set free in the truth. But as we speak the truth in love, our unity is maintained and we build one another up. And so when we establish a culture of speaking the truth in love here, we are matured in Christ. Now, as I'm saying all of this with unity, diversity, and maturity, lest we become too introspective and think that all of this only affects us,
• 33:12
  We must also realize that the state of the church's health affects its testimony in the world. A healthy church authenticates its gospel witness to non-believers. As we feel the cultural winds change, the world is looking to the church to see how we will respond. And the church is wondering what exactly to do in its current place in culture, aren't we? As things are changing,
• 33:44
  What does it mean to be a healthy church as culture's opinion of us is not the same anymore? In the early fourth century, the church experienced a massive cultural change. For the first few centuries of its existence, the church had experienced pretty consistent persecution at the hands of Roman emperors, namely Nero, Emperor Nero in the first century, and then Emperor Diocletian in the third century, and it was brutal. Those who wanted to join the church at this time,
• 34:16
  prepared themselves to die by joining the church, by confessing Christ. They knew if I want to be a Christian, I will probably die for my faith. They signed their membership applications in blood, if you will. But then in October, October 27th of 312 AD, everything begins to change. This new emperor comes along named Constantine.
• 34:43
  And after winning a military battle, which he attributed to the Christian God, Jesus, he stopped the persecution and he moved the church from the margin of society to the public square. Constantine gave us a seat at the table and the church at that time had to figure out, okay, what are we going to do here? Because now we're favored in society instead of persecuted.
• 35:09
  and they just needed to figure it out. How do we grapple with Roman culture that is seeking to influence the church? And it's during this period when we see the church beginning to meet in public basilicas rather than underground catacombs, where we see church leaders called priests, just like the leaders in Roman pagan religion, where these priests begin to wear robes, just like the leaders in the Roman religion, and where incense is offered during a service.
• 35:36
  just like the Roman religion, and where processionals down the center aisle of the basilica took the place of congregational participation so that the congregation became merely an audience. They were not participants. It's during this time when kneeling in prayer becomes a practice because kneeling was customarily how the Roman emperor would be greeted when he walked into a room. The church is grappling with Roman influence in...
• 36:05
  They're gathering. And those who wanted to join the church, once the favor of Constantine landed upon the church, those who wanted to join, they didn't have to count the cost anymore because there's no persecution. So I'm not going to die. I can just join the church. And discipleship begins to wane in this period, right?
• 36:25
  There are some aspects, some unhealthy aspects that begin to creep into the church. And so on one hand, the church is gaining influence in society, but on the other hand, they're grappling with worldliness. And in the last few decades, the church has felt the cultural tectonic plates shifting beneath it. There's change happening, and I think what we're seeing is we're moving in the opposite direction of the 4th century church. That church went from the margin to public square.
• 36:56
  We seem to be going from public square back out to the margin. Our chair at the table is being pulled out from underneath us, and the church needs to decide what it looks like to be a healthy church in the midst of a changing culture that may not favor it so much anymore. That's what we're figuring out. In a sense, it feels like everything is changing, but church, let me know if this is true. In another sense, nothing has changed. Our job is the same. We make disciples.
• 37:29
  We aim to honor Christ and to grow up, as he says, into every way into him who is the head. We still aim for unity. We celebrate our diversity here and then we press on toward maturity. And we do this by recognizing our unity of calling, of conduct, and confession. We proactively build one another up rather than just sitting on the sidelines and coming and receiving and then going.
• 37:53
  We seek to get involved in one another's lives, to build one another up, and we commit ourselves to speaking the truth in love. I think that if we follow Paul's fitness plan here in these verses, not only will you and I get the blessing of being part of a healthy church body, but also our testimony to the watching world is validated because of the way that we're living.
• 38:18
  And so I'm looking forward this afternoon to spending time with you all, celebrating what God has done, looking forward to what God would have for us. We hope that you are blessed by it. Let me pray for us. We'll close. Father, we are so grateful that in your word, you give us all the essential information we need for health here in the body of Christ. You leave no essential information out. You tell us exactly what we should be. And Lord, I'm also so grateful to be part of a church
• 38:52
  that is pressing toward unity and celebrating diversity and looking to grow in maturity. Thank you for Highland's Board, which loves you, which seeks your will. Thank you for a senior pastor, which preaches your word and loves you. And I pray that you would continue to grow us, help us to be defined by these three attributes that Paul lays out in this passage. And as we worship your name to conclude today's service.
• 39:24
  Fill us up with the joy that your spirit offers. We pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen.