How to Grow Up - Brandon Scalf

Ephesians 4 and the Call to Doctrinal Maturity

All right, everyone, grab your Bibles and turn with me to Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4, and we will be continuing on in our series through Paul's letter to the churches in Ephesus. Ephesians chapter 4, and we will be specifically looking at verses 15 and 16 this morning.

The title of today's message is How to Grow Up, and so 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 1 and concluding at the end of 16.

This is the Word of God. Therefore, I, the prisoner in the Lord, exhort you to walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But to each one of us, grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift.

Therefore, it says, when he ascended on high, he led captive, a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men. Now the expression, he ascended, what does it mean except that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth.

He who descended is himself also he who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things. And he himself gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ, so that we are no longer to be children tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming.

But, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head that is Christ, from whom the whole body, being joined and held together by what every joint supplies according to the properly measured working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever.

Amen?

Amen.

The World’s Deception and the Church’s Need for Truth

Go ahead and have a seat and fix your eyes on our text. As I said, verse 15 is where we will begin. You don't have to pay attention very long to what's going on outside the walls of this church to come to the realization that our culture, our nation, and in many ways our world is drowning in deception.

It is flailing about in falsehood. Most people do not know which way is up, which way is down, where to go, where not to go, what a woman is and what a woman is not. The reason for that, of course, is because we have rejected the truth, primarily the truth of God's holy, infallible, and all-sufficient Word.

This is what Romans 1 teaches us, that we, apart from Christ, suppress the truth in unrighteousness, that we push it down because we don't like the truth, we do not love the truth. Apart from Christ, we would rather create our own truth.

But there is one truth, one reality, and that reality is God's reality and that truth is.

God's truth.

So though the world is increasingly hostile to the truth, we as the church must not be. We must be a church that prizes, prioritizes, and makes a habit of resting in and promoting.

God's truth.

In fact, this is how we grow. We grow by the truth being injected into us by each individual member of the body of Christ. It's all about truth. Truth is what unity is built around. Unity cannot exist without truth, and so we must be governed by not the world's definition of truth, and not your truth, but the truth of God's world, or word, rather.

So you might be asking yourself, or we should be maybe asking ourselves, what is the truth? What is the nature of truth? This was Pilate's question before Jesus, was it not?

What is truth?

The pursuit of that question will be the endeavor of your life, but the good news is all the truth that matters is found in the book that God wrote. So as we begin to look at our passage this morning, we must ask not what does the culture say about truth, but rather are we growing up into Christ by his truth, or are we declining and stagnating in our faith?

Are we being conformed to Christ's image? That's why we're here on this earth, or are we being swept away by the violent currents of our post-truth world? The thing about truth is it never changes, and so when we start talking about progressing, we've misunderstood the definition of truth itself.

Are we going to be conformed to the image of Christ, or are we going to be ruled by our sinful passions that are brought about by the flesh? Are we going to allow ourselves to be molded into Jesus' image, or allow ourselves to be governed as this church by the whispers of Satan?

Well, we want to answer all those questions in the affirmative. We want to, in fact, be conformed and molded into Christ's image as the church, and that requires truth, and it requires you to believe and know the truth, and it requires you to speak that truth, and when we do that, we are actually growing up, or actually maturing.

A mature church is a church that is buried in the truth, loves the truth, promotes the.

Truth.

After all, God's people are to be pillars and supports of the truth. That's the definition of the church found in 1 Timothy 3, verse 15. Paul says to Timothy, but in case I am delayed, I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God.

So first of all, there is a way to conduct yourselves when you're in the household of God, and there's obviously, by implication, ways that you ought not conduct yourselves. But then he goes on, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of.

The truth.

So if what we're doing here is not absorbed in truth, not promoting truth, then we're not being the church, and we're certainly not growing into maturation, doctrinally. And so here, as we see in Ephesians chapter 4, Paul is going to present us with a profound vision of what it looks like to be matured doctrinally, right?

Last week, we looked at what doctrinal maturation looks like in terms of why it's important and how doctrinal immaturity really tanks us. But today, we're going to get a positive view, as it were, of what it looks like to actually grow up, to actually be a mature church.

And so he's going to implore us to speak the truth in love, emphasizing that our growth in doctrine, in truth, is both essential and, if you're paying attention, transformative. And so as you look at verse 15, the first thing that I want you to note is the means of doctrinal maturation.

The means of doctrinal maturation. Now in some ways, I've let the cat out of the bag with the introduction, and what I mean by that is we're very keyed in already to what the means of, or the road to, or the path of doctrinal maturation is.

It is, if you look with me here at verse 15, speaking the truth in love. Speaking the truth in love. Now that's an interesting sentence, and the reason that's an interesting sentence is because in the world that we live in today, as I've already stated, truth is not all that important.

Truth is seen as a relative thing, subjective in nature. Well, what's true for you may not be true for me, and what's true of me may not, in fact, be true for you. Well, we know that that is illogical to its core.

What's true for me is true for everyone else, and what's true for you is true for me. To say otherwise would actually be to negate truth itself. Truth is literally that thing which objectively tells us what reality looks like.

But there's a modifier here in love. So if we want to be a mature church, if we want to grow up, we need to make sure that we are, in fact, speaking the truth to one another. That's the most essential thing to consider, but we need to do it in love.

This is the right way to conduct yourself in the household of God. To do it any other way other than loving would be to disobey the Lord Jesus, and it would be to essentially degrade our maturation inside the church.

So we must anchor ourselves, if we want to be helpful, in the reality that there is a truth and that that truth is the Word of God, and we must be firmly, firmly anchored in.

The bedrock of it.

Now, as is true in all letters, there is false teachers always looking to tear down the doctrine and the truth that has been built. If you've been here for our evening service as we walk through 2 Timothy, you will know that he was the pastor of the church in Ephesus, or the pastor overseeing multiple locations over many churches in Ephesus.

And there was threat of doctrinal immaturity in the church, as well as false teachers flooding.

The church.

And when Paul here is telling Timothy that the body is to speak the truth in love, what he's doing, essentially, is laying out a two-fold contrast with the false teachers that were running rampant in his day.

The latter, those who were essentially presenting false doctrine in a deceptive manner, were doing so, well, deceptively. They were deceived, and they were deceiving. Now, if those people that Paul was speaking about in 2 Timothy, whether or not those are the same people spoken about, or if it was even a thought in Paul's mind at this time, is somewhat unknown, but they could have been the same.

And if they weren't, certainly there was false teachers anyhow. But the other part of the contrast here is, over against this, God's people are to grow through proclaiming the truth in love. You see, we don't grow in maturity in this church by deceiving one another and by withholding the truth lovingly from anyone.

We must be the opposite, in other words, of a false teacher. So we need to understand, when we speak the truth in love, that there is an absolute authority behind this word, truth. Now this word, truth, in the Greek, is the word aletheia.

And what it does is it signifies, well, truth. But more than that, if I want to get more specific about it, it's not just speaking about facts or factual correctness, although it's not less than that, but it's a truthfulness that is grounded in the faithfulness of God, the faithfulness of his character, because God speaks truth.

Now one of the things that you need to understand at the outset here, truth is not a God to be worshiped. Truth is not something that we come here to worship. Truth is that thing which we utilize to grow.

And it's the thing that we rest in, because it's true. But Jesus Christ embodies the truth. He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And so if it comes from Jesus' mouth, out of his faithful mouth, then we ought to take it seriously.

We're not about worshiping truth, we're about worshiping the man who is truth, who embodies truth, and who shows us the truth. In an age where subjective truths abound, we must reaffirm that Jesus, the truth, the truth speaker, the truth preacher, the embodiment of truth, as well as God's word, that they stand in absolute authority in our lives.

And what you need to understand is that speaking the truth in love, in this context, is not specifically speaking about truth in general. And the reason that you need to understand that is because not everybody needs to hear everything that you're thinking that's true.

They need to hear certain truths. In the flow of context, the apostle is not exhorting his readers, in other words, to truthfulness in general, or speaking quote-unquote honestly with each other, however appropriate and important that might be.

Rather in the flow of context, when we're speaking about the faith, the content of the faith, that we're being built up in the faith, and all of these sorts of things, it's important to note that he wants all, including us by extension, of the Ephesians to be members of a quote-unquote confessing church, a truth-believing and truth-promoting church with the content of their testimony being, and I quote, the word of truth.

We saw this in Ephesians chapter 1, the gospel of their salvation. Chapter 1 verse 13. If you look with me, just so you don't take my word for it, it says here in him, verse 13 of chapter 1, and Jesus, you also, after listening to the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed, you were sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise.

Now, are there going to be times when you need to tell people some true things that have nothing to do with biblical doctrine?

Of course.

However, walking around with your chest poked out, looking to be the truth police in every single situation is not a sign of spiritual maturity, but a sign of spiritual immaturity. It's not a sign of doctrinal maturity, but a sign of doctrinal immaturity.

God's people need to be able to let some things go and let love cover a multitude of offenses, which we'll get to here momentarily. But you must understand that truth must be said nonetheless. But hey, a dress is a little tight on you, or, you know, it looks like you really caked on those pounds, or, you know, your car needs a car wash, or, I mean, you can keep going.

Down.

It's like, that's not what Paul's talking about here. Every time you notice something, it's not your job to necessarily go tell everyone that because we're just a truth-telling church. No, this is what it's saying is what's more important than all of that is the truth of God's word primarily as it pertains to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It's how you're sanctified and how you're formed. This is how you ought to conduct yourselves according to this chapter and this verse, according to what God has revealed already. Not about some vision that I've actually come to understand, or that I've been downloaded from the Lord.

I thought it was a little bit funny. Just a second ago, Pastor Corey said, when someone stands up here and says, thus says the Lord, and I know what he meant by that, and I agree largely with what he's saying, but the reality is the only thing that we should be doing in this church, the only thing that I am attempting to do in this church is to essentially say, thus the Lord has already said, now pay attention to it.

Many of us, actually all of us, don't need a new revelation from the Lord. We just need to learn how to love and obey the revelation he has already given us. That's one of the reasons that all of this talk of weird spirituality and continuationism and so on and so forth is so dangerous, because it pulls you away from the thing that God is actually using to save and sanctify his people and fixing their eyes on other things.

And the devil loves it. In fact, the parallel passage to this very passage, spoken about in Colossians chapter 2, verse 9, actually makes the same argument in relationship to this text. So I'm not even on a rabbit trail right now, though it may seem like it.

He says this in Colossians chapter 2, verse 19, but for the sake of context, let's look.

At 18.

Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize, speaking to the church in Colossae, by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, going into detail about visions that he has seen, being puffed up for nothing by his fleshly mind and not holding fast to the head.

We'll talk about this in a moment in our own text. From whom the entire body being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments grows with growth that is from God. So if we want to be a mature church, in other words, if we want to be a church that is growing up in doctrinal maturation, we need to take the words of Paul seriously, and that is what?

To reject silly things outside the word of God, like dreams and visions and silly myths and arguments, as Paul will say in 1 Timothy, about genealogies and different things like.

That.

That's why one of the weirdest podcasts to me in the entire world, and I feel like getting yelled at on the internet, so I'll say it. Haunted cosmos may be the most colossal waste of time ever on behalf of those men.

And if you're listening to it, probably yours as well. That's not to say that every once in a while you can't indulge into some weird thinking and see what other people are saying, I'm not saying that.

But I'm saying there's things that matter out there, and we should give our attention to those things. Whether Atlantis was real from a biblical perspective, not all that important. We need to be focused on the body.

