Walking Worthy - Brandon Scalf

Heritage Church Tulsa

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In the year 1666, a pastor by the name of William Mompesson lost 267 of his 350 congregants, including his wife, to the infamous plague.

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Confronted with the frailty of his own health, he, of that same year, wrote a letter of exhortation to one of his surviving disciples.

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And in that letter, he said this, Dear Sir, let your dying chaplain recommend this truth to you and your family, that no happiness, no solid comfort, can be found in this veil of tears, of course, talking about life, like living a pious life.

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And pray ever to retain this rule, never to do anything upon which you dare not first ask the blessing of God upon the success thereof.

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Essentially what he was saying in this exhortation was this, don't do anything with your life, with your hands, with your feet, that God would not ultimately approve of or bless.

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And if you do that, your life will be filled with happiness and comfort, regardless of what's happening around you.

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You see, what Pastor Mompesson understood was the same thing that the

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Apostle Paul understood when he penned this letter to the

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Ephesians, namely, that our life lived before God matters. Holiness matters.

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That acting like, sounding like, and looking like a Christian in this world absolutely matters.

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What you do with your thoughts, what you do with your heart, and what you do with your hands matters.

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It matters individually as the Lord Jesus Christ is sanctifying us progressively over time.

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It helps us to see where we've been so we know where we're going. But it also helps us to ascertain whether or not we really even know the

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Lord Jesus at all. And it helps us corporately. It helps us to dwell alongside one another when we take holiness and sin seriously, when we take seriously the word of God as it pertains to living a holy life.

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And contextually, that is actually what is being talked about in Ephesians chapter 4, really all of it, but 1 through 6 specifically, that corporately we are to care about living like Christians, specifically because it helps us to attain unity inside the church.

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After all, this is why the famous John Trapp has said, to break unity in the church is to cut asunder the very veins and sinews of the mystical body of Christ.

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If you remember in chapter 3 of Ephesians, in verse 21,

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Paul ends with a doxology and in that doxology he says, to him, speaking of God, be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever, amen.

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And the question that should be at the forefront of our thought is how is that accomplished?

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How do we bring glory to the church and in Christ Jesus?

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Well, if you haven't already heard me hinting at it, let me say it quite explicitly. It's by being unified.

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We have been brought into a body. That is one of the things that Paul has been waxing eloquent on up to this point.

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He starts off in Ephesians 1 with telling us how Christians are made, individual Christians, namely that they are predestined before the foundation of the world, chosen by God to be holy and blameless and they are chased down by the

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Holy Spirit and given a new heart that beats red with blood for him. They are forgiven of their sins because of the finished work of Jesus Christ and more than that, they are brought into a family of believers being adopted as sons and daughters of the

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Most High God and they are placed in a building, not just this building but a metaphorical building with the prophets being some of the building blocks, the foundation, more specifically with Jesus Christ being the cornerstone.

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And as part of that building, we are also a body and a body has many members and it functions in ways that benefits one another.

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But in order for a body to bring glory to its head, the members must work and they must be unified.

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Therefore, and I believe this is the point being made by Paul himself. If we want a unified church, which we do, we must have and we must labor to see individuals in our church who are consumed with walking worthy and are not concerned with walking away and not concerned or not giving themselves over to walking aimlessly or complacently or crookedly.

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We need people who believe that ground zero for the church's unification is holiness.

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In other words, step number one in maintaining unity in the church is precisely acting like a

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Christian. So do we want to bring glory to Christ and to the church?

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Then we must be worthy walkers. Or, as Paul is going to challenge us to think through, or to walk away.

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So if you would please stand with me for the reading and honoring of God's holy infallible and all sufficient word.

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As I said, we will look at verses one through six, but verse one primarily.

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This is the word of the Lord. 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.

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There is one body and one spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling, one

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Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

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The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of God endures forever. Amen. Amen. Go ahead and have a seat.

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As we look at our text, as we look at verse one, the first thing that I want you to note is the exhorter.

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The exhorter. And of course I'm speaking here of the apostle Paul. The apostle Paul is the one obviously writing this letter.

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We learned this from Ephesians 1 .1, where he says, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. But we know it even more so as he continues on by identifying himself as the prisoner in the

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Lord. And this is not the first time that Paul has identified himself with his imprisonment.

