Called together

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It’s good to be here with you today. It’s good to be anywhere that is not my house, and I know that a lot of you feel the same way. This morning, they’re going to help me illustrate what I want to talk about.

When I was growing up, the church I grew up at was very proud, not in a prideful way, I guess, but very proud of our music program. We had a wonderful choir. We had a fantastic orchestra.

But one of my favorite memories of that time was a piece of special music that our youth group used to perform and then got the choir, got the adult choir started performing. And I’ve asked our praise team to help me by sharing it with you this morning. They are extremely worried about living up to the high standards set by our youth group and choir.

but they’re going to, Christy’s going to lead them, and they’re going to sing for you, happy birthday, right? I promise you, Easter will not sound like this. All right, you ready?

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday. Happy birthday. God bless you.

Happy birthday to you. Thank you. The praise team, everybody.

I asked them to do that because just telling you about it wouldn’t quite do it justice, right? They were so worried they were going to mess this up. I said, you literally can’t mess it up unless you sing it correctly.

See, we had this fun thing that we would do where we would sing happy birthday to each other and to others at the church. The only rule was nobody could sing the same tune. And you definitely didn’t.

And we always had so much fun doing it. And like she said, Easter will not sound like that. I’ve been there for the rehearsals.

They do not sound like that, and they won’t, Lord willing. But we used to do that and it was always fun, but it’s kind of horrible to listen to, isn’t it? And don’t take that as an insult.

That means you did exactly what I asked you to do. You sang the music that was given to you. It sounds horrible.

When we’re trying to sing something and we’re not all together, it’s just a mess, right? How many of you want to download that on iTunes and listen on repeat? Of course, Jeff does.

My son, he hears a song he likes, and we have to tell him, stop listening to it on repeat, because we’ve all heard it 60 times, we’re done. But I guarantee you that would not last one time on repeat in our house. It’s a mess when you try to sing and it’s not all together.

What does it look like when a church is not all together? It’s a mess, isn’t it? When the people in the church are not together, they’re not on the same page, they’re not headed the same direction, not moving at the same speed, it can be a real train wreck, kind of like singing happy birthday to a bunch of different tunes.

It looks like division. It looks like fighting. It looks like conflict.

It looks like nothing good being accomplished. I’d say nothing being accomplished, but churches that are divided can accomplish a lot. It’s just none of it’s good.

I’ve seen some of this in my own experience. Now, you may be saying, what’s going on here that I don’t know about? Nothing, unless it’s something I don’t know about.

We’re going to start today spending a few weeks looking through a passage of scripture, Ephesians chapter 4, that as I began to dig into it years ago, completely revolutionized my understanding of ministry, kind of freed me up in ministry, kind of freed me up to do what I was actually called to do and help others do what they were called to do. And when I’ve seen churches get on board with what Ephesians chapter 4 talks about, it just creates a new atmosphere where things are actually getting done and the gospel is proclaimed and ministry is accomplished and things that I think we all want to see happen. And so I want to spend a few weeks looking at this passage here.

And so talking about division in the church has nothing to do with any division I’ve seen. It has to do with where Ephesians chapter 4 starts out. Paul deals with the subject of division.

And what keeps a church from being together is division over earthly things, division based on earthly things. We see our country, we see our community, we see our own family sometimes divided over earthly things, race, politics, income, background, all sorts of things. We see all this division and it can creep into the church.

And in the early church, we tend to have this idealized picture of them. Oh, they were so godly. They were so perfect.

They were so special. They were human beings just like us and they dealt with a lot of the same problems that we deal with. They just didn’t have social media to have it all in their face all the time. And so Paul dealt with the issue of division in the early churches.

He dealt with the subject of unity, which is what I want to talk about this morning, not so much to hammer the dangers of division, but to hammer the importance of unity. And so if you would, if you haven’t already, join me in Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4, we’re going to look at the first six verses of the chapter this morning.

And if you would, once you get there, stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. Ephesians chapter 4 verses 1 through 6. Paul said, I therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called.

With all lowliness and gentleness, with long-suffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, there is one body and one Spirit just as you were called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all. And you may be seated.

And it almost seems like that passage of Scripture is sponsored by the word one. It’s all throughout it. One, being one, being unified.

And the main point that Paul is making as he begins this passage, as he transitions here into dealing with the practical applications of what he’s already talked about through this book. He begins with the subject of unity, the need to be one in the church. And it makes the point that we cannot allow the concerns of the world to divide the church.

