Choke and Cultivate - Brandon Scalf

Ephesians 4 and the Call to End Chapter 4

Alright everyone, grab your Bibles and turn with me to Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4, and today we will end chapter 4. We have been in this book now for two years, and we are inching our way toward the end.

That is what we call progress. Ephesians chapter 4, and today we will be looking specifically at verses 31 and 32, which really is a summation of everything that we have been talking about the last couple of weeks.

Ephesians chapter 4, verses 31 and 32, and the title of today's message is Choke the and Cultivate. Choke and Cultivate, and if that sounds very strange to you, hang in there, it will make sense as we examine the text.

So Ephesians chapter 4, and if you would please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible, and all-sufficient Word. And for the sake of context, I will begin reading in verse 25.

This is the Word of God. Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth, each one of you, with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. Be angry and yet do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your anger.

And do not give the devil an opportunity, he who steals must steal no longer, but rather he must labor, performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to share with one who has need.

Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for building up what is needed, so that it will give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

Let all bitterness and anger and wrath and shouting and slander be put away from you. Along with all malice instead, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, graciously forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has graciously forgiven you.

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.

Amen? Amen.

Go ahead and have a seat and put your eyes on verse 31. And as you're turning there, I want you to imagine, if you would with me, a farmer standing before a barren field. If that farmer wants a fruitful harvest, he must do what?

He must uproot the weeds that choke out the soil, and he must plant seeds that will bear good fruit. As we look at our text before us today, we are looking at the reality that Paul is challenging the church or churches in Ephesus, and us by extension, to choke the weeds of sin.

To choke the weeds that tend to try to grow around the new man and to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit. Now, the church is said to be a lot of things in the Bible, metaphorically speaking. A little later on, we will see that the church is, in fact, called the Bride of Christ.

As we have been looking at how to preserve the unity and the bond of peace, the church has been likened to a body with many members that are interdependent upon one another, where Christ is the head. But another way that we can think about the church, which is not explicit in what's being talked about, but it is most certainly a way to help us think about it, is that the church is like a field, like I was talking about with the farm or a garden, and that it belongs to God, purchased by the blood of Christ, and it is planted to display His glory.

But the question becomes, if that's true, if that's how we want to think about it, we have to ask this question. Will we, as Christ's church, be gardeners of grace, or will we be arsonists of unity? Will we do what Paul is commanding us to do, and has been commanding us to since the beginning of Ephesians 4, and guard and keep this unity with fervor that has been purchased for us and has been applied by the Holy Spirit, or will we set it on fire?

You've noticed that Paul continues to go on, and it's almost as if he's repeating himself. And you're saying, well, if we've already heard this stuff, why are you going to go over it again? Well, one, it's a slightly different angle.

Secondly, we preach verse by verse around here, which means we go the way that God tells us to go, because He knows better than us. And third, because we tend to forget it over and over and over again.

And fourth, because it really matters.

Because it really matters. Right? We can't destroy the unity given by the Spirit, but we can mar it, we can catch it on fire, we can spit on it, and that will do damage to our local body. So, as we look at this text, let's think through how to be gardeners, how to be farmers that seek to do things in such a way as to put the display of God's glory everywhere, to one another.

And the reason I say that, and the reason that Paul is repeating himself here, is because Christians, and I do mean Christians, because remember, Paul is speaking to those who, according to chapter one, verse three, have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

He's not speaking to people out there in Ephesus who hate God. He's speaking to the people inside the church. He's talking about good church boys and girls. He's talking about you. He's talking about me.

And we have a tendency to forget what Christ has done, suffer from spiritual amnesia, and become spiritual arsonists. The seeds of bitterness are sown, anger is kindled, and words of slander ignite flames that divide and destroy.

So we must revisit these same truths, because we do not want to be a church that just a few years from now looks around at ashes, but rather a church that looks around and can say, look what our God has done.

Amen?

