WOW Lecture Ephesians 4:1-16

 United in the Lord's Hospital

Do you ever feel like no matter how old you grow, you're still you? I remember as a little girl thinking that by the time I got married, I'd be different. I'd know what I was doing. But there I was at the altar thinking, "What am I doing? I don't know how to be a wife? I'm just me!" It was the same with having babies. I didn't feel old enough to be taking a baby home. I was kind of surprised the hospital let me. I didn't know what I was doing.

It made me wonder, maybe we'll always be ourselves no matter our life stage, but our ideas of God are growing leaps and bounds. I worship a much bigger God today than I ever did when I was six or sixteen or thirty-six. And isn't that what Ephesians 4 is all about: how our growing understand of God gives us the stability to meet anything in life no matter our age or experience.

So before Christmas break we went through Ephesians Chapters 1-3 where Paul says: “Okay, you Ephesians, you’re in. You used to be on the outside, but now God has brought you into his family. You used to be living in pitch black; now you’re in the bright light of day." Then Ephesians 4 says, "Therefore, in light of this, live like people who can see! Find out how what God did for you makes a difference in how you work and rest and think and interact with people."

Studying the bible isn’t something we do to prove how godly we are. It’s not some intellectual exercise to keep our passions in check. It’s something to guide us, give comfort and strength in every area of our lives. It’s for when you’re been feeling a pain and you’re afraid of what it might be. It’s for when a family member is addicted to pot or is sleeping with their girlfriend or is experimenting with the occult. It’s for when people around you don’t show you the love you wish they would.

I had to come face to face with how Christ made any difference in my life when almost two years ago my kids were sent home from school for an unknown amount of time. And the news said stay home because you might catch this horrible virus. Then it rained for two weeks straight and my husband had set up his office in the living room and he’s trying to have conference calls while my 5 and 7-year-old were roller skating inside, and my garage freezer broke, and my 18-month-old couldn’t nap because it was so loud in the house. And I didn’t have a moment of quiet, a moment to myself. And I asked God, “Okay, Lord, how does what you did on the cross make any difference right now because I need help. I can’t handle this amount of chaos in my house with no end in sight.” 

What Jesus did by bringing us into his family makes all the difference because through Christ we know every chaotic situation is leading somewhere. It's not pointless. We know peace and order are not all up to us. We don’t have to be afraid when things feel out of control. And we know that even if we mess up, Christ has us covered. These truths we’ve studied in Ephesians 1-3 make all the difference.

That's what Chapter 4 says. This is the Chapter where the rubber meets the road. Chapter 4 starts out “Therefore," because of what we’ve just learned live a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. Don’t think of this “worthy” like live a life so you are worthy. Think of it as live a life befitting to who you are now in Christ. 

It’s like before Christ we were homeless people dumpster diving for our meals. But now a king has adopted us and he has provided us with good nourishing food from his organic farms. Why go dumpster diving for love and acceptance and security and influence when we have all that from God. Don’t go digging in the dumpster anymore. Live like royalty, live “worthy of the calling." 

Verses 2 and 3 talk about this calling to which we’ve been called, which apparently is going to require some humility and gentleness, patience and love. 

If I told you that outside there was an injured animal, and that in order to catch it and take it to the vet, you were going to need some gentleness, patience, love and probably some humility, what sort of animal would you think was out there? One that was scared. One that was probably going to make a fool of you. Maybe one that was angry.

Ladies, we are like that injured animal. We are all injured. We need to approach people and be approached with patience, gentleness, love, humility because that is how we “bear with one another.” If we didn’t, we’d lose this unity in the body of Christ. We’d be so offended, we’d say, “Forget it! I can’t stand you people. Every time I get close to you, you bite my fingers. I’m outta here! You’re scare me too much!” In the body of Christ, we have to suffer others and others have to suffer us.  

Let me give you an analogy. The body of Christ—aka this capital-"C"-Church—is like one big hospital. We’ve checked into this hospital because God revealed to us that we’re terminally ill. We’ve got a serious form of cancer called sin that’s going to kill us and we’ve realized that our only hope is to check into this hospital and undergo multiple operations at the hand of the master surgeon who is God. 

So we’ve checked into this hospital. Our names have been entered into the system and we're undergoing treatments as we all do life here together. We’re so thankful that we're here, that there’s hope for us, but we soon begin to notice two things. We’ve been looking at those diagrams on the wall, the ones that show us how our organs are supposed to work, and the longer we look at those diagrams, which are Christ, the more we realize one, we’re sicker than we thought and two, other sick people make unpleasant company.

