Grace and peace to you from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The sermon text is from Ephesians 4:1-16 previously read.
I’d like to make a point that may be subtle, but I think is important and it may help you to pull out our text to understand what I’m saying. The actual Greek text of Ephesians 4 reads, “I exhort you, therefore, I, a prisoner for the Lord, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” It sounds pretty similar, but the difference is this… Paul isn’t saying, “Since I’m a prisoner for the Lord, therefore I urge you to live a life worthy of your calling.” That would be like Paul saying, “Since I’m in jail, I urge you to go do a bunch of good things I can’t do any longer.”
The real sense of our text is that everything Paul just finished saying at the end of chapter 3, since it’s all true, “Therefore, I exhort you… to live a life worthy of the calling you received.” That clarification might seem like a waste of time, but here’s why it’s not… What compels and impels a Christian to live a worthy life? It’s not, the Law – do it for Paul. It’s the Gospel. 2 Corinthians 5:14 says, “The love of Christ compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all.”
Just listen to the verses that precede our text: “I pray that out of His glorious riches [God] may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
God wants to reach through you to do good works – to make your lives worthy as you serve Him and live for Him. But genuine Spirit-given good works don’t happen when your preacher bangs you over the head with hellfire and brimstone and we go out licking our wounds thinking, “I guess if I’m a Christian I better do this or that.”
Lives worthy of our Christian calling come when “Christ dwells in our hearts through faith”; when we are “rooted and established in love”; when we “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”; when we’re “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
When I was out in NE, it’s probably the same in flatter parts of IL, some of the farmers used gravity irrigation. Diesel pumps would pump up water from the ground and fill a tank and when that tank was filled it was connected to long pipes with little holes. As the tanks were filled, the water ran into the pipes and ran down the rows leaking water to nourish the crops.
I think Paul is saying you and I are like the tank. In Christ through faith as the Holy Spirit feeds you through His Word and Christ’s body and blood, you’re being filled up – as Paul put it: “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” That little word “therefore”, as in – “therefore I urge you to live a life worthy the calling you have received” is Paul’s way of saying that when God fills you up His love in Christ overflows our tank. We can’t contain it or restrain it. Knowing how miserably sinful we are and how incredibly high and long and wide and deep is God’s love in Jesus, that love overflows into our lives.
So what is the calling “you have received?” It’s the calling to be forgiven and loved beyond anything else this world can imagine. God has called you from eternal death and hell – which we deserve – and given us perfect homes in heaven. And God gives this grace, this undeserved love, not because of who you are and how you are, but because that’s who He is. “God is love” and that showed itself in dying a terrible death so that “whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” His love changes us. Now the thought of doing good works to buy God off and win His favor is just stupid. That’s not how it works. God chooses to see us through the shed blood of His sinless Son.
When we see life in that perspective, we can understand Paul saying, “Live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” What does that life in Christ look like? What’s it look like when our tanks are so filled with the love of Jesus they start leaking out to everyone around us? Paul goes on: “Be completely humble.” How could we be anything else toward God or our neighbor? How could we look down on our neighbor when both of us are equally undeserving and yet completely loved by God?
“Be gentle. Be patient, bearing with one another in love.” Notice, you don’t have to bear with perfect people. If we were all “super, sinless Christians”, there would be no need for gentleness and patience. But we’re not. We’re still sinners. We’re still stubborn and willful and prideful. We still think our ideas and our ways are the right way and everyone else is wrong. That’s why Paul says, “Be humble, be patient, bear with one another in love.”
Later in our text, Paul compares the Church to the body of Christ. When we’re tempted to say, “Heck with this person or that person; I didn’t get my way I’m washing my hands of them” – and we all face that temptation, Paul’s saying, “Remember how graciously God has filled your tank to overflowing with His love, let it flow to your neighbor.” “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”
It’s a dangerous thing to cause divisions in Christ’s body, the Church, because of our pride, or because we just can’t let go of something we regard to be a failing in our neighbor. Thank God, He doesn’t choose to throw us away for our failings and sins which are anything but minor flaws. If God chooses to shower His “high and wide and long and deep love to overflowing” on us, God wants us to choose by the power of His in-dwelling Spirit to “Be humble and patient and gentle and forgiving.” Being right isn’t always the most important thing – keeping the “unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” is.
There’s one exception to Paul’s point and that’s when the truth of the Gospel is at stake, we aren’t patient with error. We stubbornly and rigorously uphold the truth of God’s Word, but even that causes us to “speak the truth in love.” We teach and admonish and learn God’s Word. We don’t give credence to the idea that doctrinal truth is unimportant. In navigation a tiny error of a few degrees makes little difference on a short trip, but on a long flight can get you in big trouble. Christians love God’s Word and are committed to it, small errors tolerated can give the awful impression that how we live, or our good works, are more important than what we believe – we’re saved by grace through faith alone. And it’s our love for fellow Christians that causes us to insist on that truth of justification by grace through faith alone. If we lose that truth of God’s free grace in Jesus, then our tank can never be filled, we’re just left to pump up the dry dust of our sin-parched hearts.
Farmer who use gravity irrigation are planners – making sure the pipes carrying the water are going where they need to go. As God in Christ fills you up with His love by the power of the Holy Spirit, He has also carefully laid the pipes that carry His love through you to your neighbor. Ephesians 2 said, “We are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do the good works God prepared in advance for us to do.”
We don’t go around measuring out whom we feel worthy of God’s love through us – that’s not how God treats us and that’s not how we treat each other. Even the people we have to “bear with” are people God has placed in our lives. You and the people you worship with, work with, live with and play with are not accidents. God would reach through you with His grace into their lives as you encourage and forgive and pray for and with and show patience to others. God made you moms and dads and grandparents and church members and friends and employees, because God doesn’t want His love bottled up in a tank, but He wants it to overflow into your life. God is the Irrigator. He’s the one that made the channels. The people God puts in front of you each day aren’t accidents, but opportunities God places in front of you to do the “good works He prepared in advance for you to do.”
This fills our lives with meaning. It gives us purpose each day to know that once we’re saved through faith in Jesus God doesn’t snatch us up to heaven, but leaves us here overflowing with His love for our neighbors. And it all begins in the Father’s heart of love for you and me, the love that saw you from eternity and chose you as His own, the love that flowed from the pierced hands of Jesus and His blood shed on the cross. That kind of love is unimaginable. It’s high and long and wide and deep and that love is yours through faith in Jesus every moment of every day, not because of who and how you are, but who He is and what He’s done for you. Amen.
And now may the peace of God which surpasses human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.