All right. Well, check this out. This is not just even for the church. The good news about this passage is it has extensions that reach its tentacles, as it were, to each individual in this pew. Yes, collectively, he's certainly talking about the church, but this is also how we can also treat, say, an unreasonable husband, or a dripping faucet of a wife, or an unbearable brother or sister, children, contentious children, parents, overbearing coworkers, or harsh task masters, if you will.

And so this is going to be, I believe, a helpful sermon because it's going to show us not that this is how you change other people so that unity can exist, but rather this is how you change you. Because if you change you, then that generally changes the situation.

Choking the Old Life Patterns That Burn Down Unity

And so if you look with me, the first thing that I want you to see, and really this is just a two-point sermon, choke and cultivate. So the first one is choke. Choke.

Choke.

That's the first point. Choke. And what I mean by that is Paul here is wanting us to choke the old life patterns that are used to burn down unity. The things that are natural about us in our sinful state, the things that we give ourselves.

Proclivity toward need to be choked.

Look with me at verse 31. He says, let all bitterness and anger and wrath and shouting and slander be put away from you along with all malice. Now, I want to move to a word that's at the end of your English version.

But the reason that I do that is to tell you why I'm using this word choke. The word choke is used in point number one to capture this idea of put away.

Right?

These are things that we must put away from us. Bitterness, anger, wrath, shouting, slander, and this last piece called malice. Malice.

Malice.

Now this word here can simply mean to discharge or to violently put away. That is somewhat clear. But what it fundamentally means in the Greek is to lift with a view to carrying, to take away, to remove.

But here is the bigger thing. It is used in the Bible to picture not just any removal, but a violent removal. This same word is used in Matthew 24, 39 when it says, and they did not understand until the flood came.

Of course, this is Jesus speaking of those who were swept away in the flood in Genesis. And they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away. So will the coming of the Son of Man be.

So this putting away is the same word that's being used by Jesus when he's saying it's like the flood when it came and guzzled everyone up and killed everyone for the rebellion against God when Noah built the ark.

And that's also how the Son of Man will come. Will come. So as the flood swept away the inhabitants of the earth, so should all these negative characteristics be swept away from you. They should be moved, violently put away.

What I'm getting at here is these sins are not to be managed. They're not to be tolerated. They're to be ruthlessly executed. They're to be choked out. They're weeds growing. And what I mean by that is we are, if you haven't been paying attention, talking about the characteristics of what it looks like to walk worthy as the new man purchased by Jesus Christ, the old one having been crucified.

So I could have even used the word crucify instead of choke. So crucify, choke, to put away, you're to get rid of these. This has no place in the Christian church. This has no place or these things rather have no place in Christian relationships.

To put all of these things away. And what are these things that we are to put away or rather to choke? Well, the first one in this list is bitterness, but not just any bitterness, all types of bitterness, right?

Look with me again at verse 31. It says, let all bitterness. Now, if you remember, when we started speaking of verse 29, we said that this word use pass all really refers to all sorts of every kind of or every form of that thing, which it is talking about.

Therefore, it is speaking about all types of bitterness. All types of bitterness. Now, this word here is derived from a certain adjective that is used of a quote unquote pointed or sharp arrow. A pointed or sharp arrow.

And when it is used in reference to this, it is rendered sharp or oftentimes a bitter taste. A bitter taste. It's pungent. The smell is sharp or it is penetrating. It is piercing. Sometimes this word is used in antiquity to talk about a piercing sound that hurts.

Right?

And it can refer and it does refer oftentimes in antiquity as bitter taste of plants. It's fitting our theme quite nicely.

Not on purpose.

That's just God's providence, I suppose. But with reference to temper, it means a bitterness or a type of resentment that is kind of just.

There.

And in context, that's certainly what it's being talked about.

It is, as one commentator put it, a spirit of irritability where you're just letting.

Things build up in you as you see other people doing things that you think you can do better or they're doing wrong or that, oh gosh, that is just, and it's not even necessarily sinful things. It's just things.