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If you remember, for example, in Ephesians chapter three, verse one, he tells us that he is the prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of the

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Gentiles. That is that he is in fact there because Christ Jesus has placed him there.

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He is not a victim of Rome. Rome did not have him laying in a dungeon because they have all sovereignty.

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Paul looked at his situation. He looked at being in prison. He looked at the calling with which he was called and why he was there.

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And he concluded, as we all should conclude in any hardship and situation that we find ourselves in, that this is of the

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Lord's doing. This is not anyone else's. That my chains are the chains that the

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Lord has put on my feet and arms. Rome has not holding me.

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The Lord Jesus is holding me, the Messiah, the one who has sent me to proclaim the message of good news to the people who are far from him.

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But here there is a slight twist. Namely, he is not saying in repetitive nature that he is a prisoner of Christ Jesus.

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Here he says he is a prisoner in the Lord. He is a prisoner in the

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Lord. So he's not capitalizing anymore on this idea of providence. That he is there for the sake of Christ and for his purposes and that God has in Christ sovereignly placed him there.

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No, there is a different motivator. There is a different, you could say, modifier in the

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Lord. And what this does for us is it shows us, because remember,

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Paul is purposeful, he is precise, and what he is saying here is particularly relevant to where he is headed.

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This idea here both sums up his union with Christ and also what he thinks about Jesus.

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What he thinks about Jesus, firstly, is union with Christ. Everybody who is saved is in Christ or in the

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Lord. Remember just in the first verses 3 -14, the longest run -on sentence in Greek antiquity, this term or phrase in Christ is used 11 times just in those few verses.

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That averages out to about once per verse. This idea of union with Christ pervades everything that Paul does and thinks.

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It's what helps him form his theology, forms his theology of the church. And here he continues on with this same bit of imagery.

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He is not just there because of the Lord, he is there in the Lord. But also, he is literally about to make the argument that we are to walk worthy.

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In other words, we are to be holy, but we'll get to that in a minute. And what he wants us to understand is this, namely that Jesus is not just a blessing dispenser, but he is

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Lord. We have looked at the book of Ephesians for nearly a year and a half, off and on.

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And we have seen nothing but blessing as if it was a faucet coming from heaven that God had literally opened and it was just pouring forth with blessing.

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But blessing is not the end of the road. It's not just blessing and then stop.

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It's not just God choosing to save and then saying you're saved and then leaving you and then seeing you in heaven one day.

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No, it goes much further than that. And it goes to this end, namely that Jesus Christ gets to tell us what to do since he has saved us from heaven, or from hell rather, and has made way for us to heaven.

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And so we come to the first word, though not the first word in the Greek, but the first word in our

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English translations, therefore, therefore, therefore

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I, the prisoner in the Lord exhorts you. This therefore is not something to skip over.

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In fact, we talked about this last week in God's providence. We looked at Romans chapter 12, verse 1 and 2.

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And in Romans chapter 12, verse 1 and 2, it's almost an identical phrasing.

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And also the way in which this is laid out, it's almost identical as well as a book.

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He says here, therefore, and what that does to for us is it, if you want, if you need some reminding, it signals us to a transition in the argument being made.

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Specifically, it's splitting the book down the middle. It's splitting the book between doctrine and duty, between proclamation and application, between belief and behavior.

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And so oftentimes when you preach through or you look at or you read or you study in depth

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Ephesians, you come to find that there's a whole lot about God and what he has done and not very much about what you are supposed to do in light of that.

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And the reason for that is because Paul wants to get you enamored with who God is and what he has done in Christ.

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And he wants to get you saturated and what you are to believe and love about Jesus.

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Because that really is the fuel for the Christian life. You can't do anything that God has called you to do if you are not motivated, as Romans 12 said, if you remember, by the mercies of God.

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And so from here on out, this really is a transition and the letter, a transition that is signaling to us that we are now about to get into the land of application.

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Chapters 1 -3, in other words, is how Christians are made and how the church is formed. And in chapters 4 -6 are how the church is to live out its calling.

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That's not to say that we are leaving doctrine behind, and that's not even to say that there was no application, right, in the first three chapters.

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It's just to say that this is the overarching thrust of the letters.

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In fact, we're going to see as we progress through this verse that these things are linked in an inseparable way.