We need to be focused on the head, right? And by the way, that's not to come down on every single thing that those men do all of the time, all right? That's just, you know, that podcast has never made any sense to me at all.

So the body, speaking truth to one another, is that very thing, that very thing that grows us to maturation. Here's what that means. Each and every single one of you is needed for the entire growth of this church and maturation.

And every single one of you, every single one of you is more important than any dream or vision that some huckster has said that he received. Because you are the plan for maturing this church. You are the plan for maturing this church, and you do it by speaking the truth.

Now, you get that truth, as I have said, from the Bible, because the Bible claims to be the absolute authority of truth. It is the truth that gets to judge all other truth claims. Every word comes from God, right?

2 Timothy chapter 3, verse 16 and 17. It is God-breathed, and it is self-attesting, it is prophetically fulfilled, and it is unified in its message. It is unchanging, it is unwavering, and it is more than reliable.

If we're going to be a mature church, we have to know and promote the truth. Children, would you look at me? Here's why truth is so important. I want you to understand this. Do you guys know what a lighthouse is?

A lighthouse, it's a tower of sorts that either has a flame or a light of some kind off to the side of a shore that signals to ships in the ocean that they're about to hit the sand, they're about to get to land, right?

And the thing about lighthouses is they have to be made strong. They have to be firmly planted because the waves get really, really dangerous, and they get really high, and they hit against the shores and the lighthouse in such a way that it might break to pieces if it's not made with stone, if it's not made with all kinds of things that reinforce it because when the storm rages on the sea, it's maybe one of the most dangerous places you could ever be.

Maybe you guys know that if you've ever been to the ocean. It's strong. The current's strong. But here's the thing about those lighthouses. They guide the ships to safety amidst those treacherous waters.

So if a captain can see that lighthouse, even though that there is all this water rushing around them and they can't see very well, if they just see that light flickering, then it will lead them safely.

When we think about God's word, when we think about God's truth that he has given us, we need to think about it like a lighthouse in many ways. There are many other ways to think about it, but think about it like a lighthouse as you are journeying through the waters of this life as you're growing up.

See it as the guiding light, if you will, that illuminates the path before you, that shows you where to go. Does that make sense? The truth is, sounds interesting, is our lighthouse. And it's so wonderful.

And so when we have interactions with one another, let the word of God and biblical truth be ever on our lips. And in order to do that, we must regularly study and meditate on God's word to ensure our understanding is accurate.

Truth formed in your own mind might be true, but it might not be true. There are people who make really long, complicated arguments about things in the Bible that simply are not true. And so you study, you study, you study, and then you look at history and you look at those men who have studied and study, and you go back as far as you can go.

Because here's the deal. The Holy Spirit did not show up in 2024. He's been working throughout his church for a very long time, and there have been many men who have helped us understand what the Bible teaches.

This is why, for instance, in 1 Peter 3, verse 15, it tells us that we are to be prepared to provide biblical reasoning for our positions, right? So I have no problem if you disagree with something that I say.

I might be wrong. I work really hard not to be wrong, but if you want to talk to me about it, that's fine. But don't come up to me after the service or don't try to get ahold of me during the week and say, I don't agree with that pastor.

And I go, okay, why? And you go, well, because it just doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound good. I don't care about that. I don't care about that at all. If you're going to disagree with something that I have said, that I've made a biblical argument for, then you must have a biblical argument as well.

And it must be rooted in the truth of God's word. In 1 Peter 3, verse 15, Peter says, sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Set aside the Lord as holy in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you.

Yet, with gentleness and fear, gentleness and fear, and gentleness, you could say even in love, which we'll get to in a minute, although there is a slight difference, but being gentle nonetheless, gentleness is part of being loving.

And fear, fear of who? Those people you're talking to, you're giving a defense to? No, of God. God governs the way in which you essentially make a biblical reasoned argument. So you set Jesus aside as holy, not set him aside, but he's sanctified, right?