Sometimes it's sin, of course. An unwillingness to forgive that this resentment and this bitterness builds up. But primarily it's something about harboring and nourishing personal grudges out of a discontent.

Heart.

Ultimately, discontentment with God and who he is. And this is really where he begins. Because this actually here is kind of what I believe is spurring all of these other things. Walking around as a bitter person is going to cause you to amp up your behavior.

And I think that is what's going on here, right? Bitterness, which leads to anger, which leads to wrath, which leads to public strife, which is shouting slander, talking bad about one another and doing so maliciously.

There is a step stone process and it all begins here with this bitter, irritable disposition. And it eats away at the very integrity and soul of those who give themselves to it. Children, would you look at me?

I got something for you. I want you to think about it like this. Why is this such a problem? Well, it's such a problem, one, because God is not bitter. And when we engage in bitterness, we stop acting like God.

And the reality is we want to be imitators of God. As a matter of fact, Paul is going to say that at the beginning of next week's sermon. In chapter five, verse one, he says, therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children.

All of us are to be like children imitating our father, imitating God. But secondly, I want you to think about this. I want you to think about it this way. Bitterness is like a little bit of poison, right?

If you put a little bit of poison in something, it might hurt someone on, say, like a TV show you watch. Somebody might put a little poison in a drink and it may not kill them. But it begins to, over time, eat away at their health until eventually that poison corrodes them.

That's the same thing that happens with bitterness. It's like poison, and the only person that really gets hurt at the end of the day, outside of it tearing down a potential church, is you. It will eat you, and it will corrode every single relationship that you have.

And by corrode, what I mean is it will make that relationship bad, where you don't trust one another. Because you can't trust people that you're bitter against and you resent. You're always looking with a squinted eye, wondering when is the next time they're going to do that thing that irritates you.

Don't be like that, Paul says. Let me ask you this, Heritage. Are you bitter against anyone in the church? Are you bitter against anyone in your household or at your job? Are you holding grudges against someone here in these pews?

If so, let me say this. Bitterness cannot coexist alongside the grace of God. These two things are opposed to one another. And so what you must do is you must take this bitterness, and you must put it at the foot of the cross.

And you must allow the grace of God to choke it. And you must put it away. You must put it away. The second thing is anger.

Anger.

And we will not belabor this point entirely because we literally had an entire sermon talking about how we must be angry, but we must be angry in the right way for the right reasons. And we must be really angry against unjust anger.

Anger that is pointed at the wrong things for the wrong reasons. But as we're thinking about this as a thing that ramps up, one of the things that is brought up when you look through a lot of this letter is that really this is kind of a smoldering kind of a thing that exists after bitterness takes root.

It's the embers of wrath, as it were. It begins the thing that becomes wrath. It is unjust anger. It is a heart that is quickly offended and who wants to lash out. And it's the breeding ground, really, for division.

It's when you nurse the bitterness that one becomes angry in the sinful sense. Ecclesiastes 7 .9 says, Do not be eager in your spirit to be vexed, for vexation rests in the bosom of fools. This means to be angry.

And fools are the ones who get angry sinfully. Proverbs 14 .7,. Leave the presence of a fool as you have not known lips of knowledge there. So when someone gets angry, there's no knowledge in that. So flee.

Proverbs 14 .29,. He who is slow to anger has great discernment. So the opposite side of this is you're not very discerning if you get angry easily. But he who is quick temper raises up folly. You want to know how to continue to burn things instead of choke weeds?

Get angry. Make sure there's folly everywhere. James 1 .19,. Know this, my beloved brothers. Everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. So even when you are to be righteously angry, you need to make sure that you are slow in doing so.

Because our hearts are deceitful. Anger is like leaving a pot of water on a flame. It simmers quietly, but eventually it boils over and it scolds everyone around it. How many of you are okay with saying, Ah, I got a short fuse.

