Ephesians 9
We continue our discovery of Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus. We were thinking last time of what God wants his church to be like and how its members should behave. This time we are looking at chapter 4 and verses 7 to 16.
As we discovered last time, the church is made up of those who have been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ and who have received eternal life. They meet together in different places, in different countries, but they are all one church - one body. God has a plan for his church. They are the people who bring true worship to Him and they also declare to others the kind of God He is. God wants his church to make known his holiness, his power and greatness, his love and mercy, and above all his way of salvation. It is his longing that men and women everywhere may be brought back into fellowship with Him, to know and to love Him. As the church meets together for worship and to encourage each other in the ways of God they grow in grace. Also in their individual life and witness to Jesus Christ, they reach out to take the message of salvation to all around. This is God’s purpose for the church as is shown in this letter and in other parts of the New Testament.
In these verses of which we are thinking Paul speaks of two things. First, he shows how God has given gifts to believers to assist the church in its growth and witness. Secondly, he urges them to grow up and become mature as Christians, and shows them how this is possible. Paul says that when Christ returned to heaven He gave to the church all the gifts that are necessary for its work and growth. He mentions four types here. At first there were the apostles, fitted by God to go where the Gospel had never been heard and to establish new assemblies of God’s people. Then there were prophets who had the gift from God to hear from Him and declare the very word that was needed for any occasion. Thirdly, we have evangelists - those who have the gift of preaching the Gospel in a way that people understand, and that brings conviction and salvation through the work of the Holy Spirit,. Then we have pastors and teachers, often these go together. The word pastor really means a shepherd. Jesus calls Himself the Good Shepherd and the believers his sheep. So the pastor is one who cares for the church like a shepherd by comforting, reproving and challenging them and giving them direction. The church also needs some to teach them the truths of Scripture and to help them in their understanding of the faith, and there are those who are gifted to do this.
These gifts have a purpose. Verse 12 says they are “to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up …” What Paul means is that every believer should be ready for the work and witness that God has for him to do. It is for “works of service”. This is the word used for those chosen to serve tables in Acts chapter 6, but in that same chapter it is also used for those who ministered the word of God, they too were servants of the church. So this service includes helping in the practical things that need doing in the work of the local church as well as preaching, teaching and witnessing.
If you look in the first letter to the Corinthians chapter 12 and in the second list of gifts, starting at verse 27, you will find that helpers and administrators are included among the gifts. So you see it is a very wide term. Every believer has their own gift. Some have more than one, but everyone has some area in which God wants them to serve. God has given all these individual gifts to help the church so that every believer may be fully fitted to fulfil his or her task.
Paul now moves on to a subject always dear to his heart and one to which he returns quite often in his letters. He believes that the church, and because the church is made up of individual believers, the believers as well, should grow up spiritually and move on to maturity. In his first letter to the Corinthians and chapter 3 he accuses the believers there of still being babes in Christ. They had not grown up, they were still ruled by their fleshly desires. This is his theme again here in Ephesians chapter 4 verses 12 to 16. Listen to how he goes on - these gifts are “so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants … ”
I wonder if we can try and discover what Paul means by this mature and spiritual manhood. It seems that there are two ways in which this maturity shows itself. The first is shown in the words “until we reach maturity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God.” Faith in and knowledge of the Son of God become one. We put our faith in Christ for pardon and peace with God. He answered and made his forgiveness and peace real in our hearts. What He promised came to pass. This gave us confidence to keep trusting Him and we experienced his answers to our prayers. This enabled us to trust Him to deliver us from our unbelief so that we are no longer blown about by doubts and fears but have confidence in the Lord - as the following verses indicate.
Then Paul speaks of “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” This surely fits in with “being filled with all the fullness of God” which came in Paul’s prayer at the end of chapter 3. It fits in too with another exhortation which we have not come to yet. It is in chapter 5 and verse 18 and says, “Be filled with the Spirit”. In all three cases Paul is urging these believers to be spiritual, not controlled by their old sinful nature, but living and walking under the control of the Holy Spirit, allowing Him to rule in them.
Now he tells them the results if they do grow up spiritually. First, they will be stable. They will not be blown about; they won’t run after every new idea that is exciting and stirs their emotions; they will want to find out whether it is really the truth of God. Satan knows it will not be easy to make even very new Christians commit deliberate sin, but he knows, too, that they can be easily stumbled by something that appears exciting and new; so he brings along false teachers to lead them astray. We will not be easily deceived like that if we are mature in Christ, knowing Him and knowing his Word.
The other result is that they will learn to grow in love and likeness to the Lord Jesus. Paul illustrates this from the body. This is how one translation of this passage puts it: “Under Christ’s control all the different parts of the body fit together, and the whole body is held together by every joint with which it is provided. So that when each separate part works as it should, the whole body grows and builds itself up through love.” You see what he means: every part of the body works together, and while all the different parts work together properly, all goes well. But, when something goes wrong, the whole body suffers. So it is in the church when an individual believer’s relationship with God or with his fellow Christians goes wrong, then the church begins to suffer and sometimes the work of the Lord is hindered. How necessary then, to keep a right relationship with God and our fellow believers.
So we have discovered that God has given to each believer, and to the church as a whole, gifts to enable us to carry out his work and to witness for Christ. We have seen that God’s purpose for each believer is that we grow up in Christ to be mature in faith and able to stand firm against false teaching. And the power to do all this comes from the indwelling Holy Spirit. As we allow Him to rule and control us, we will grow in love for one another and for the Lord.