We can’t allow the concerns of the world to divide the church. Now, those concerns of the world can take all kinds of forms. When I say the concerns of the world dividing the church, where our minds may go immediately because of the climate we live in right now is politics. Those are definitely one thing that can divide the church.

But it’s not just those big issues. It’s not just the politics. It’s not just the race.

It’s not just income, background, all these things. It’s not all these big things that are the only things that can divide the church that are earthly concerns. Sometimes it’s very small things.

Sometimes it’s very small things like two people just don’t like each other. I’ve seen that split a church. Even if it didn’t split a church, I’ve seen it divide a church.

I’m sorry to say I’ve been involved in that. When I was a teenager in the aforementioned youth group, there was a girl that I dated for a few months, and we decided it was not a good fit, and we broke up. By the way, we went to the same church, and after we broke up, as so many times happens, we decided we just didn’t really like each other.

And that’s pretty normal, but because we were both involved at this church, and we both had friends at this church, and we were both stubborn enough to say, this is the church where God put me, and I’m not leaving, Others kind of felt like they needed to jump in. And it had the potential to be an ugly situation. We went through several months where we just did not like each other.

And I remember both of us being very convicted by a sermon we heard that whatever other concerns there were, whatever other reasons there were, that we didn’t like each other, we were a brother and sister in Christ, and we needed to figure this out. And so we talked it out. We decided whatever our concerns were, those had to be secondary.

And I’m glad to tell you that this lady is still one of my close friends today. She and her husband and Charla and I have dinner frequently, as frequently as we can. They live in another state.

Our kids play together. When they still lived in Oklahoma, they were incredible partners in ministry. We almost forget about that time we hated each other.

You see, little things. It doesn’t have to be big things like politics and race. It can be little things like we just don’t like each other that can bring division to a church.

And we cannot let our earthly concerns divide the church. Paul talks about unity and he talks about oneness throughout this text we’ve looked at already. But it goes back even further than that.

If you notice here, the second word that we read in verse 1 is the word therefore. And when you see that word there, it’s a clue that tells everything that comes after this is based on everything that came before this. And so reading that word therefore, we have to go back to chapter 3, and we don’t have time this morning to go through all of chapter 3.

But to summarize chapter 3 for you, he talks about a great mystery that has been revealed, and that he has the privilege of being able to help reveal to other people. And this mystery is the gospel. It’s the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But on top of that, it’s the fact that others who were outside of the covenant of God were brought into the fold through the gospel.

What that means is the nation of Israel thought it had a unique relationship with God, and nobody else could enter in, but through Jesus Christ, the Gentiles, the filthy Gentiles who were looked down on, those who were not Jewish, were suddenly brought into the family of God. And he calls it a great mystery because they didn’t anticipate that. Nobody saw that coming.

Even though it’s kind of hinted at in Isaiah and in other places, nobody really saw that coming. It was a mystery that God had revealed in these later times. He talks about in chapter 3, verses 5 and 6, This mystery which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of His promise in Christ through the gospel.

So this great mystery that he talks about all through chapter 3 is the fact that through Jesus Christ, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or a Gentile, it doesn’t matter which of these groups that you come from that by the way hate each other, They have been brought into one fold and into one family through Jesus Christ. It’s this incredible mystery that’s been revealed. It’s this incredible thing that human efforts and human imagination cannot explain. It’s something that only Jesus Christ can do.

So when he says, therefore, that mystery is the basis for everything else. When he says, therefore, I beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called. When he says, I want you to do these things as one, he says it’s on the basis of this mystery that’s been revealed.

It’s on the basis of what Jesus Christ has done. Romans chapter 11 describes how the Gentiles have been grafted into Israel to form the church. Now, this is not something we do very often anymore, something our grandparents might have done.

But that word grafting is where you take a part of one plant or tree, and you cut it off, and you cut a part of another tree, and you stick it in there, and you wrap it up, and they grow together. as one plant. And that’s what he’s saying has happened here.

Through Jesus Christ, Jew and Gentile have been grafted together to form the church. It’s something that man could never have put together. And it’s something that should not work on paper with all of our different ideas, with all of our different philosophies, with all of our different backgrounds.