That gets a pass a lot of times. No, it shouldn't. You must submit your anger to the Spirit. You must submit your anger to the Lord Jesus Christ. Because He produces self-controlled churchmen and women and those whom He indwells.

It is the fruit of the Spirit that we have as believers. And if we do not have the fruit of the Spirit, we may not be believers. Hot-headed tempers are not to be in God's church. Wrath is the next one.

This is anger unleashed. Literally an explosion of fury, as some commentators and lexicons put it. It leaves devastation. Resentment that builds into, Ah, it actually is an explosion of rage. Commentator put it, it's like firework anger.

And usually when you're at this point, logic has gone out the window. And as Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, when we looked at it previously, it's when we become most like the animals of the field. The thing that makes us human, we turn off.

Because we are blinded by our rage. Wrath is a wrecking ball. And it sees everything as a fragile building and it wants to tear it down. To be God's men and women in God's church and in His garden, seeking to display His glory and goodness to one another and to the world, you must pray for the power of the spirit to choke wrath and replace it with patience.

And this means you might have to seek some sort of accountability. You might have to submit that to the people around you. And that means that they must show grace, walk with you, and love you in it. Fourthly, shouting.

Now this is an interesting word. One lexicon put it as a display of bad taste. And it's used 66 times in the Septuagint to translate a very myriad versions of the concept it tries to put forth. It's a myriad of contexts and stories.

And in one place it's used of the cry of complaint in Exodus chapter 3. When they're crying out to the Lord, shouting to Him, shouting in 1 Samuel. But really it refers to the loud outbursts of frustration or conflict that disrupt peace in public.

That's kind of the idea here. So it's not even just shouting, but it is less. But not less than that. It's when the anger and the wrath become public. Become a spectacle for everyone to see. It's moved from the corners to the living room.

And people can witness it. It's loud, it's obnoxious, and it puts a poor taste in everyone's mouth. It would be like losing your mind if you were the judge in a courtroom. And you're supposed to be cordial.

You're supposed to be put together. You're supposed to be leading the conversation with tact. And instead somebody says something negative to you on the other side of the bench. And you lose it on them because you can't understand what they're doing.

And you don't care because you're going to let them know how they've screwed up. But that is the problem. That is the problem. God's people, empowered by His grace, seeking to walk worthy and guard the unity of the bond of peace in the Spirit.

People who want their church to flourish and grow. They need to choke these sins out. They need to replace shouting with calm, measured voices that speak truth and love. Too many people, too many Christian people, especially in the reformed camp, think that in relational situations, to be harsh, to be completely out of your minds, losing it, and raising your voice is acceptable because you're telling the truth.

No.

All that's doing is revealing your heart. Truth can be truth without you losing your mind. Truth can be truth without anger, the sinful type, welling up in you and expressing itself and spraying it all over everyone else.

But it takes an understanding of the gospel to get there. It takes an understanding that the Lord has promised vengeance upon vengeance Himself. He will repay it. You do not have to inflict damage upon others.

One, because either Jesus paid for it and you're spitting on His work. Or two, you're seeking to take the vengeance that the Lord has promised to take in your honor. Really in His son's honor, but you're in Him, so you see how that works.

And the next one, of course, is slander. This is really when things start ramping up. When you're shouting and you're wrath and all of these things are not working and people aren't doing what you think they should do.

Well, then you decide to assassinate their character. You decide to stand on the graves of their reputation so that you can begin to build yours on fertile soil. The word here really can be translated abusive speech.

In some translations, it's used as clamor, which I kind of like. It's got more like a percussive kind of a sound to that. It's just something that, to godly ears, nobody has time for. It's like a cacophony.

But to those who are ungodly, it's like sweet honey. They can't get enough of it. It's speaking ill of others, often behind their backs. It's dividing the body against one another. Which, by the way, if you think about that, in light of everything we've been studying thus far, think about it this way.

When you divide the body, you're dividing Christ. He's the head, we're the body. So you're not just turning people against one another so that they will like you more. You're actually trying to sever parts of Christ's body from him.