As holy. You recognize Jesus as holy in your hearts? You fear God, and you're ready with the truth of God's word to answer people with gentleness. Gentleness. What this teaches us, and what the next phrase is going to teach us, is that truth is not a weapon, in other words, to bludgeon people over the head with.

It's a loving, loving invitation into reality. When you're speaking truth, you're trying to get people to come to grips with the truth that they, in their sinful disposition, suppress in unrighteousness.

And so how do you do that? Well, Paul tells us by mandating bold love. Look with me again in our verse. He says in chapter 4, verse 15, continuing on, but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head.

So love is the way in which we do the truth telling. Now I said last week, and it bears repeating. It's not an either or kind of a thing. It's not some days you're going to choose to be truthful, and some days you're going to be more loving.

No, no, no.

You're always to be speaking the truth to one another, and you're always to be doing it, and I'm always to be doing it in a way that is loving. And if we do not do that, then we are failing, and we are not honoring our Lord Jesus Christ, and we certainly are not being a cog in the wheel of maturation.

Now this love spoken about here, the word of agape in the Greek, is not necessarily the love spoken about, for instance, on Valentine's Day. It's not sentimental. It's not gushy. It's not weak. It's not governed, in other words, by the way in which we feel it is actually bold.

It is bold, and it is self-sacrificial in nature. It is other people focused. It's not about how you feel. It's about how you love. It's not about how you feel. It's how you, in other words, display love to make that more clarifying.

In other words, this type of love is more like a verb. It is rooted in action, and we see this love exemplified in our Lord Jesus Christ when.

He went to the cross, right?

In John 3, 16, maybe the most famous Bible verse of all time, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever might believe in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Love is not weak.

It is bold.

It is self-sacrificial. And as we think about the cultural context of Ephesus, and even the cultural context that we exist in that is steeped in paganism and immorality, it's a bold thing to demand such love, right?

Because in our culture nowadays, and it was this way back then, right? There's nothing new under the sun. Let's not think too highly of our progressiveness. The reality is love is like just letting people do what they want, right?

People are engaged in homosexual relationships. Ah, it's none of my business. People are mutilating and abusing children and giving them hormone blockers and changing, changers. Ah, it's none of my business.

If we love them, we're just going to let them do what they want. They reject God. That's okay. That doesn't affect us. I mean, we still believe in God, right? Yeah, okay, you know? And where does that lead us?

Well, as a culture, it leads us to a place where, and I hope this video is real. If not, I'm engaging in some sort of, you know, dissemination of non-truth. But I did a bunch of research, and it seems to be true, but there is a debate as to whether or not it is.

But I guess I should just say it. Kamala Harris, which I don't usually use, you know, current events. But I think this one bears repeating, because if it actually isn't true that it was said, oh, it's most certainly her heart, right?

And apparently, at her rally the other day, someone yelled out, Christ is Lord. And she very quickly quipped something to the effect of, I think you're at the wrong rally. I think you're at the wrong rally.

And everybody stood up and cheered, and, you know, she laughed and cackled. Gosh, I was just telling Lacey the other day, that's probably the first time, actually, it is the first time in the history of the United States that a candidate did not even or at least pretend to be a Christian.

The tide is turning. The tide is turning. And the answer is not, well, we'll just love them, i .e., the way our culture defines it, leave them alone and let them do them. And in the church, the same thing happens.

If we just let everybody do them all the time, just do you, bro, then we're going to have a church that is like daycare for children. And everybody's just going to be running around, fighting and arguing with one another, disrespecting one another, hating the truth, being argumentative for no reason.

These churches abound everywhere. But we want to be a mature church, and so we need to make sure that we're speaking the truth in a way that is loving, in a way that is bold, self-sacrificial, that seeks the other person's good.

Right?

You're not confronting someone, which, by the way, that's what happens when you're speaking the truth in love. You're confronting. You're not doing it because they annoy you. You're not doing it because they make you angry.

You're not doing it because you would just rather them, you know, not mix those colors in their suits or park in your parking spot or whatever the case may be.

Right?