Ladies, the church isn’t where all the good people go; it’s where the sick people go. It’s where the sinner goes who knows he can’t help himself. And the longer we’re here the more we study Jesus, and the more we realize we’re not functioning like him. We don’t love like Jesus did. We don’t use our power like he did. And we don’t trust like he did. God has a lot of work to do on us. 

No wonder Paul tell us in Ephesians 4:2 that we have to bear with one another in love. Being with other sick sinners can be unpleasant. You have the patients who stand in the hallways pointing at diagrams of Jesus saying, “This is how you’re all supposed to function. Shame on you! You’re not doing it right!” 

You have the patients who just sit in the corner moaning and groaning about how hard they have it and how nobody understands their ailments. Then there are those who have plastic scalpels and are offering to operate on you instead of letting Jesus do it. And of course there are those walking the halls in denial, “Oh, I’m fine. I don’t need any more treatments. I don’t need prayer. I’m fine,” and they’re trailing body fluids down the halls behind them. Sorry to be so gory, but the hospital of the Lord is a gory place.

You may be asking yourself, why would anyone want to be in this hospital. It sounds awful! And here Ephesians 4:4-6 is great encouragement. This hospital and the surgeries the Lord does on us is the only way we can live together. All the other government programs aren’t fixing the problem. Only God can accomplish this wonderful and beautiful and miraculous transformation that allows us to live together in peace. 

We thought we’d come into the hospital to just get our organs functioning, but God has bigger plans for us. He plans to turn us into god-like beings, sons and daughters of himself.We can bear with one another because we know God is doing a glorious work. There's a bright future ahead. We are united in the spirit of God’s transformation. We are united in encouraging one another to undergo God’s surgeries. Don't stop going in for them.

There is one body, this hospital of God. There is one hope, and that is that God will finish what he started. How many times does the psalmist say I put my hope in God? We hope that even though things look out of control, that God is still in the operating room! He’s pressing his Kingdom into all of us. There is one master surgeon, one person to trust, one omniscient God who is going to see us through to the end. 

“How good and pleasant it is
    when God’s people live together in unity" (in God’s hospital!) Psalm 133:1

Our unique role in this hospital, our graces, or what we sometimes call our spiritual gifts, which are really just our transformed weaknesses (think Moses’ stutter or Gideon’s fear or Abraham’s old age or Jacob’s conniving), these places where we need the most grace in our lives become the means by which we give to others. I think that’s why Paul describes these as he does in verse 7: “But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.”

Skipping to vs 12-13 these graces are “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith.” We also see this “equipping” in verse 16.

When you equip someone for something, you give them the right equipment for whatever they’re going to do. Like if I equip you for a long trip, I might give you a suitcase of clothes and toiletries and snacks. But equipping each other for service in Christ’s Kingdom looks different. It’s more like what a nurse or doctor might do. That’s what this word “equipping” is often used for—for fishermen mending nets and doctors mending broken bones. Doesn't that fit so perfectly with our hospital analogy? 

The gifts God gives us are for the mending of others’ hearts, minds, and bodies until we reach mature womanhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. I love how that's said. Let me reword that for you using our hospital analogy. “So your internal organs beat and pump and breath and bend in the way the diagrams on the wall say they’re supposed to.”

Or here’s another way to say it: “So you feel what Christ feels, you cry his tears, you're passionate for what he was passionate for. So you think in the scale of God’s kingdom, so you use your God-like power to further his kingdom on earth.” That is what it means to reach the full stature of Christ.

Paul has his own analogy he brings in here in verse 8 in this quote from Psalm 68.  However in Psalm 68 it says that the conquering king, aka God, receives gifts from the people, but here Paul has turned it around and said that the king gives gifts to men. The conquering king who’d normally receives tribute from the people he just conquered is in fact turning around and giving gifts to the rebels. 

What a beautiful picture of our God! He has come to conquer our rebel hearts and instead of demanding from us that we repay him for our rebellion, he gives us gifts—love, protection, and power, every spiritual blessing available. The captives taken by a conquering king ought to be turned into servants or slaves or put in prison, but instead God has decided to adopt us and teach us how to behave like queens. No more dumpster diving.

I’m not going to get into Paul’s ascending and descending bit much here. The point is: Jesus came to earth, died, and went up to Heaven. There. That’s my summary.

What are these gifts conquering God gives us? They are whatever you do when you are filled to the brim with gratitude for what God did for you. It’s God’s gift to you for the building up of this body. It’s what you give in this hospital to bring others in and to encourage other patients to undergo their scheduled surgeries.