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And so what it's going to show us is that if we are going to take this letter seriously, we need to understand what has been so that we know where to go.

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For a moment there, that Kamala Harris thing that gets repeated popped in my head.

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That's why the awkward pause existed there. I was like, you're not actually about to accidentally say that, are you?

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Anyway, it means that we are to live doxologically. We are to live doxologically.

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Our holiness, our pursuit of the worthy walk is one that is doxological in nature.

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In other words, our praise is that thing which drives us to action.

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It's not the other way around. It also signals to us, as far as it concerns

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Paul's theology, his radical trust in God's word. You notice he's pointing and connecting back to truth.

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He's not saying you need to live this way because I'm an apostle. And I said so. He's not saying because I'm your pastor, you need to do what

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I say. What he's saying is because of all of this beautiful truth I have said, because of what scripture has revealed, you ought to live this way.

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You ought to walk worthily. He's not resting on his laurels or his apostolic authority, but on heaven's blessings itself.

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So what Paul is doing for us by using this word, therefore, as insignificant as may seem, is he's helping us to look forward by telling us to look upward.

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Children, would you look at me for just a second? As we look through the book of Ephesians, there's going to be a lot of things that Paul is going to tell us that have to do with how we behave.

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But we can't behave the way that he tells us to behave if we don't believe what he has told us to believe before we got here.

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So we must make sure that we are living in the first three chapters of Ephesians, believing who

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Jesus is and what he has done before we can actually do what it is he has called us to do.

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The second thing that I want you to see in this text is the exhortation. So we saw the exhorter, that is

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Paul, the prisoner in the Lord, and we have seen what he is aiming at. Now let's look at the exhortation itself.

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He says, therefore, I, the prisoner of the Lord, exhort you.

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Exhort you. Now what's interesting about this word exhort is that it's actually the first word in the

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Greek. It starts off with the word exhort. Now we mix it up so that we can make it make sense in English, but there was a reason that Paul put exhort first, and that was because the most important thing that he wanted to get across in this moment was that you need to do what he's saying, or rather what the

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Ephesians need to do and us by extension. This is an urgent and authoritative command.

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You remember me saying last week when we looked at Romans chapter 12 that it is something that is like pleading.

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It's begging. It's summoning someone to action. It means to implore.

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And as I dug a little bit deeper this week, I found some uses of the word in the

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Greek and dictionaries that would also add this nuance.

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To force someone along, to push or hasten toward.

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So what Paul is doing here is he's not only begging and pleading pastorally for his people to hear what he's saying and to do what he's about to tell them to do.

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He's doing it in such a way that he is shoving them toward action.

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Pushing them, as it were, verbally. Helping them by shoving them, in other words.

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And this is important because there are implications here that begin to arise when you see this important nuance, when you see this idea of exhorting.

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Namely, that the Christian life, the worthy walk is one that is not passive, but active and proactive, right?

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Because if it was something that we could just sit back and not really worry about, if it's something that God was just going to do in us and it required no working and willing of us at all, then it wouldn't make sense for Paul to urge people to live holier, right?

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But as soon as you start talking about holiness or telling people they need to live holy, then all of a sudden the legalist police pop up and they start saying, well, no, no, no, no, no.

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Jesus is savior. But as soon as you start talking about all that lordship stuff, you've betrayed the gospel.

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Really? Well, Paul seems to disagree. And Paul seems to disagree by using a word as simple as therefore.

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And I exhort. They are absolutely linked.

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But of course, we need to get law and gospel and its proper order and context.

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And that is precisely what he is doing here. But the thing that you must be aware of,

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Christian, as we are talking about walking worthy, we are talking about being Christian and doing it well.

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We're talking about living in light of what God has done. It will require of you blood, sweat, and tears.

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It will require of you a certain amount of grit. Yes, the spirit is wooing and winning.

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Yes, the spirit is working and applying. Yes, the spirit is, as he has promised to be, a helper.

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But he helps you to actually mortify sin. He's not there to help you make light of it and to excuse it and to walk the other way.

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Why? Because the fruit of a life, the fruit of a life that is marked by grace is a pursuit of holiness as we are exhorted by the scriptures, by the

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Lord himself, and by our church members as we strive for unity.

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But not only is he exhorting, pleading, begging, pushing, and hastening, he is also doing that to everyone.

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Look with me here. He says, exhort you. Now, this is you plural.

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He's not speaking to an individual. He's speaking to y 'all. That is everybody who calls themselves a

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Christian in the Ephesian church and every one of us. What that means very practically is that there is not one of us who is exempt from this pursuit of the worthy walk.

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There is not one who doesn't need exhorted. There is not one of us who can do this thing on our own or not one of us that doesn't need the church.

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And so, thirdly, I want you to see the expectation.

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We've looked at the exhorter. We've looked at the exhortation, that is to walk worthy.

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But let's drill down on what that actually means. This exhortation is one that is exhorting us to walk worthy of the calling with which we have been called.

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But what does it mean to walk worthy? Well, let's take this one at a time. The word walk.

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The word walk here signals to us a command, which is interesting because it's the second command that is found in the book of Ephesians.

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Now, there's about to be a lot of commands, but there's been far more pieces of doctrine than there has been commands.

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Does anybody remember what the first command was? The first command was found in 2 .11,

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where we are told, or rather, the Gentiles were told in the Ephesian church to remember.

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To remember that they used to be alienated from God's people, that they used to be alienated from God, that they used to be far off, but they have, by the blood of Jesus Christ, been brought near.

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So the first way that we live the Christian life is to remember, reflect upon that which has been done for us.

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The second thing is to literally, in light of that remembering, to walk worthy.

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And here's the reality. A unified body has a walk. It has a way of carrying itself, in other words.

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Now, this word walk is used in the Bible a myriad of different ways. For example, the Bible speaks of walking in this reality, that we are to walk in a newness of life.

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That's one way the Bible tells us to walk. Another way is to walk by faith and not by sight.

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And the third is to walk in spirit. And of course, there are other ways in which this is talked about as well.

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But it is used all over the place in the book of Ephesians. For example, if you look at Ephesians chapter 2 verse 2, it says that we, apart from Christ, formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

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And again in 2 .10, Paul says, We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which

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God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.

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We see it obviously here in verse 1 of chapter 4, but it also is seen in 4 .17.

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Therefore, this I say and testify that in the Lord that you walk no longer, just as the Gentiles also walk in the futility of their mind.

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And then we're going to see it as we get into chapters 5 and 6, specifically verse 2.

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It tells us in chapter 5 that we are to walk in love just as Christ also loved us.

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In 5 .8, it says that we formerly were darkness, but now are in light in the

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Lord and we are to walk as children of light. And then, of course, if you look at 5 .15,

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Paul says, Therefore, look carefully how you walk, and that is not as unwise, but as wise.

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So if we are to understand the rest of this letter, or even the Bible for that matter, we have to understand what the

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Bible means or what Paul means when he uses the word walk. Well, very simply, the word here, walk, is speaking of one's conduct of life.

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That is his lifestyle, the things he values, the things he loves, the way in which he lives his life in light of those things.

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And so to walk literally means to live. To live a life, as we will see, that is worthy of the calling with which we've been called.

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So if you are doing walk worthy, it means you are to live worthy. What makes this even more interesting is this particular word is in the

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Greek, in the ingressive aorist tense. Now, I know that means nothing to most of you, and quite honestly, you could probably live without knowing that.

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However, it is important because what is actually going on here is this word walk, or you could even translate live, although I like the word walk.

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It's more biblical, and it gets at kind of this imagery that I think Paul is getting at, is it's helping us to understand that this walk is a new walk.

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In other words, what this tense does is it helps us to understand that this walk is one that is a change in the way that you once previously walked.

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It is behavior that is different than behavior that you had prior to, namely, knowing

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Christ Jesus. In other words, it is how you act as a

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Christian. Now that you are a part of a new family, now that you're under a new roof, now that there are new rules, you must walk in them, and you must represent that family now that you bear the family name.

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And you should literally be absorbed in the thought processes of what it means to follow

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Jesus Christ. You should look, sound like, act like, and smell like someone who has been purchased by Jesus Christ.

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Now, this idea of walking is actually something that the world understands quite well.

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And what do I mean by that? Well, here's what I mean. I mean, for example, the army, the military.

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When you join the military, a lot of your history, in terms of people caring about it, gone.