It shouldn’t work that we should be able to come together with a common cause and move in a common direction. It should not work but for the work of Jesus Christ. God took people from different backgrounds, who hated each other and made something new. Now, if you were to just take each person in this room and you were to just oversimplify us down to a list of attributes, your ethnicity, your income, your job, your politics, you know the things the world wants to divide us over, and you were to look at us on paper and say, can this group of people work together?

Can this group of people find unity? Can this group of people find common purpose? It should not work on paper.

What’s the big thing we have in common? Jesus. And in light of Jesus Christ, all those other concerns, it’s not that they stop being real. It’s not that they stop being concerns.

It’s that we realize there’s something more important. And anybody who’s ever been in a close relationship with another person understands how this works. Because we may say, well, how are we supposed to work through those things?

And how are we supposed to work through the earthly concerns? Whether it’s a big national issue or whether it’s just a personal I don’t like you issue. How are we supposed to work through those things?

Listen, if you’ve ever been married, if you’ve ever had a parent or a sibling or somebody that you’ve been in a relationship with and you’ve got to work this out, you understand how this works. My wife and I do not always see eye to eye. We don’t really fight, but we don’t always see eye to eye.

We don’t always agree. It would be kind of boring if we did. I don’t think I’d want to be married to somebody exactly like me.

That would be challenging. I can be a handful at times. But sometimes that leads to disagreements, right?

Anybody else ever experienced a disagreement or is it just us? Okay, well, you’re just laughing, so I’m going to say it’s just us. But if you were to experience a disagreement, you realize, yes, these things are, these disagreements are real. We have a real difference of opinion here.

And guess what? As much as I’d like to say so, she’s not crazy for disagreeing with me. She’s always got valid concerns that sometimes I hate.

she’s right, okay? But we have to talk about these things. We can’t just pretend they don’t exist, and we have to work through these things, but as we work through these things, we have to realize that there’s something more important than who wins or who’s right, and that’s the fact that we still have to love each other and be husband and wife.

And so, yeah, we sometimes argue. Mostly, we’re too tired to argue, thanks to the children, but sometimes we discuss these things. Sometimes, we argue, but there’s always that understanding there that these things are secondary to the relationship.

That’s how it works for us as believers. It doesn’t mean that all of our differences go away when we walk into this place. It doesn’t mean that all of our differences go away when we deal with each other outside these four walls.

It just means that they are secondary, that there’s something else more important. And that’s the calling we’ve been called to in Jesus Christ. And I want to also be clear that I’m not talking about just a kumbaya, pretend it doesn’t exist, let’s all just pretend we’re in agreement, or let’s not stand for anything so we can agree with everybody. We are united around the truth of who Jesus Christ is.

If our unity is not based on the truth, it’s not really unity, it’s just pretend. So I’m not saying, there are all sorts of crazy ideas out there that are gaining frequency in the church. I’m not saying unify with those things.

If we’re not united on the truth, there’s no grounds, there’s no basis for unity. It doesn’t mean we have but it’s just hard to be one when we can’t even agree on the Jesus we’re being one around. But we’ve been called out together for the sake of the gospel.

And we have to realize that all those other concerns, like the Jew versus Gentile issue that was brought into the early church, just like that issue, our earthly concerns are secondary to the calling that we have in Jesus Christ and the calling we have together as a church. Because it’s not by accident that you’re here. If God led you to this church, if God led you to be part of Central Baptist Church, it’s not by accident.

He has you here for a reason, and He has you to be here as part of this church to work with us to accomplish what He’s called us to accomplish together. And each person that’s involved in that is important. Each person has a role, and we’re able to move forward when we treat all the earthly concerns, again, not as though they’re unimportant, but as if they’re secondary to the calling we have in the gospel.

He’s given us one calling. He says in verses one and four, that one calling is to make the gospel known. And it doesn’t matter where you work.

It doesn’t matter if you work on post. It doesn’t matter if you’re retired. It doesn’t matter if you work at a store or teach school or you work here at the church or you’re a stay-at-home mom. It doesn’t matter where you work.

Your calling is to make the gospel known. It doesn’t matter this morning whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, an Independent, or somebody who just says, I don’t care. you’re all corrupt, you’re all nuts, leave me alone.

Your calling is to make the gospel known. It doesn’t matter whether you make a million dollars a year or you’re just barely scraping by. Your calling is to make the gospel known.

