How to Kill a Church - Brandon Scalf

Heritage Church Tulsa

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According to the most recent statistics, about 4 ,500 churches die every single year.

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Now, in truth, some of those churches need to be closed. They are zombie churches operating in ways that are unfaithful to the

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Lord Jesus. But many of them are faithful churches in that they have leadership preaching the

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Bible, they have a biblical church government, they practice church discipline, and they teach verse by verse through the

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Holy Scriptures. And the reality is, a lot of these churches that close their doors are not merely or only closing because of moral failure in the leadership or leadership failures.

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Many of them are not closing their doors because of lack of funds coming in to keep the lights on.

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A majority, and I do mean a majority of the churches, are closing their doors, being put to death, because their congregations have been eaten alive by disputes, discord, and division.

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In other words, the reason that many churches throughout the year are closing their doors are because professing

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Christians have the tendency to stand opposed to one another and divide.

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And they divide in an attempt to protect their own personal territory, if you will, their own opinions, and ultimately, their own comfort.

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Sadly, this is not a new thing for Christ's bride. This is something that is talked about quite often in the

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New Testament. For example, in 1 Corinthians chapter one, verse 12, Paul, the very author of the letter that we have been examining, rebukes the church at Corinth for rallying behind certain preachers in their midst.

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They kind of did a type of hero worship that led them to say,

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I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas, and you know, the really spiritual,

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I am of Christ. And this hero worship drove them to form factions and there was tension created in the body, much drama exploded.

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And Paul, very aghast in the situation, says in the very next verse, has

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Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

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See here, Paul was pointing out that they had a unity that was purchased for them in Christ.

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And at the end of the day, the men who brought the message were largely insignificant. And to make that a point of tension within the church is very problematic.

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Instead of recognizing that God had gifted his people with men of different temperaments and different ways of communicating the truth, they decided to fight over the matter.

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But what Paul was very clear on in this letter, what Paul is going to show us today as we look at Ephesians chapter four, verses one through three, is that God hates division.

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He hates discord. And he has purchased for us, if you've been paying attention to the letter thus far, which we will rehearse momentarily, he has done a lot to make sure that we are unified by the sending of his son,

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Jesus Christ, and by the blood of his cross. But the thing that we must remember as we think about these things is though God hates discord, division, and so on,

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Satan loves it. He loves it. He loves to make us war with one another, whether that's over who your favorite preacher is at the church, or whether that's what things we buy, or that's what side of the stage the piano's on, or what community group looks like, and all of these sort of things.

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Satan loves it when we do that, because then he takes our eyes off the prize and the mission, and maybe he'll close the doors.

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The good news, however, is that we do not have to suffer the same fate as these churches who have closed their doors this year, and who will close their doors this year.

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We do not have to die. And Paul is going to show us how we can keep from dying.

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He's gonna show us how to inject health into our body. Much like the human body has a way of maintaining itself, the church does as well.

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And he's gonna do that by showing us firstly what unity is built around, secondarily who creates it, third, what dispositions we must have to preserve it, and lastly and ultimately, what it accomplishes and what it points to.

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The reality is if we put our hands to the plow, listening to Paul's words here, walking worthy and fix our eyes on Jesus, God will in fact do great things in our midst if we can be unified by the

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Spirit and in the Spirit, resting in the truth of what God has already revealed, then he has promised beautiful things for us.

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No doubt you've already seen it as we are a new church plan and God has already done beautiful things.

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And I think I can say with a certain level of confidence that we are quite unified. But lest we fall into complacency, we must give an ear to the apostle this morning.

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Because if we aren't careful, we will kill our church. And if we want to kill our church, if we want it to die, if we just want to be a number on a graph that other churches will look at to use as illustrations for their sermons, all we need to do is nothing.

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All we have to do is ignore what the apostle Paul says here and seek not to diligently preserve unity in the bond of peace.