It's the opposite of what you should be doing. It's not guarding, it's not protecting your brother's and your sister's reputation, which is what you should be doing. It's seeking to tear it down. If you love someone, the reality is, and you should love everyone in the church because they have been bought with the same blood as you.

You're no better than them. The cross is a beacon that says we are all the same here. And you are called to love them. You should love them. You should want to love them. And if you do love them, which you should love them, then you must learn to be their defense attorney and not their prosecuting attorney.

With everyone you meet. It should be your job to make everyone else look better than they even are. Well, maybe that's too far, right? But you should be causing people to look at them not with disdain but with pleasure.

That's what you do in Christ's church. That's what you do in Christ's church. So that when people show up to talk to somebody, they're not, Oh, man, I don't know about this guy. Instead of, I've heard great things about this brother.

And that means you've got to start thinking about things differently. You've got to think about them differently in order to be able to be this type of person who doesn't slander but rather is their defender.

Those annoying things that you do, think about them differently. Think about yourself less. Oh, they take too long to eat at the potlucks. Or maybe what it is is those people are so awesome that they just, they want to fellowship with everyone.

You see, that's a better spin on it, and it's probably more accurate to the truth. And it's not speaking of you, it's them. Oh, they're always wanting to argue about something. Or, oh, man, this is really awesome because they love the Word of God.

Those people love the Word of God so much that they always want to talk about it.

Right?

You have to learn not to slander, to assume negative intent, but positive intent. That's where it begins. If you love someone, I'll say it again, it is your job in the church of Jesus Christ to be their defense attorney, not their prosecuting attorney.

James 4 .11 says, do not slander one another, brothers. He who slanders a brother or judges his brother slanders the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge of it.

James is saying, hey, why don't you just follow the law? Quit worrying about whether or not everyone else is, and you just do it. You're not the arbiter here of what's, like, just do it. You're not slander your brother.

Slander is like spreading ink on a white cloth. Have you ever got ink on white cloth? There's a few of you out there I know. You fountain pen people with me. You get it on, and it starts like this, and then it just, it takes over.

It doesn't just hit one spot. It just spreads. And so as Christians, if we hear slander, we're to turn the other way. Hey, that's slander. You stop that. Or maybe you don't rebuke them. Maybe you just don't engage.

Oh, okay. We don't entertain slander. You don't slander.

You don't entertain slander.

Remember, as we have walked through these passages the last few weeks, we are told that we need to speak words that edify and build up. We're not seeking to burn down. We need to guard the reputations of our brothers and sisters, not make them laughingstocks.

That's not a good thing to do. So to summarize everything that we have seen thus far, bitterness in verse 31 deals with our attitude. As one commentary put it, the next two nouns, anger and wrath, they deal with our disposition.

And the last two, shouting and slander, these refer to the manner of speech. This is the whole person. Now Paul is going to convey to the church in Ephesus and to us by extension the fate of the qualities expressed by these words.

And it's malice. It's malice. Look with me again at verse 31. Let all bitterness and anger and wrath and shouting and slander be put away from you. Choke it, in other words. Get rid of it violently. Along with all malice.

Along with all malice. What Paul's doing here and why he's put it at the end like this is to help color for all of us all of the other words that have been mentioned up to this point.

He wants us to understand that certain words like anger and wrath can.

And more often than do, than not do denote malicious, malevolent, and evil behavior. Right? Because we've already went over this. There is an anger that's godly. The Christians that show that type of anger are rare.

But the ones who do not and show evil anger, unrighteous anger, unjust anger those are rampant running. And so Paul here is urgently exhorting everyone who reads this to put away all of these qualities which are defined by or colored by malicious behavior.

Everything that we have discussed up to this point is evil. It's not indifferent. It's not just, It's none of that. It's evil. It's horrible.

It's horrible.

It's spitting in God's face. It's marring the spirit of unity. And the worst part of it all the worst part of it all is that's who we are by nature. That's easy for us. We do not have to try to do that.