When we are continuously in this place of worshipful receiving from God and to God, from others and to others, we leave no place for the devil to enter. It's like a garden so covered in flowers that the weeds have no place to pop up. But a garden must be planted and replanted. Flowers grow and die. So we too must be in constant growth in the Lord. It’s because we get too laissez faire hanging out in the hospital wings, holding conferences on how to best go in for our surgeries without every going in for them ourselves. That’s when our organs begin to cause us troubles. 

Verse 14 talks about what happens when we stop allowing God to work on us, this being tossed about by the waves and carried by winds, acting like children. Let me tell you, I have experience with children and in listening to them, I’ve realized, they’re not really that different from adults. Adults are just more cunning at hiding their intentions, justifying their motives while they obtain things that make them feel good without going in to the Master Surgeon.

Adults are experts at getting what we need without God. After all, we’ve been doing it our whole lives. We've had to because we were born without God. Earlier, I called this dumpster diving. Paul calls it the old self or the sinful flesh. And the old self is trying desperately to keep us out of surgery because it knows that to go in there, it will have to die. The cancer will need to be cut out.

So the old self uses all forms of human cunning and craftiness to keep us from going under God’s knife. It tells us:

-You can be better, just try something else.

-Those other people have worse problems than you. Help them instead. You’re not so bad.

-They’ll like you eventually. Just keep working at it.

-You can make them understand you. Just keep explaining yourself.

-You can figure this out.

-You can secure your own future.

-You don’t have to think about those tough things. Just keep moving.

-Grit your teeth and just make this happen. It's up to you.

-Just stay out of things and you won’t have to deal with any of it.

Did you notice a theme here? The old self says you can meet your own needs. It says jump in the garbage and get it yourself or take it from someone else. And what are these needs that I'm talking about? Psychologists will tell you there are three basic ones. And God made us with these needs.

Boiled down they are 1) to feel safe, 2) to feel loved, and 3) to have some sort of influence and power of choice. 

• To feel safe or secure doesn't mean no harm will ever befalls us. It’s knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that we're going to be okay no matter what. 
• To be loved means to be thoroughly known inside and out and accepted no matter our successes or failures. It's to know someone delights in us and that we aren't a burden to others.
• The power to influence includes the influence of circumstances around us, control of ourselves, and the ability to withhold control.

Ladies, do you realize that the book of Ephesians starts out by showing us how God meets all these psychological needs: Ephesians 1:3-9 says:

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. 4 For he chose us in him (SAFETY) before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight (POWER). In love 5 he predestined us (SAFETY) for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure (LOVE) and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us (POWER) in the One he loves. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, (POWER & LOVE) the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, 9 he made known to us the mystery of his will (SAFETY & POWER) according to his good pleasure, (LOVE) which he purposed in Christ.

I could go through the entire book of Ephesians and point these promises out to you, but I’m supposed to be talking about chapter 4, so let’s get back to that. 

In order to no longer be children, tossed about by every wind of doctrine, we have to be continually in a state of growth, continually in a state of undergoing God's surgeries, continually letting go of trying to get these things ourselves.

To undergo surgery is when we surrender yet another way we’ve been meeting our own needs, and instead believe God will meet that need for us.

We don’t have to dig in the dumpster anymore. We don’t have to get our own psychological needs met. God is meeting them as we work out our salvation. Go in for your surgeries. 

And speak the truth to each other in love, verse 15 says. Remind each other again and again of these truths, so that there are no stagnant Christians in this hospital. All the patients are cycling through pre-op, surgery, post-op, and rehabilitation in a healthy cycle.

I’ve listed nine basic truths that we often forget and they’re categorized based on what need they fulfill in us. The first three are for love, the second three are for security and the last three are for power or control. 

1. God sees all your needs and loves helping you.
2. God accepts you no matter your performance.
3. God understands you entirely.
4. God knows everything, and will tell you what you need to know at the right time.
5. God has planned how you will make it through this, and it is a good plan.
6. God will be with you through the difficult situations and feelings.
7. God is in control of everything, 
8. God wants to involve you in his plans.
9. God has made you righteous through Christ already.

You know what’s neat about truth? It’s always the same through all time, all people, all personalities. Our truth we speak to each other in this hospital, this Church, is always the same: go in for your surgery. Submit to God. Trust Him. He’s never failed an operation yet. We’ll be with you through it. In fact, we’ll hold your hand through it. Will you hold mine too?

Link to audio of this lecture (http://ghfc.org/media/229008-4396709-15691720/ephesians-4-16)

Other WOW Ephesians Lectures: (Eph 4:17-32, Eph 5:1-20, Eph 5:21-6:9, Eph 6:10-24)