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And so why don't you stand for the honoring and reading of God's holy and fallible and all sufficient words so we can see

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Paul's blueprints for how to not die a premature death as a church.

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Look with me at verse one, starting in chapter four. This is the word of God. Therefore, I, the prisoner in the

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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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The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever, amen? Amen, please have a seat.

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So we look at our theme verses today, verses one through three.

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And though we won't get into chapter one very much because we covered most of that last week, there is something that I want you to know, which is my first point, the ground of unity.

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The ground of unity. Martin Lloyd -Jones, many, many years ago, once said that there is too much loose talk when we talk about unity in the church.

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And friends, the reality is that has not changed. There are countless books written about unity.

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There are countless blog posts written about unity. There are a lot of preachers who preach about unity.

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In fact, I have a friend who just took a pastor at a church and they had unity built from wood that lined the entire back of their church so that when people saw something being preached, they would see this sign, unity.

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Unity is important to the body of Christ. And you read the Bible and you come face to face with that and you must do something with it.

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The reality though, is that when people talk about unity, they're often talking about a unity that doesn't exist or can't exist or a unity that is rooted in things that we should never be unified around.

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The question that we must ask if we are to think about what it means to be a unified truth is what actually unifies us?

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Well, when we look at verse three, we say that we are unified, namely in the spirit, right?

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We are commanded, keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. And so people will start to conclude that we'll just inject unity with me and everybody gets along to get along and that's spiritual.

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But that's not what this text is saying. As a matter of fact, the argument for where the ground of unity lies is actually found in the first word of the first verse.

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The word therefore, I said this last week and I say it all the time when we bump into these type of words.

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Don't ever move too quickly past the therefores. Don't ever move too quickly past these seemingly insignificant phrases.

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Because what has happened, not only has there been a division in the letter, namely that we have moved from doctrine primarily to duty, from proclamation to application, right?

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From belief to behavior, but we also are being told what the link is to unity.

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As a matter of fact, as we look through verses four and six in the coming weeks, we'll see that it's rooted in the

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Trinity, but more than that, it's also rooted in everything that Paul has said thus far.

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In other words, the reason that we have unity in the church is because of everything that we have read from chapter one, verse one, all the way through chapter three, verse 21.

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And if you remember, that's doctrine. That's theology.

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It's objective truth. So what am

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I saying? What I'm saying is that when Paul is advocating for unity, especially here, and as we continue looking at chapter four, he's not talking about something vague and nebulous.

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He's not speaking about a unity that is held together by a common aim or a common cause.

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It's not a set of hobbies. It's not a particular set of circumstances that brought them together.

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He is not speaking about a unity that is motivated by a common enemy, right?

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This is the way many institutions, many organizations are set up, right? The political party exists to stand opposed to the democratic party.

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And the democratic party exists to stand at odds with the Republican party. Many organizations exist to do certain things at certain times in certain ways for certain reasons, many of them not biblical.

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But the church here is grounded in the truth of Scripture.

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It is the truth that God is the bestower of all blessings in the heavenly places, verse three of chapter one, that he chose us before the foundation of the world, that though we were dead in our sins and transgressions, chapter two, verse one, he made us alive in Christ.

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Though we loved the world, though we engaged in fleshly desires and we lived a rebellious life,

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Christ died on the cross to woo and win us to himself.

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And more than that, he not only saved us from our congenital spiritual disease, namely, right, fallen nature, and our cardiac sclerosis, our hard heart, not only has he taken us from death to life, but he has brought us into a body.

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He's brought us together with those who were once close to God and far away.

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As we looked at chapter two in chapter three, for example, we see that God has made a new man, right?

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Christians did not become Jewish and Jewish people did not become pagan.

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God in Christ created a new man with a new covenant and new purposes.

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Though there is much overlap, that is the truth. So if we are to understand unity, we must understand that it is rooted primarily in doctrine.

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Does that mean that we can't ever disagree on doctrine? No, but what it means is nothing else binds us together, those of us who are saved by Christ.