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You get a new uniform. They give you a new vocabulary. And when you are in uniform, they remind you all of the time to maintain your military bearing because when you speak in that uniform, you speak for the entire

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United States military. And so there is a uniform way of acting and speaking and behaving when you decide that you're going to be in the military.

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But even if you look at the LGBTQ plus community and you go out to the gay pride festivals and parades or some democratic rally or whatever the case may be, every single one of those people, generally speaking, are wearing the same uniform.

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They're wearing their shirts with the rainbow, their different colors, their faces are painted. Generally, they're wearing sexually explicit things.

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Why? Because they understand that when they have a, you could say, a body to belong to, although it's not the body, it's not the

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Christian body, it's obviously not the church, but a group of people. When they belong to a group of people, it has a set of norms.

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And they do not deviate from that, generally speaking, because they understand that they have been given a new way of walking and talking and behaving because they belong to something that they believe is much bigger than themselves.

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This is the idea that Paul is trying to get across here, that you now belong to Christ and therefore you ought to walk, you ought to live your life in such a way that it points back to the reality that you belong to Jesus Christ himself, both individually and corporately, both you and your home by yourself and as a church body.

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You are to walk. It is something that is active. It is something that you do.

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I want you to see this repetitive thing happening here where Paul is continually showing us that the

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Christian life, especially as it pertains to pursuing holiness, is one that is active.

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It is not stagnant. It is not something that you are going backwards in. It is something that you are continually going forwards in.

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The second thing that I want you to see as we're looking here at the expectation, that is what he has for us, what he wants us to do, namely walk worthy, is this idea of calling.

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Now, I'm going to skip over this word worthy and that's going to make sense, I hope, as we look back upon that.

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He says here that we are to walk worthy of the calling with which we have been called.

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This word calling is used explicitly three times in the book of Ephesians.

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The foremost, of course, being 118, where Paul prays for the believers of Ephesus and us by extension that we would have our spiritual eyeballs enlightened and that we would know the hope of our calling.

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But the idea is also everywhere in the Bible. This word calling pops up in a myriad of different places.

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Some of which are 2 Peter, verses, verse three of chapter one, saying that his divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness through the full knowledge of him who has called us by his own glory and excellence.

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So if we're going to think about calling, one of the things that we're thinking about here is this idea of what

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God has done by his grace. Namely, that every Christian has been bought, sought, and brought by Jesus Christ to God the

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Father. And this is done after hearing the gospel.

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The very thing that Paul prayed for is that we would understand that hope that is found in that which

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God has done in Christ. It means also to be selected or appointed to a thing.

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And of course, this is often used when thinking about the doctrine of election, that God came after us.

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Right? Ephesians chapter one, verse three says that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

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And then verse four says that he chose us before him in the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before him.

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In second Thessalonians 2 .14, Paul says it was for this that he had called us through his gospel that they, speaking to the

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Thessalonians, would obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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Very simply, to be called means to be called out of something.

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To be called out of, as we looked at Ephesians chapter two, called out of the world, called out of darkness, called out of death, and called out of judgment.

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Right? This is the entirety of Ephesians chapter one, verses one, all the way through the end of chapter three.

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That literally, God has taken our lowly estate and our misery and flipped it on its head.

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And instead of being in the world and in darkness, destined for eternal death and judgment, he has given us, in his son, eternal life.

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He has given us a family to belong to. He has called us to be a body of believers and we ought to see the beauty in that.

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If that doesn't cause your heart to leap, you're not getting it. He's called you to a people when you were not a people.

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He's given you a family when you had no family. He's given you himself.

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In other words, the calling to which you have been called is the very essence of everything that has been found in the letter up to this point.

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Now, let's return back to the word worthy. Let's return back to the word worthy.

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Now that you have this calling in mind and what that is, you need to understand that you are to walk in such a way that it makes much of what

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Jesus Christ has done. And what I mean by that is this word worthy, if you look at it in the

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Greek, actually has the idea behind it of bringing up the other beam of a scale.

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Some translations even talk about it like the message, for example, not saying that's what you need to look into, of a balancing act.

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The idea of being worthy is living in a way that is equal to your calling.

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This is why it's so important to understand what your calling is and what God has done in Christ for you.

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Because how can you live equal to your calling if you don't know what your calling is?

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And so the idea that Paul is trying to get across here is it's like if you actually have, you know how Lady Justice has her scales and the scale weighs different things.

