Community

Reference

Ephesians 4:1-16

So community, what is it?

Community is a word that gets used loosely in our world today.

It can either refer to a neighborhood, a social media group, a fan base, or any gathering of people with something in common.

In the broadest sense, community simply means a group of people bound together by shared location, interests, or identity.

People gravitate naturally towards others with similar perspectives and values, and society creates gatherings around common purposes all the time.

Community in that general sense can be understood as togetherness, fellowship, camaraderie, or simply the absence of being alone.

But the Christian community, our community, is something altogether different.

It does not form around shared preferences or demographics.

Christian community can be defined as lifelong fellowship with other believers in Jesus, a fellowship that Jesus himself won for his people,

and that the Holy Spirit maintains through the Word, and that God ordains to the best, to be best expressed in local churches.

It is a community composed not of people who chose one another, but because, or because they were compatible, but of people who love

Jesus and therefore find themselves in fellowship with one another.

The original Christian community was known for four things, mostly what we are to be known for as members of Sunrise.

They were known for devotion to the apostolic pr- uh, preaching and teaching, fellowship, attending.

They were, uh, known for prayer and love for one another.

The local church is the primary place where believers put these callings into practice and where shared faith becomes

concrete acts of love and mutual care.

So when we talk about community this morning, I'm not talking about something casual or optional.

I'm talking about something that Jesus purchased with his very own blood, and that the Spirit sustains, and that God designed to be the ordinary context for the Christian

life.

Which raises the question, what does God actually expect of us within this community?

So this morning we'll be turning to Ephesians 4:1-16, if you can turn there in your Bibles or your devices, to understand...

But first, before we go there, we gotta understand where Paul is going.

To understand where Paul is going here in Ephesians 4, we first need to understand where he's been.

So in Ephesians 1:1-3, Paul lays down a theological foundation.

He unfolds God's great work of redemption, and all of it according to his eternal plan, reconciling sinful men

and women back to himself through the blood of Christ.

He writes of Jews and Gentiles who were once divided by deep hostility now being made into one new body, one new community

in Christ.

He writes of a mystery hidden for ages and now revealed that God's manifold wisdom would be displayed through the church.

Three chapters of some of the richest and deepest doctrine in all of Scripture.

And he begins...

But here in chapter 4, Paul turns a corner, and after three chapters of doctrine, he begins to address the everyday practical implications of the gospel that he's laid

out.

And the very first thing that he begins with is community.

So this is the start of the second half of the letter, the part that teaches us how to live in light of God's glorious grace together.

So the hinge on which everything turns is a single word in the start of verse one, as you see, therefore.

This is one of the weightiest therefores in all of Scripture, and to feel its full weight, you have to know what it is pointing back to.

In chapter 1, Cr- in chapter 1, he establishes the spirit- our spiritual resources available to every believer,

which is adoption into God's family, redemption, forgiveness, and the full riches of their inheritance in Christ.

In chapter 2, Paul describes

God's transformative work, moving from people who are spiritually dead to life, sealing them in the heavenlies, and reconciling formerly hostile groups

into a single community in which social, racial, and economic distinctions are dissolved.

And in chapter three, it reveals God's intention for the church, to display His manifold wisdom through believers committed to Jesus, grounded

in salvation by grace alone, and united as one body.

And that is what this therefore is gathering up.

God's blessings, His saving grace, unity in the body, the full sweep of the gospel, and saying, "Given all of that, here is

how you live, together." So what God has done always grounds itself in what we are called...

I mean, what God has done always grounds what we are called to do.

Grace comes first, and the call, the community follows.

So the main idea of this passage is this: Paul exhorts us, the community, to maintain unity and to grow into spiritual maturity.

And these two things are not separate goals.

They're deeply connected.

A community cannot mature while it is divided, and a community that is truly maturing will be marked by unity.

And notice, the very first thing that Paul addresses after three chapters of doctrine is not personal devotion and isolation, but it is community, how we live with one

another, and how we function together as one body.

So this morning, I wanna walk through three things that this passage calls the community of Sunrise to, and every congregation that bears the name

of Jesus.

They unfold in a natural progression.

First, a community's walk, second, a community's identity, and third, a community's contributors.

So first, let's read the text.

Read along with me.

"I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and

gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, 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 g- 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, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up of 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, so that

we may," excuse me, "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, 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 together 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." Whew.

Okay.

So our first point this morning will be a community's walk.

Let's look at Ephesians 4:1-3.

So Paul opens Ephesians 4 not with a command, but with a, an appeal.

He says, "I urge you." In some, um, translation it says, "I, uh, beseech you." He's appealing to us.

He's urging us.

What is he urging us to?

There is a pastoral tenderness here, even though what he is about to ask of us as his, as, uh, as the Christian community at

Sunrise is nothing short of profound.