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If truth doesn't unite us, nothing will and nothing is worth rallying around besides the truth of what

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God has done for us in Christ. The second thing that I want you to note is the person of unity.

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So we see that the ground of unity is quite simply the truth, doctrine, theology, right?

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That, by the way, is supposed to move to your heart, cause your affections to rise after you have been flooded with it, but truth nonetheless.

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And here we see the person of unity. Now we're going to do this a little differently than we usually do. We usually go verse by verse, line by line, but the climax or the aim or everything that this is kind of aimed at is this idea of being diligent, verse three, to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

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So though we are grounded in theology, we are actually unified by the third member of the

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Trinity. You will notice if you use the

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Bible that I preach from, the Legacy Standard Bible, or if you're using a New American Standard, that this word spirit in verse three is capitalized.

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The reason it's capitalized is because the translators believe this is speaking of not just like the spirit of the age kind of thing, but the very

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Holy Spirit himself, the person. And so what this means, if we are to have any unity, it must be in the spirit.

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It must be in the spirit. What does this mean? Well, first it means that we do not, and we cannot create or manufacture unity.

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We can't do the right things at the right time and produce unity.

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Unity is something that has already happened. Namely, it's been already purchased by the

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Lord Jesus Christ as we have seen in previous texts, which we will get into in more in depth.

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But it's in the spirit, by the spirit, and for the spirit. And this spirit gives life to those who are in the body.

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Very practically, this means that people who are unregenerate cannot have fellowship with those who are not, or are regenerate.

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So Christians and non -Christians cannot dwell together. This is what 2 Corinthians 6 teaches us, right?

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We're not to be unequally yoked, right? We're supposed to get rid of the uncleanliness in our midst.

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God is walking through here, and it is those who are regenerate, not those who believe in good

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Christian ideals, but those who have actually been brought from death to life by the power of the

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Holy Spirit. And so the spirit is the one who creates that unity, and we are only meant to maintain it, preserve it, stop it from dying, not letting it be killed.

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And so if there are times where there seems to be tension in the body, we must ask the question, is there something going on here that's sinful, or do we have sheep and goats in the same pen?

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And really what's happening is there's different heart postures because there's different hearts. There's changed hearts, there's regenerated hearts, and there's dead hearts, unrepentant hearts.

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And so if we are to be a unified church, we have to be a church that loves

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Jesus, that worships Jesus, and is empowered, and changed, and transformed, and propelled by his very spirit.

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Now, now that we have seen these two things, the ground of unity and the person of unity, we must get to the boots on the ground, imperatives, if you will.

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So in order to have unity, we must understand what we're grounded in, and we must understand the spirit and the role of all of this.

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But we also need to understand, and this is my third point, the dispositions of unity.

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The dispositions of unity. We saw in verse one where Paul chose not to give formal imperatives, that is formal commands, but rather chose to exhort them, to plead with them, to beg with them, to walk worthy, walk worthy of the calling with which they have been called.

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That is that they would walk in a manner that is fitting for the profession of faith, for their regeneratedness, for their

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Christianness, that their belief and the things that they say are true would empower their living.

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Right? We said that the word worthy meant to raise the other end of the beam. It's as if there's two scales.

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And what Paul is saying is, you need to have a scale on one side that's life and another scale on the other side that's doctrine, and they shouldn't look like this or like this, but they should be measured and they should match.

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And here, he's not doing formal commands either. We have a series of prepositional phrases, a series of prepositional phrases that kind of act as these imperatives.

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And they're not things to do so much as their dispositions, their heart postures, their ways in which you orient yourself to the people around you.

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So how do we actually walk worthy if we want to unify the church?

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Well, he tells us here. He tells us in verse two, with all humility and gentleness, with patience and bearing with one another in love and being diligent to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

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And we have five. Five dispositions with two categories.

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The first being active dispositions and the second being passive. One, you are doing on purpose and the other one you are doing as you respond to people in their need.

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Let's look at the first one. The first one is humility.

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Humility. So if you want to stop this church from dying, if you want to live walking worthy, you need to be humble.

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Now this word is an interesting word and it's an interesting word for a couple different reasons. The first being that it's the first in the list.

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Which means that it is probably the most important. In fact, if you look at the Greek, it kind of bears this out.

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Everything seems to kind of be attached to this idea of humility. That's why you see, for example, in the

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Legacy Standard Bible, it doesn't say humility comma in verse two.

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It says with all humility and gentleness and then with patience, bearing with one another. It's building off of this idea of humility.

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The second reason that this word is interesting or important is because it's only used seven times in the

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New Testament. And before the New Testament, it wasn't used at all. As a matter of fact, in all of antiquity, it wasn't used.

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This word humility is a compound word that really was created. Was really created by the

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Christians as a virtue. Once this word was starting to be employed in ancient Rome, for example, it was not looked at as a virtue.

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As a matter of fact, one writer in ancient Rome put this on the, you don't want to be like this list.

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Why? Because human beings do not like humility in their sinful nature.

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Human beings love to do the opposite, which is to walk around with their chest puffed out and be prideful, be self -seeking.

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So what does humility mean? Well, very specifically, it means a lowliness of mind. It is the opposite of pride.

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It is the opposite of thinking that you are the greatest thing to ever bless this world.

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It's recognizing your lowly state. It's believing what the Bible says about you, your mind, and your behavior, right?

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For instance, in Ephesians chapter two, and this has already been mentioned once, it says that we were dead in our transgressions and sins in which we formerly 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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Verse three, among whom we also formerly conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

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Now, when you read that, that's not so encouraging, right?

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When you flip to Romans, and you're reading another one of Paul's letters, and it says, for all have sinned and all fall short of the glory of God.

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Ah, that's not good. I don't like what that says. But a humble heart recognizes that we are in fact sinners, that we don't always see everything the correct way, and that we understand our lowliest state.

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And when we come into conflict or conversation with people who are in fact arguing about something or making something an issue that shouldn't be an issue, your first response should not be anger, but to remember who you are or were apart from Christ.

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Paul says it like this in Philippians 2 .3, you're not to do anything from selfish ambition or vain glory, but with humility of mind regarding one another as more important than yourselves.

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That one famous preacher often says, humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

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Now, there's truth in that, but in order to be truly humble, I think you do need to understand, and you need to think less of yourself.

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You need to understand that you actually do have a brain that is affected by the fall.

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This is called the noetic effects of the fall. And the old man clings, as Colossians 3 says.

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And when we come into situations, we need to be humble.

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We need to have that right in front of our face.

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It is in fact a virtue. Pride, you see, provokes disunity, but humility fosters it and grows it and produces an atmosphere where we can actually walk worthy and we can promote the goodness, kindness, and graciousness of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is the greatest example of humility.

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Now, on the one hand, the analogy breaks down because humility looks different in Jesus than it's going to look in us because he has a different nature than us.

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Namely, he was never a sinner. He was perfect in every way.

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He, 2 Corinthians 5 .20, he who knew no sin became sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

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But nonetheless, he was humble. He didn't have to look at his sinful disposition, but at times he did have to look upon his earthly disposition.

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He had to understand his limitations as a human being. See, Jesus, though he was God and man, would go and find himself sleeping, taking naps on boats, praying, all of the things that you and I need to do because he understood his finiteness.

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But also in Philippians 2 .3, just prior to him telling us what to do in terms of not having any sort of selfish ambition, he talks about Jesus and he says that Jesus, being found in appearance as a man, humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

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The argument in Philippians is that Jesus left heaven and the riches thereof to come down and to take on human form and to humbly live the life that we should have lived and to die the death that was asked of him by him in the covenant of redemption in the triune

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God. And it says all humility here. I want you to notice that. It doesn't just say humility, it says all humility.

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And this all here is to signify that you are to act humble all the time, every time, always, and in every way.