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He's trying to show you that you have doctrine on one side, you're calling on the other, and that's essentially what it is, right?

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It's doctrine, it's the stuff that informs you about what God has done to call you to himself.

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And the other one is your life. And what he's saying is the way you live ought to match what you believe.

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And what you believe ought to match how you live.

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In other words, your doctrine and your practice go together. They are not divorced from one another.

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We see this all over the place, 3 John 6 says, you will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God.

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Philippians 1 .27, only live your lives in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.

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Or in Colossians 1 .10, walk in a manner worthy of the Lord to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and multiplying in the full knowledge of God.

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So walking worthy is walking in such a way that your doctrine informs your practice and that they go together.

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In other words, you aren't to be a hypocrite. You aren't to say things with your mouth and deny them with your life.

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And one of the things that's most beautiful about this reality is this way of thinking about things, and it's the way that Paul is putting it across here, is it's ultimately the cure for both legalism and antinomianism.

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And you might be thinking, well, how is that possible? You're talking about doing stuff.

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Isn't that legalism? No, no, it's not. It's the cure for both legalism and antinomianism because of this.

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It crushes the arguments of legalism, namely that you must do and you must act like a

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Christian in order to be saved or to curry favor with God. Well, that can't be true because he has spent three chapters telling us about what

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God has done for us, and he's saying because of that, therefore, I now am telling you to live life in a way that is honoring to me and good for those around you.

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It's ultimately going to bring about a unity in the church that otherwise would not exist. So, as I said last week, it is as if, and it is, that these promises or indicatives are empowering these imperatives.

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However, it is also the cure for those who are antinomian, for those who think, well, if I just know the right things and believe the right things, then it really doesn't matter how

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I live my life. Well, that's wrong too. And that's wrong because grace in the heart produces obedience in life.

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When you have been thrust through with the sword of God's grace, then you can't help but bleed out everywhere with your life.

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Then you're going to do what God says because you believe what God says, and you're going to delight in doing so because you know what he gave to make sure that you had that in the first place.

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Charles Spurgeon has famously said on multiple occasions and in many different ways, that how can we not live for Christ?

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How can we live loving that sin which nailed him to the cross?

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You can't. You can't. So we

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Christians then are not to live walking with tilted scales.

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Now, this is hard for some people. This is hard for some people because some of us are wired to love theology.

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Some of us are wired to really care about what the Bible has to say. And we put off practicing what the

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Bible says because we have more doctrine to learn, more Greek words to get up underneath and so on and so forth.

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And that's helpful. But unless it's paired with practice, then really what you're engaging in is a type of Gnosticism.

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Because you're saying, yeah, the spiritual, the thinking of stuff is really good.

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But the physical and what I'm told to do, not really all that important. So it's not the same thing as Gnosticism, but it suffers from the same symptoms to the same heart posture.

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And so if you are a hearer and not a doer, you're more like a Gnostic than a Christian. On the other hand, if all you care about is application and all you care about is needing what to do, then you're actually kind of like the charismatic.

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What in the world do you mean by that? Because you prize experience over everything else.

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But what Paul is teaching us and what the Bible is very clear about is that biblical Christianity is not just about experience and it's not just about knowing doctrine.

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It's about both of them together forever. They're completely inseparable.

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Doctrine without practice leads to dead orthodoxy that is completely void of any sort of zeal or passion or desire to mortify sin.

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You know, a lot of people talk about theologians and their ivory towers. Well, there's a lot of ivory tower

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Christians sitting in the pews who have never read an academic book, who just want to think about what the

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Bible says and not actually do it. Now, correctness of thought or getting your doctrine right with no vitality and your spiritual life in Christ, no practice in other words, see what that does is that leads to aberrations.

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It gives you a false sense of security.

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It tells you to rely on yourself and not your God and you wind up going down the wrong paths and often engaging in types of legalism.

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And so these pitfalls happen on both sides.

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And we must understand that what we are to do is we are to live in the balance.

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Now, we have to be careful here. And we have to be careful here because people use balance wrongly in our world, especially as it pertains to theology.

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And they will say, well, we want to hang out in the gray or that's a gray area or, you know, we have to be well balanced.