Notice also how Paul identifies himself as a prisoner for the Lord.

He's writing from chains.

He's in prison, bound to a prison guard, not from a comfortable study or a place of ease.

And yet, in this moment, Paul's concern is not for his own circumstances, but for how we walk together.

And that itself models the very posture he's about to describe.

He says to, "Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been ca-"

Called.

So here the word calling carries the full weight of chapters one through three.

He says, "You were dead, and God made you alive.

You were strangers, and now you're fellow citizens.

You were far off, and now you've been brought near by the blood of Christ, brought into community with God and with one another." Jews

and Gentiles, once divided by hostility, were made into one new humanity and one new community, and that is

your calling.

So Paul's exhortation is that your walk within this community should match that calling.

So Paul then gets specific.

He gives us four qualities, and together they describe both the heart and the hands of the community walking worthy of its calling.

The first three are matters of the heart, humility, gentleness, and patience.

Paul leads with humility because nothing unravels a community faster than pride.

When we're more concerned with being seen, or being right, or being first than with one another, then the whole thing

starts to come apart.

Humility simply chooses to put others ahead of yourself, as we heard from Chad preach when he was, um, talking about serving.

To treat the person next to you as more important than your own comfort and reputation.

And then gentleness.

Gentleness grows from that same root.

It's not a soft personality type, it is the Spirit's work in your life.

It is shaping strength into something that serves rather than dominates.

And then patience.

Patience is a long fuse.

It is what keeps you from saying things that you regret, from writing off someone who has let you down again, from walking away when community gets hard.

It keeps bearing, it keeps forgiving, and it keeps showing up.

But Paul does not let us stop at good intentions.

He adds a fourth quality that moves from the heart into action.

It is bearing with one another in love.

This is not putting up with people.

It is choosing to carry their weight, their struggles, their failures, their rough edges, and Lord knows I got some rough edges, as an act of love.

It is the moment when everything internal becomes visible.

And here's what makes all of this amazing.

Paul is not asking SonRise to build unity from scratch.

Christ has already secured it.

The Holy Spirit already gave it, and these qualities are not the foundation, they're how we protect what has already been laid.

And there's something beautiful in how they work.

The more we practice humility and love, the more these qualities will grow in us, and the more they grow, the more naturally

we extend them to others.

It feeds itself.

Then Paul gives this whole vision a name in verse three.

He says, "To be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." The unity is already there, established by Christ

and given by His Spirit, and our job is to guard it.

Notice the word bond.

We sang about the bond this morning, bonds of grace, bonds of love.

Paul opens this chapter by calling himself a prisoner, literally bound in chains, but there's something in- intentional

in that, I believe.

The same man who is physically bound to a prison guard in chains, turns around and calls this community to be bound to one

another.

Not in chains, but in peace, in love, in grace, as we sang this morning.

One commentator said that, "The peace that Christ gives is the rope that ties people from every different background, every temperament

and story, into one unified whole." That bond is not, is, is not fragile by nature, but it's fragile in our hands, 'cause we can loosen

it every time we choose being right over choosing love.

So guard it.

Think of a, a sports team.

Think of your favorite sports team, doesn't matter who it is, and on that team, you may inherit a player who's always late, or the one who hogs the ball, or the one who

second-guesses every play call.

Now, some teams do try to remedy that and solve that problem by trading away, you know, every imperfect player until they have the perfect roster that they're satisfied with,

and we've all seen how that usually works out.

But the church doesn't have that option.

God does not give us a transfer window, He-

Gives us this community with all its friction and imperfections, and calls us to develop the character to walk worthy

within it.

The goal is not a perfect roster.

The goal is humility, gentleness, patience, and love being practiced right here among these people as

we are.

So consider this honestly.

Is your walk within this community marked by the qualities that Paul describes here?

Or are you depending on others to be patient or gentle, bearing with ones while you remain unchanged?

And if our walk is the ground on which the community stands, it raises a deeper question.

Why should this particular group of people, why should we, with all our differences, be bound to one another at all?

So Paul answers that in my next point, which is a community's identity in verses four through six.

So after calling the community to walk in humility and love, Paul pauses, and rather than adding another list of commands, he reminds

us, the community, of what is already true about our identity.

So notice the structure that Paul has built across these verses.

He lays out three grounds on which the unity of our community rests.

A divine calling shared by every believer in verse one.

Christ-like conduct lived out among believers in verses two to three.

And now a shared gospel confession held in common by believers in verse four to six.

This third ground is bedrock.

The community's unity, our unity, built upon shared personality or preferences is fragile.

It shatters the moment people disagree.

Our unity, the unity of this community, built on shared confession of who God is and what He has done, is foundational.

So if you notice in verses four to six, he says one seven times.

Paul repeats the word one.

He says, "One body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and

in all and through all." And this is not Paul dropping bars, as the young folk may say.

This is, this is a declaration of shared identity.

Paul is not saying, "Wouldn't it be nice if this community was unified?" No, he's not saying that.

He's saying you already are.

The unity of this community is not a goal to still be achieved.

It is a present reality to be believed and lived out.

So why does this community, why does this, why, why does our unity require agreement on these realities specifically?

Well, think about it this way.

If a member of, of a community disagrees about who the Lord is, they're not actually worshiping together.

They mer- they're merely just oc- occupying the same room.

Or if they hold different understandings of what faith is or what baptism means, they could possibly be operating from an entirely different gospel.

But what holds this community together is not shared culture or shared preference, but shared truth.

And this is why doctrine matters in the life of the community.

Not as a academic exercise and not as a weapon to divide, but as the very ground beneath our shared identity.

And the more clearly a community understands and holds these truths together, the more genuine its unity will be.

And this also reshapes how we understand belonging within the community, because our culture tells us that belonging is earned, that we fit in

because people like us or because we're similar enough.

But Paul reverses that.

He flips it on its head, and he says that you belong to this community not because you earned your place here, but because Christ himself has already placed you here in

one body by one Spirit.

So the question before us today is not whether we belong to one another.

It is a question of whether we will live like it.

Picker, pic- picture, picker.

Picture a, uh, a bridge, a suspension bridge.

I think the Skyway is a sus- suspension bridge.

It has cables.

Anyway, a suspension bridge held up by a series of cables, right?

So each cable, let's imagine that each one of those cables represents the realities that Paul has listed here in this, i- in, uh, verses four to six.

One faith, one Lord, one baptism, and the rest.

So if someone comes along and begins cutting those cables one at a time, saying, "Well, this one doesn't really matter," or, "That one doesn't really matter," what

happens to the bridge?

It doesn't simply just weaken at one point.

The entire structure becomes unstable-

And will eventually collapse.

So doctrine functions for us in the same way in the life of our community.

It is the cable system that holds everything together, and if you remove enough of it, unity does not bend,

it will break.

So is your sense of belonging to Sunrise rooted in the unchanging reality, realities

that Paul lists in verses four through six?

Or has it been resting on preferences of personalities and circumstances that can shift at any moment?

And if identity is what binds us together as a community, then the next question follows naturally, then what is each member of this community

actually expected to do with what God has given them?

And Paul now turns from who this community is to how it grows in verses seven through 16.

A community's contributors.

So Paul moves from identity to function, from what is true of this community to what is expected of each contributor

within it, and he grounds the entire shift in the person and work of Christ.

In verses seven through ten, Paul describes Christ's descent, and there's different views on this, so

I would...

My view is, let's think the incarnation.

He came down.

His death on the cross, his resurrection, and his ascension as a vic- victorious king with all authority.

And from that position of triumph and victory, he gave gifts to his people, gifts meant to equip an entire community,

not just a few individuals.

So Paul is echoing here the imagery of Psalm 68, which is a victory hymn describing a conquering king distributing the spoils

of battle to his own people.

And Jesus did not just simply save this community and leave us to manage ourselves on our own.

He ascended as king and poured out gifts on the Church, extravagant generosity flowing from a position of total authority

so that every member of this community will have something to contribute.

This matters because our gifts are not random.

They're not merely a by-product of your personality or your upbringing.

They are deliberate endowments from a victorious king who has a specific purpose for you within this community.

Verse seven, "But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift." Notice the word each.

Not only pastors, not only elders, not only staff or the most visibly spiritual member in the community.

To each one, every person in this room has received grace, not only saving grace, but a gifting grace

equipping you to contribute to this community.

And Paul then lists the gifts that Christ gave to the Church.

He says, "The apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers." And then he states their purpose plainly, which is, "To equip the saints for the

work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ," in verse 12.

This is one of the most significant and most misunderstood verses in the New Testament.

The pastor's task is not to perform the ministry on behalf of the community.

The pastor's task is to equip you, the m- the community, to do the ministry, and the work of this community belongs to all of us,

not only those in paid roles, although we love our pastors who we, who are in paid roles, Andrew, Adam.

Thank you, guys.

We are all contributors.

We are all called.

We are all needed.

So what is the purpose of this equipping?

Verses 12 and 13 tell, answers that.

It says, "Works of, works of service and the building up of that community," which is Sunrise.

But what is the goal?

What is it aimed at?

It is aimed at verse 13.

The goal is this, "Until we obtain to the unity of the faith," the oneness, "and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood,

to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Every gift, every role, every act of service within this community points towards one destination,

Christ-likeness.

Think sanctification.

We are all growing together into Christ-likeness, not in, not just individual maturity, but the whole community

growing together in-

Into the fullness of Christ.