But because you know if you don't say anything, they are going to not be growing in sanctification, but rather you should say it so that they can grow in sanctification.

Right?

And this means you should be inviting the same thing back to yourself. So love, then, is not acceptance, but rather it's a bold, self-sacrificial, and gentle— I'll use that word gentle—confrontation.

Because true love does not turn a blind eye to sin. It is the love that seeks the highest good of others. This is why parents, if you do not discipline your children, you don't love your children, you hate your children.

Because if you do not discipline your children, then they will walk out into this world and they will act like imbeciles. They will not be a productive member of society. They will destroy, by their sin, everything that they touch.

And if you do not correct that in them first, tell me how that is loving to send them into the world like that. To send them to the church like that. In the same way, we must look at each other and say, yeah, we must be willing to confront in love gently and not turn a blind eye to sin, to untruth, but rather to engage in it.

Let me ask you this question. Are you, each of you, willing to confront sin in the lives of others? And are you willing to have sin confronted in your own life, believing untrue things? And that's at the heart of why we sin.

We believe wrong things often. If we're converted, or we entertain them, or we know them intellectually but not affectionately and experimentally, as the Puritans would call it, in a world of compromise and this idea of self-love accepting love, that we must be a voice of truth that speaks boldly and lovingly calling one another to holiness.

So in other words, never shy away from sharing God's truth. But when you do it, make sure that your hearts are filled with love and not disdain for the person across the way from you. Act like a surgeon and not like a serial killer if I'm going to continue to carry this imagery on through this part of the sermon series.

You're not, in other words, to get out a machete and start hacking, but a very fine, thought-out tool that has been given a proper cleaning, that has had, you know, anesthesia maybe put in its place prior.

Right?

Because we're brothers and sisters. We love one another. We've been bought by the blood of Jesus Christ. And we need to have these two things working in tandem. Two sides of the balancing scale, as it were, because truth without love is just simply brutality.

And love without truth is hypocrisy. Because God is love. And he's also truth to say that truth can exist without love is to deny reality itself. I want to read for you a quote a friend of mine named Jeff posted on Facebook the other day.

We're a confessional church, so truth is very important to us. But he said something I thought was very profound, because sometimes confessional people can be the most annoying people, because they're nitpicking over every single little word that you might be saying and lack grace and love when they should be doing that and speaking.

The truth.

And he said this, and this is interesting, a fundamentalist spirit in confessionalism. Now, that sentence will keep you busy for a couple days, but it's true. There are fundamentalist-minded confessionalists.

I don't have time to get into that, but it's true. He says a fundamentalist spirit in confessionalism sees others as a threat until they strictly subscribe, and then some, to our confession. To our confession.

But a gracious, or we could say a loving, in light of our text here, right? Spirit sees a confession as something for beloved, right? Those whom we love, saints, to grow up into at different speeds over long periods of time.

Right?

Not everybody is going to know what every chapter of the 1689 says. Some people don't have time to study their Bible with everything they got going on in life and also become a subject matter expert in 16th and 17th century.

Baptist, you know,.

Writings.

So we must be patient as well as being loving. In other words, what I'm saying is not every situation is Protestant Reformation-level importance, right? Like there's some times where we have to shake the world because we want the truth to be known.

Especially as it pertains to the truth being spoken about here. The gospel, right? This is what happens, as we will celebrate later this month, or what happened rather is justification by faith alone had a knife to its throat by the Roman Catholic Church as well as Sola Scriptura.

And the reality is that needed to be dealt with. Somebody having a weird view about who the Nephilim are is not that and so on and so forth. So love must be the motivation and the manner of truth speaking.

And this involves praying even before you get to that conversation for God's love to fill your heart and their heart before engaging in a potentially difficult situation. Consider the other person's perspective, even if it's not like yours.

Maybe their emotional state, maybe yours, before coming to this idea that your truth needed to be spoken about, right? As Paul has said in 1 Corinthians 9, verse 22, To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak.