Ephesians 4:1-6. Paul spent the first three chapters of this letter encouraging the gentile (non-Jewish) believers in the church in Ephesus that God was using his enormous power to do a new thing, a mystery, he called it. But it was a mystery no more, God was using his power to build a forever family for himself. This family would include not only Jews, who had had hints about the plan in the rules and other writings God had given them (the Old Testament) but non-Jews too. They would all be equal in God’s new and forever family, his kingdom. He also wanted to be sure that the fact that he was imprisoned and awaiting a trial was not discouraging to them. He told them it was a prisoner because he was going everywhere telling people how to have a relationship with God through Jesus. Jesus was the solution to each persons broken relationship with God (see “A Tale of Two Trees”) and if telling people about Jesus made trouble in his life it was worth it, he was willing to trade and easy life here and now in order to help people everywhere hear about Jesus. He began the letter with a prayer honoring God and he ended chapter three with a similar prayer. Specifically he was praising or honoring God because God’s massive, indescribable, immense, huge power was working in all of the believers to do more that we can even imagine. He also asked in that ending prayer that God would help all of his readers be strong in the poser of the Holy Spirit living in them (see “Three or One?”, that their faith would help Jesus be a part in their lives, and that love would be the foundation of their God honoring lives.

In today’s reading Paul starts a new section where he wants to tell them how to live for God; how to be a part of this new family of God. He calls this new family of God the church (the word means gathered or assembled ones). He also compares the church to a body, a building and a temple. Each believer in Jesus is a part of the “building” that God is putting together. Each one has a part in the building and each one is being carefully fit together with all the others. In Ephesians 2:10 Paul told the Ephesian believers that each one of them had been brought into the church for a purpose; Paul says we were “created in Christ Jesus”. God has an active place for each one of us in his forever family, God knew before he even created us physically if we would follow Jesus and when he created us he made us just right for the place we would one day have in the church.

God’s wisdom, power and insight are amazing and because of that Paul begs the believers in Ephesus to live (walk) lives that measure up to place they have in God’s forever family (worth of the call to which they have been called).   One of my sons has a leadership role on a ship owned by a missions organization. The ship travels all over the world and stops in ports where they distributing both educational books (that part allows them to enter many of the countries) and also Christian books. They also have classes for pastors to attend, they have a creation exhibit, and they are all tasked with making sure they try to tell the locals they meet about Jesus. They also do stuff off the ship like taking stuff to prisons. The department he oversees basically has to work every day since they provide a necessary daily service. Part of his staff has a regular duty of cleaning up from their regular work. There are also special event that need to be cleaned up from too. His clean up staff don’t think they should have to clean up after the special events, they resent that that department gets to rest while they have to work. But they are missing the point, they don’t have to work, they get to work.  God hive to each person the talents, gifts, and abilities that are just right for the job he has for them. It’s a privilege to be entrusted with more. It’s like human pyramids in the circus, should the guy on the bottom complain that he is holding them all up? No, he has the strength and its an honor to be entrusted with that job.

In verses 2-3 Paul uses four phrases to tell them how to “walk” for God. This isn’t a “what” but a “how”. There are many different “what’s” when it comes to living for God; like the story above leading, cleaning up, running special events, running the regular stuff; later Paul will mention a couple of specific jobs God has given some people but here he is talking to all the believers about “how” they do their jobs, mostly its about attitude. The first thing he tells them in verse 2 is that they need to do the job God created them for with humility and gentleness. In the Greek culture of the time humility was seen as a weakness; that idea hasn’t really changed much throughout history. In Philippians 2:3-4 humility is contrasted with selfish ambition and conceit. It is an attitude that sees other as even more important that ourselves. The word translated “meekness” is really the idea of being polite even if the other person doesn’t deserve the politeness (Galatians 6:1). The second idea the Paul says should control how we live is “patience”. The idea here is patient when you are being provoked, you might translate the original word “have a long fuse” or “take a long time to boil over”. It’s not about picking up 200 marbles that you just dropped with out having a fit, it’s about picking up the 200 marbles you just dropped without having a fit while people are walking through the area kicking them around. Next Paul tells them they need to “tolerate each other in love”. Put up with others that seem to be a pain in the neck in love. This is no argggggggggg, type of putting up with those that annoy us we need to see them as a valuable part of the team, of God’s family. Pretty tough! Finally Paul tells the readers to work hard (be diligent) at watching over and protecting (keep or protect) the unity of the Spirit (this is back to the idea of the church, a group of believers in Jesus, as “one new man” (Ephesians 2:15), a body (Ephesians 2:16; 3:6, see also Ephesians 1:22), a building or house (Ephesians 2:19-22), and a temple (Ephesians 2:21). Notice that this unity is a product of the Holy Spirit. When people trust Jesus as their savior (see “A Tale of Two Trees”) God, the Holy Spirit (see “Three or One?”) comes into their inner being and starts helping them live for Jesus. Each of us does that kind of differently based on the particular way God has designed us and what he has made us for (Ephesians 2:10) but there are a lot of things that are the same (like the four ideas above and more). For sure, we are all part of God’s forever family and should live in ways that honor him for that. As the Holy Spirit helps us live that way we have unity (or should).

The last little piece of the puzzle here is peace. We are told that we have this unity that the Spirit is producing “in the bond of peace”. The word bond here is the idea of a fastener, like a button. But it also is used for things like ligaments that hold muscle to bone and can also have the idea of things like “team spirit” or the bond between family members (of course that is probably the idea here). This bond is described as peace. Back in chapter 2 Paul talked about peace between the two groups of believers, Jewish believers in Jesus and non-Jewish believers in Jesus. This peace was produced when Jesus died and fixed the sin problem between us and God, he made peace between us and God possible (See Luke 2:14, that peace was most likely the peace between God and man that Jesus was going to make possible, see also “A Tale of Two Trees”). So the peace is first between each of individually as we accept Jesus as the solution for our broken relationship with God but it is also peace between the different types of people who would come to be part of God’s new family (Ephesians 2:17). In Ephesians two of those groups were the gentile believers and the Jewish believers (Ephesians 2:14-16, in verse 16 the word translated “reconcile” means to “bring back together again”). So the sacrifice Jesus made for us, a sacrifice that made peace brings us back together and that unity and bond is maintained by the holy Spirit in our every day lives.

In verses 4-6 Paul repeatedly uses the word “one”.   There is one [Holy] Spirit, One hope that we were all called to, one Lord (since almost all of Paul’s uses of this word so far have been linked directly with Jesus, that is who he is talking about here, Jesus as our master. This word also has at least hints of deity; pointing to the fact that Jesus is God), one faith (in who Jesus is and what he has done for us (Ephesians 1:15; 2:8; 3:12,17), one baptism, and one God and Father. This list of “ones” shows just how united these believers ought to be. They aren’t just “fans” of the cowboys, or “Americans”, children of the same parents they are united a bunch of ways. Paul puts God last probably to make us think about him a little more. He is the “father” of all, probably pointing out both that he is a creator and his personal love for us. He is also “over all”, he’s the boss. “Through all” either points to God as the creator or maybe to the one who actively keeps the whole universe together.   “In all” might point to the fact that the whole universe proves the existence of God to us, everywhere we look scientifically, morally, socially we see evidence of a loving creative being whose universe is a universe of order not chaos. It’s difficult to divide up these ideas, the language kind of overlaps, and other places in the New Testament some of these “works” of God are credited to Jesus and even the Holy Spirit (like the peace and unity above where we see activity on the part of God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, see “Three or One?”).

Also a little note on “one baptism”. The Greek word translated baptism is “baptizo” and it means to dip or immerse. It was used for the process of dying cloth, where the cloth was submerged in the liquid dye to give it color. In the ancient world of Jesus time many groups used a ritual where they would “baptize” people into the group by submerging them into a body of water. We see this when John the Baptizer (Matthew 3:11) was baptizing people who wanted to show they knew they had a problem with God and wanted to change (repent). From the earliest days of the church people were being baptized to show their identification with Jesus (Acts 8:12, 16). In Colossians 2:12 (a letter written at the same time as Ephesians) Paul describes baptism as a way of identifying with Jesus’ death (which took the penalty for our sins away, see ”A Tale of Two Trees”) and his resurrection (which proves hos power over death and gives us hope of our eternal existence with God; we will be resurrected too). So baptism is a symbolic action that believers do to show that they identify with all Jesus has done for us.

It’s too bad when believers in Jesus don’t get along, it gives God a bad reputation. We need to recognize that that we are all part of one new eternal “family” that God has created. Paul wants us to recognize that, appreciate it, and live out that appreciation by getting along with each other. We aren’t on our own in this though we have the Spirit of God living is us, helping us be all that we each can be as we live and work together as God’s children. This doesn’t mean we need to compromise what we believe, the Holy Spirit that binds us all together is called the “Spirit of Truth” by John (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13) and in those chapters we see that he teaches about Jesus in a why that honors Jesus. ON the other hand there are lots of real churches all over the world that do things differently from each other. As Paul has already said in chapter one Jesus is the head over the church(es) not me. In 1 Peter 4:15 Peter instructs believers not to be surprised if there is trouble in their lives for following Jesus, it shows that the Spirit of God is controlling their lives. But he warns them to bring trouble on themselves by sinning (doing things that dishonor God) One sin he mentions is “busybody” or “troublesome meddler”. That’s a very funny word in the Greek language. It’s a compound word that only appears in that verse and experts think that Peter invented the word. Literally it means “another man’s overseer”. That could mean don’t be someone else’s boss; don’t run other peoples lives. The word for “overseer”, by the time Peter wrote, had become sort of a technical term among believers and was used for leaders in the church called elders. What Peter may have been warning his readers about was not going around stirring up trouble by trying to run churches they were not a part of. I think we need to cooperate within our church and cooperate with other churches as much as we can. We need to stick to the truth, but the point is we need to stick to the truth, we need to individually live in peace. We need to spend our time building up other believers in the local church that we are part of. We need to cooperate with Christians everywhere as much as possible and we need to let Jesus and the Holy Spirit do their work in all believers everywhere, starting with ourselves. Remember God is powerful and can take care of himself.

Thank you God for the Holy Spirit. Help me learn to listen to him better each day. Thank you for calling me into your forever family, thank you for the certainly that I will be with you and you with me forever. Help me be diligent to preserve the unity of what your Spirit is building through the peace you have offered to mankind. Thank you for giving me a part in the plan, let me do my part to build up. Help me recognize that my part is different that the part of others. Help me be patient and recognize that the church needs all different kinds of parts to help the world find you. Thank you for your patience with all of us for whom you died while we were still enemies. Help me help the world find peace with you. Let me focus on them and let you worry about the others.