That’s the calling that he’s given us, this one calling. And I noticed in here as I’m reading through chapter 4, he gives us an example of unity. As a matter of fact, he gives us an example of unity that’s almost too perfect because there’s no way we can be as unified as the example, but it gives us an idea of what the ideal here is.

And that example is the Trinity. The Trinity is the model of this ideal unity, even though, again, the Trinity doesn’t experience division. Okay, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit don’t have differing ideas on how to deal with things.

They don’t have different backgrounds. They’re all three, all three persons of the Trinity are eternally God. And yet they have this fellowship together.

They have this bond with one another that nothing can break. And they are working toward the same goals, toward the same goals, toward the same aim. They have different functions.

What the Father does is not exactly what the Son does, is not exactly what the Holy Spirit does. They carry out different roles, but they’re working in the same direction, and they have an unbreakable bond. Now that’s a picture of where we ought to try to be, is that we carry out different roles, but we’re bonded together, And we’re working for the same purpose.

See, he says in verse 6, he describes how the Father rules over all of us. For all our differences, we have the same lawgiver. We have the same ruler.

We have the same Father that we’re working for. Verse 5, in verse 5, he describes the one Lord that we serve. There he’s referring to Jesus.

And by calling him our Lord, he’s talking about him being our master. He’s talking about him being the one we ultimately pledge our allegiance to. He’s talking about Jesus being the one that deserves our allegiance.

Who is it that we serve? Who is it that we’re united around? It’s Jesus.

Who rules over all the whole process and orchestrates things? It’s the Father. Who are we serving and who are we united under?

It’s Jesus. And then the Spirit in verse 4, it describes how He binds our hearts together. And you know, the Holy Spirit does give us a capacity to love one another that we would not otherwise have.

You see, in a church like this one, when people tell you they love you, I really believe it. Because I’ve seen it in action. I’ve seen it carried out.

It’s not just, hey, I love you. See you in seven days. I’ve seen this carried out in the way that you check on each other, the way you help each other, the way you’re there for each other.

Seen that love carried out. And I believe it’s true. Who is it that gives us the capacity to do that?

It’s the Holy Spirit. Verse 4 says there’s one body and one spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling. And verse 3 says that we’re supposed to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

He is the one that binds our hearts together. He’s the one that we turn to and say will you help me love them the way I ought to will you help me Walk as one in this body because the church is also like a family and sometimes in a family You rub each other the wrong way Sometimes in a family you get sideways with one another, right? We just spent what the better part of a week and a half Stuck together in the house.

I love my family dearly, but I was ready to be anywhere I I went at one point out for a walk in negative temperatures around our property just so the screaming would stop. Sometimes in a family, you’re going to get sideways with somebody. You may come to a time that you and somebody sitting down the pew from you do not see eye to eye.

How do you love them through that? Instead of giving into the anger and the disunity, you go to the Holy Spirit and say, help me love them. Love them through me.

Keep that bond of unity between us. It’s the Holy Spirit that binds us. And so we see that He lays out the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and the role they play in this passage.

And by doing that, they are the model for us. That they fulfill different roles, but they share a unity beyond anything that we can invent. And that’s the goal for us as well.

We do not all fulfill the same role. We would not want to all fulfill the same role in the church. How many of you want to get up and do this?

I might let some of you if you want to volunteer. But I’ve seen polls that say a higher percentage of people rank public speaking as their number one fear than rank death as their number one fear. Not everybody wants to do this.

How many of you want to get up and sing? I know there’s a few of you, but most of you are saying, don’t move, don’t look at me. How many of you want to work with little children?

Not me. I love my kids. I can also whoop them and send them to their room when I need to.

That’s kind of frowned on with other people’s children. And I like your little kids and grandkids that you bring in, but I also like that I don’t have to take care of them, right? Some of you say, oh, I’d love to work with kids.

That is not my calling. We don’t all fulfill the same roles. God’s called each of us to do different things, but we’ve been called to a unity that’s beyond anything that we can invent.

We’ve been called with the same calling, as he makes it clear throughout this whole passage, we have been called with the same calling, and that calling is to represent Jesus and to publicize the good news of his death, burial, and resurrection. And he’s called us to walk worthy of that calling, as it says in verses 2 and 3, by the way we do it together. Can you go out and make Jesus famous on your own?

Sure. Can you go out and proclaim the gospel on your own? Absolutely.