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We have to make sure that we're not making the people on the right mad or we're not making people on the left mad and we're just staying right down the middle of the lane.

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No, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that if you are not practicing what you preach to yourself or to other people, then you're maybe not a

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Christian. Because Christians walk worthily and they walk worthily because they know what

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Christ has done for them. What Christ has done for them.

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And I want you to stop and I want you to consider that for a minute. I want you to think through that. And I want you to meditate on that.

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Why would I maybe care more about what I read than what I'm doing? Or why do

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I care more about what I'm doing than I'm reading? And maybe you might should think, I need to care about both of them.

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Now, generally speaking, especially in reformed churches, we have a lot less problems with people who do a lot and don't think about theology a lot.

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In reformed churches, we often have people who think about theology a lot and oftentimes don't apply it.

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And the reason for that is because we might be, right, stimulated by the intellectual exercise.

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But when we look at doctrine, especially from a reformed perspective, and we understand the very real truths that God sent his son to die for us, that we were elected before the foundation of the world, that we were called to him, and we are assured if we are in him that we are not falling away, then we isolate ourselves with this truth of doctrine.

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And we believe that truth, and we can oftentimes just hang out there.

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And it makes us feel safe. And we're not actually slaying our sin.

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We're not mortifying it. We're not vivifying. We're just kind of existing.

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But true belief works itself out in action. And if you keep falling on your face in the same sin over and over and over and over and over again, and you keep coming back to, well, well,

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Jesus, this, Jesus, this, Jesus, this. Well, you're pointed in the right direction.

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But are you using that as an exception clause? Or are you using that as fuel in the tank?

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Are you using, for example, Romans chapter 8? There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus as fuel to get on the horse and to slay that sin.

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Or are you using it as a, I guess we'll do it better next time. What Paul is saying here is, if we want to have a unified church, we have to have a church filled with people who believe the right stuff and do the right stuff and do it the right way with the right heart posture.

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You see what I'm saying? We need them also to be filled with humility and gentleness.

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They must be patient. They must bear with one another in love, which is very hard to do at times. They must be diligent to keep the unity of the

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Spirit and the bond of peace. Unity is bound up in the church.

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And then he makes that argument in verses four through six by saying that it's actually bound up in the Trinity.

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It always comes back to the Trinity. Yes and amen. Right? There's one body and one spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling, one

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Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all who is over all, through all, and in all.

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Unity is a big deal, which means holiness is a big deal, which means we as a church have to press into one another and we have to call each other out when we see sin.

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But not in a way that demonizes them, that points them back to the cross and causes them to sort out their salvation with fear and trembling.

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And you must do that yourself. That's what the Bible says. The Bible says you are to sort out your salvation with fear and trembling.

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And you do that by looking at what you believe and what you do. Not just what you do and not just what you believe.

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But both of them together. That's the Bible, friends. Lastly, I want you to see the exhilaration.

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The exhilaration. You see,

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Paul exhorts the Ephesian church and us by extension and me exhorting you now to walk worthy because he knows that God has given them the ability to do it.

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How exhilarating is that? It's not a mission that is failable if we are in Christ, right?

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Philippians 2 .13, Paul says, for it is God who is at work in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

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God says, I am responsible for your sanctification and it is me who is going to work in you and I am going to do it for my good pleasure.

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Paul says elsewhere, he says, I am confident of this very thing that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ.

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In other words, the higher the view we have of our calling and what Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross, absorbing the wrath of God on our behalf and bringing us into a body of people, the higher we will live.

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The higher we will live. So do you have these sins in your life that you can't seem to put to death?

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Well, if it's promised that God will be in us to work and to will, and it's been promised that he will finish his work in us and because he is exhorting us here to walk worthy, assuming that it can be done because we have been called to that hope which exists, then the question becomes, why am

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I doing what I'm doing? Is it because I don't know

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Jesus or is it not?

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Does your life preach the theology that you profess to believe? If not, why not?

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Does your life demonstrate your salvation? If not, why not? Do you apply as much as you study?

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That is, do you live as much as you read? Do you walk worthy?

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If not, why not? Because Jesus has purchased a worthy walk for each of his children who are in him.

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And that is the beauty and the promise of the gospel.

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And that's where we begin if we want a unified church. We begin by asking the hard questions, by exhorting one another to walk worthy of the calling with which we are called.