Let's skip down to verse 16.

This completes the picture.

It says that when each part is working properly, it makes the body grow, so that it builds itself up in love.

We grow when each of us contrib- when each one who is contributing is functioning, and it is stunted when

contributors remain idle.

Every uninvolved member is a part not doing its work, and the whole community feels the effect.

And there's a beautiful paradox here, because you grow most when you contribute most.

The member who serves this community grows faster than the one who merely observes, and the one who teaches often learns more than the students, and the very process shapes the one who disciples the other.

So contribution shouldn't be looked at as a burden imposed on the community, but it is a pathway to the community's own maturity.

Think of the human body.

And I know, um, Scott already brought this verse out, but I'll touch on it again.

Think of it.

The heart doesn't finish its work and then rest while the lungs take a break, or the liver doesn't pause while the kidneys cover a double shift.

Every organ, every system functions simultaneously, and when one part stops working, the whole body suffers for it.

And this is precisely what Paul's picture was that, uh, Scott pointed out in 1 Corinthians 12.

I'm starting at verse 14.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many.

If the foot should say, "Because I'm not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less part of the body.

And if the ear should say, "Because I'm not an eye, I do not belong to the body," and that would not make it any less part of the body.

If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing bing?

Be.

Or where would be the sense of hearing?

If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell?

But as it is, and this is important, but as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them as He chose.

If all were a single member, where would the body be?

As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." But on the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to

be weaker are indispensable.

And on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable

parts do not require.

But God, I love those two words.

But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there be, there, there may

be no division, get the words out, in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.

If one member suffers, all suffer together.

If one member is honored, all rejoice together.

Think about that.

Isn't that amazing?

Now, you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

So this community grows and builds itself up in love only as each contributor does their work.

And when members withhold their gifts, the whole community feels the absence, even when no one can name exactly what's missing.

Think of this.

If you stepped away from this community, and this is a question I've asked myself.

If you stepped away from this community entirely, what gift, what joint, what act of service would go missing?

And have you ever thought of your, your, your, your membership here, your involvement here, as something that we cannot afford to lose?

So before I close, let's consider something.

Let's consider what happens when a member of this community withdraws.

Proverbs, uh, chapter, chap- bleh.

Proverbs 18:1 warns that whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire and breaks out against all sound judgment.

The writer of Hebrews, Adam pointed this out in his sermon on attending, the writer of Hebrews calls believers not to neglect to meet together, but to encourage

one another and to stir one another up to love and good works.

That's verses, chapter 10, verses 24 to 25.

So there is a reason that these exhortations appear in Scripture.

God knows what isolation does to the soul.

You may have heard of this story of a pastor who visited a man and who had stopped going to, coming to church, and he found him sitting alone by his fireplace in a cold

evening, and without a word, the pastor picked up the tongs-

lifted a single glowing coal from the fire and set it by itself.

And the two men watched in silence as the coal that had been burning bright began to dim.

And within minutes, it had gone cold.

And the pastor stood, put on his coat, and simply said, I'll see you Sunday.

So the man was back the following week.

So what did that coal illustrate but the words of Proverbs?

That the one who isolates himself goes against sound judgment.

A coal removed from the fire does not stay warm on its own.

Neither does a believer removed from the community of believers.

We were not made for isolation.

We were made for one another.

And more specifically, we were made for the kind of community that only the gospel can create.

But we live, however, in a culture that has made isolation easy and even comfortable, right?

We have groceries delivered to our house, right?

You can work from home.

You can have entertainment streamed to your TV, your phone.

We have engineered the need for other people almost entirely out of our daily life.

And that spirit has crept into the church.

Because there are many believers that treat Sunday morning like a drive-thru.

They pull up, they receive a little spiritual nourishment, and then drive away.

And never really engaging in the community that God has placed them in.

But scripture would not allow that.

And the Apostle Paul, writing from prison in Rome, would not allow it either.

So I'll close with this.

We began this morning with a question about community.

What it is and what it demands.

We saw that the Christian community is unlike any other.

It does not form around preferences or demographics or convenience.

It is a community that Jesus himself purchased and that the Spirit sustains and that God has ordained to be expressed in local churches like ours, like Sunrise.

And this community, Paul told us, carries real expectations.

A community walking worthy of the gospel walks in humility, gentleness, patience, and love.

Bearing with one another, not because people are easy, but because the grace that saved us bore with all of us first.

A community grounded in its true identity does not drift on the shifting sands of preference or personality.

It stands on the bedrock of one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.

And a community that grows does not grow by watching a few gifted people do everything.

It grows when every member discovers and deploys what the risen King has entrusted to them.

And Paul wrote all this from prison.

Think of that.

He was not writing about ideal conditions.

He wasn't concerned with his own condition.

He was writing about real people with real friction and real differences.