We can and we should. But the real test is the way we do it together. And he put us together for that purpose because we can accomplish more together than we can separately.

He’s called us to walk worthy. And the test of that is how well we do this together. And so this morning, if there’s anything that divides us, we look at what he says about unity.

We see the importance of unity. We see the model of unity here. And we realize the importance of it.

We realize it’s what he wants for us. We realize it’s the only way to move forward as a church is to do it in unity around the truth of Jesus Christ. And if there’s anything that divides us, we need to fix it so that we can move forward together for the gospel. That means we need to, as verse 3 says, we need to strive for unity.

Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit. We need to work for that unity. It’s just like any relationship, you have to work at it.

If you neglect it, it tends to drift apart. We have to work to stay together. Because the world is working very hard at pulling us apart, isn’t it?

We’ve got to strive for unity in Christ. And what does that look like? He says in verse 2, With all lowliness and gentleness, with long suffering, bearing with one another in love. What does it look like to strive for unity?

It looks like a lot of humility. It looks like a lot of grace toward each other when we fall short, when we mess up. Looks like a lot of forgiveness.

It looks like a lot of lowliness, meaning I realize I’m not as great as I sometimes think I am. It’s a lot of realizing the importance of our brother and sister in Christ. It’s a lot of putting their needs ahead of our own. It’s not an easy thing to do, but that’s why we rely on the Holy Spirit who lives within us to work at it through us and in us to make us able to do it.

And it’s only possible because we have the greatest rallying point possible. It’s not just a cause. It’s not just an idea.

I’ve seen causes and ideas rally people, both for and against. But our rallying point for unity is not some abstract cause. It’s not a theological idea. It’s Jesus.

It’s a person. It’s God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who stepped down to earth to become a man without ceasing to be God, to die on the cross for us, to pay for every bit of sin I’ve ever committed and every bit of sin you’ve ever committed, to die for us even though we didn’t deserve it, so that we could be forgiven even though we didn’t want it at the time, so that we could be reconciled to a God who loves us, but a God who’s also holy and holds us accountable for our sins. Jesus Christ made the only way for us to be saved through His death on the cross and His burial and His resurrection that proved that He was who he said he was and that he was able to do what he said he would do.

And Jesus Christ, because of who he is and because of what he’s done, and because he is our rallying point for unity, he’s able to transform enemies into brothers. In an example that I go back to a lot of times in my mind and even in messages, I remember years ago hearing a missionary who works in different places in the Middle East training pastors, talking about going to a relatively open country and meeting other missionaries who were there from less closed countries, excuse me, more closed countries, where they could get together in relative safety and they could have a few days of training before they went back, some of them dealing with underground churches. And he talked about at this meeting, there was a man from an Israeli Jewish background who had come to Christ and was now pastoring a church as a missionary, and a man who used to be a member of Hezbollah.

Do they have anything in common? If you’re not familiar with Hezbollah, they are an Islamic terrorist organization that wants to wipe Israel off the map. These two men should have hated each other.

Based on everything the world, based on all their attributes, based on everything in the world, these men should have hated each other, but they were able to embrace each other as brothers in Christ because of what Christ had done. Jesus Christ transforms enemies into brothers. And if there’s anything that divides us this morning, Jesus Christ is more powerful than that basis for our division.

Jesus Christ transforms enemies into brothers just as he transforms enemies of God into sons and daughters. We were alienated from God. We were separated from him by our sin.

And Jesus paid the price on the cross as the only way that we could be forgiven. So this morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, you need to understand that you’ve sinned against God. I’m not saying that to be mean to you.

I’m telling you that because the Bible says it’s true. It’s true of you. It’s true of me that we’ve all sinned against God.

We are all separated from Him. We have made ourselves the enemies of God. And yet Jesus Christ suffered, bled, and died on the cross so that we could have peace with God and eternal life with Him.

And this morning, if you recognize that fact, if you recognize that you’ve been separated from Him by your sin and you believe that Jesus died to be your one and only Savior, that He did it all and that He rose again to prove it, then on that basis, you can ask God to forgive you. And you have the promise of His Word that He will. And this morning, Jesus Christ will transform you from being an enemy of God to being a son or a daughter.

As His Word says, to those who received Him, gave He the power to be called the sons of God. And this morning, again, if there’s anything that divides us, just remember that Jesus Christ transforms enemies into brothers.

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