We have to try to not do that. That's what we want apart from Christ. John Owen says it like this. Malice is a weed in the garden of God and it must be uprooted lest it spread and kill all. Malice will kill all.

You get that? Every good thing that's happening here at Heritage can be caught on fire by spiritual arsonists and all we need to do is just.

Do nothing.

And let the weeds choke instead of us choking out the weeds. That's the bad news.

Cultivating Kindness, Tenderheartedness, and Forgiveness

But.

The good news is there's a transition in this text. The transition in this text is one that John MacArthur calls a transition from natural vices to supernatural virtues.

Right?

Natural vices to supernatural virtues. And I think that's great. Look with me at 32. He says instead or you can think about it this way. In place of or alternative way of living be kind to one another.

Tender hearted, graciously forgiving each other just as God in Christ also has graciously forgiven you. It's a powerful, powerful verse. But let's take this one thing at a time. As I said before and as I'll say again man's natural tendency is toward sin.

It is. And the natural tendency of sin is to grow into greater sin and greater sin and greater sin. So we need the Spirit's help to put that to death. And the good news is if you haven't been paying attention we have been given the Spirit.

Given the Spirit in the bond of the unity the unity in the bond of peace. We've been given the Spirit personally as He indwells us.

Right?

He has revived us from spiritual death in Ephesians chapter 2. He has woken us up from that slumber so to speak. And He has given us a heart that beats red with blood for Jesus Christ who loves Him. And this same Spirit walks with us as we are progressively sanctified and we will eventually as it has been said thus far sanctified.

And when we see Jesus we will stand before Him underneath the banner of what Jesus Christ has done for us having walked with the Spirit having been perfected by Him knowing that He who began a good work in us will bring it to completion.

And so Paul does not leave us as it were in the ashes of what we must choke. He's not leaving us there.

Instead.

He moves to what we must cultivate. And that's my second point.

Right?

So there's choke or you could use crucify or there is cultivate. Cultivate. So we must cultivate. Instead of these other things that have come natural to us we need to by the Spirit cultivate these things which constitute the new man.

That make up Him. And that's messy. It's messy. Because we're all going to cultivate differently and we're all going to fail to cultivate. And so we need a lot of dispositions that counteract those other ones.

Right?

Body parts can be messy. Gardens can be messy. But as I said earlier in a different way you don't need to clean the messiness out there. If everybody worried about cleaning up the messiness here we'd get a lot further down.

The road.

We are our brother's keeper. Those sermons I've preached on that reality is very true. While at the same time as Jesus says before you start messing around with the speck in your brother's eye make sure you get that honking log right out of yours.

That is the truth of the Scripture. And that is the truth of all the Scripture. This is not just true of this passage it's true all over the place. Colossians 3 .12 says So as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

It's almost a parallel type passage here. In 1 Peter 3 .8 it says Now to sum up, all of you be like-minded, sympathetic, brotherly, tender-hearted and humble in spirit. So let's look at this text here verse 32 at these specific destructive or these specific patterns new life patterns as you will for building up instead of burning down that replace the destructive behaviors with virtues that reflect the grace of God.

The first one here is, look with me, kindness.

Right?

Instead or in the place of these things be kind to one another. This word kindness.

Is used in this book.

And we've seen it already. Do you remember where? It's in Ephesians chapter 2 verse 7 where God raised us up and seated believers in the heavenlies that he might demonstrate his kindness and giving us salvation.

It says it like this. So that in the ages to come he did all of that which was talked about previously so that purpose clause in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

So when you are acting kind instead of all of these other ways you are acting this way. You are acting like God acted toward us in Christ Jesus. So you should be acting in ways that God acts to us in Christ.

Now we can't send people we can't send our son to die for anyone's sins and so of course that analogy begins to break down but the idea here is model God by being kind. By leaning in. By giving people what they don't deserve according to your standard or even the Bible's standard.