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This is something that should mark you as a son and daughter of the most high. You should be humble.

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You should not be seeking out your own preferences, right? And how can we?

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How can we be the type of people that seek out our own preferences when we have the word of God, which tells us

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God's preferences and we should be after that, amen? And so true humility, at least as it pertains to us as human beings, means recognizing our lowliest state, recognizing that God has already revealed the truth to us and submitting to it, submitting to it, and being humble in all situations.

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And it doesn't mean throwing up false humility, pretending as though, oh, I'm just the worst thing ever.

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No, like be real and sober and then get on with it. Romans 8 .28, there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, right?

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So you don't wallow in self -pity, but it informs the way in which you approach people. The second thing that I want you to see is gentleness.

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This word here is used 11 times in the New Testament, and it is often translated as meekness, but that is not to be confused with weakness or timidity.

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Many commentators and preachers have said that we should think about gentleness this way. It is strength under control.

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Have you heard this before, right? Gentleness is strength under control. And then you think to yourself, at least

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I think to myself, if I'm not looking at the Greek and trying to look at the lexicons and figuring this sort of thing out, how in the world do you get strength under control out of this word gentle?

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Because when we think gentle, we think the Jesus that some of us might've seen in Sunday school growing up, where Jesus is walking with long flowing hair, he's got the sheep over his shoulder, and he's just kind of floating, and he's got a rainbow of things going behind him, and he would just never say a mean word to anyone.

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The whole part about Jesus doing the whip in the temple, that's thrown out, we don't talk about that, right? And he's just there to make people happy all the time.

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And he's there to cry with you and to never rebuke you. I mean, really, it's the

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God of the liberal church. It's the God of mainline

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Christianity. The Jesus that would never actually do anything to hurt your feelings.

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But that's not what gentleness is. Gentleness is strength under control, but how do you get that?

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Well, the idea here is the word is often used in connection with horses, medicine, and wind, if you wanna think about it this way.

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It literally means to have the power to do something, but to not do it.

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So when it's used of horses, it's like saying a tame horse wins a race, but a wild horse is a dangerous and unpredictable situation.

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So a horse, in other words, has this power that if left unchecked could destroy everything.

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For those of you who may have been around horses, you know if they are not broken, it's insane.

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But when that horse's power is tamed and directed, he can win that race.

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That's his gentleness, the tame horse with what he's capable of. Or you can think about it in medicine, proper doses of medicine, they heal.

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But too much medicine will kill you, you'll have an overdose. Or you can think about how chill wind can soothe you if it is not so hard.

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But tornado winds, as you understand here in Oklahoma, will destroy you and everything around you. And so when you think about gentleness, the idea here is that, and as some commentators have explicitly said, it's like being angry at the right things and never being angry at the wrong things.

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It's being appropriate to the situation. It's being gentle, right?

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It's strength under control. So gentleness, like I said, is not weakness or timidity.

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Christians ought to be filled with zeal. They must be filled with a type of holy angst, so much so, the

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Puritans talked about this a lot, speaking of the verse in the New Testament that says that we must take the kingdom of God by violence.

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But it's a holy violence, it's a holy gentleness, and it's one that is appropriate to every situation.

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So not thinking too highly of yourself, humble, gentle, meeting every situation with what it requires in a way that is fitting.

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And that covers our active dispositions.

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Now let's look at passive dispositions, the passive dispositions.

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The next one is patience. So if we want to not kill Heritage Church, then we want to make sure that we are people who are filled with patience.

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We are filled with patience. This word is used 14 times in the New Testament, 10 times by the

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Apostle Paul. And it can literally mean long -suffering, not short -tempered, not thin -skinned, and not easily offended.

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You see, the problem with many churches and the problem with much disunity in the church is the fact that a lot of people, not only are prideful, not only do they seek their own idea of what church should look like, not only do they seek out what they think the sanctuary should look like, not only do they think how everything else should go, but they're also not very gentle.

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They don't meet appropriately the situations with the emotional state that must be required, but they're also not very patient.

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So he's telling us that if we want to be the type of church that is united in the Spirit, we must, in fact, be patient.

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We must be slow, in other words. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 14, the

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Apostle Paul urges the church in Thessalonica to admonish the unruly, to encourage the fainthearted, to help the weak and be patient with everyone.

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Here's what this means, very practically. It means that you're slow to anger like God and you're holding back wrath that you feel is deserved.

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And we'll get into those more in depth momentarily, but what I wanna say here before we move into those specifically is that we treat people the way we would desire to be treated in every situation.

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We're not looking to destroy people. We're looking to help people. That's how

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Jesus' church is marked. Long -suffering, not being short -tempered, not being thin -skinned or easily offended, presumes that you will be hurt.

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You will be potentially attacked. You will hear things that are going to cause you to have your feathers ruffled, in other words.

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And you can meet that with anger, resistance, and a warlike attitude, or you can meet it with patience, remembering the patience that the

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Lord Jesus has showed you. But this word carries with it the idea of being slow to anger by God, as I said earlier.

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After all, God is the great patient one. In Exodus 34, six, the story is told of Moses meeting

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Yahweh on the mountain. This is when Yahweh passed by in front of him and called out, Yahweh, Yahweh God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth.

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Slow to anger. Slow to anger. Slow to anger. But it also means holding back wrath, right?

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Romans chapter two, verse four. You have the same idea.

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Or do you think lightly of the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?

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So the semantic range, if you will, the thing happening here behind this word patience is this being slow to anger and holding back wrath, right?

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God, in his anger, as Psalm five says, he hates all who do iniquity, abhors the bloodthirsty, right?

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He will crush those who are sinful. That is the promise of Scripture, apart from the intervention of the

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Holy Spirit. But God in his patience decides to woo and to win those whom he has chosen to save, to go after them.

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And though they would rebel, he would stay and he would continually send his spirit to woo and to win.

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Children, would you look at me? I know it's been a minute, but I want you to think about this. We've said already that in order for us to preserve unity in the church, we need to be humble, we need to be gentle, and we need to be patient.

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And that's important, not just for the church, but also at home, when you're playing with your brothers and your sisters, or when we gather together in fellowship group, we wanna make sure that we don't think that everything should go our way, right?

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We wanna model Jesus, and we want to at great sacrifice to ourselves, sometimes do something nice for other people.

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And when things don't go our way, we wanna make sure that we are appropriately being patient in that situation, and being gentle, and making sure, right, that we are modeling

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God, even when we don't get our own way and saying, hey, I'm gonna wait to be angry about this.

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I don't need to be angry about this, because Jesus loves me, he loves me.

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And he has been very patient with me, he's been very gentle with me, and he's been very, very humble in the way that he has sought me.

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The last disposition that I want you to see is loving forbearance, it continues on in verse two.

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It says, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.

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This word is used 15 times in the New Testament, it's used 10 times by the apostle Paul, and it means to endure, to suffer, or permit.

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What this does here, this idea of bearing with one another presumes is that people around you are not going to always be the most humble, the most gentle, and the most patient.

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And the question becomes, well, how do we then respond? By the way, sometimes you're the one not being humble, patient, and you're hoping that they will respond to you by bearing with you, amen?

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Right, this isn't me at the center of the world and I'm always right, right?

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But by way of example, the idea here is that you're going to be around people who are sinners.

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Huh, how about that?

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Right, I know everybody is supposed to be perfect in church and never make anybody angry, but the truth is, you know, that's generally where a lot of this discord and dysfunction comes from in the church that causes them to close the doors.

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It starts with somebody being angry with somebody else because they have failed to be humbled, so on and so forth, and instead of addressing it, they're just harboring bitterness in their heart and they start seeing things wrong with everything that everybody does, and then they've already left the church and their mind, and so they start sowing discord about why it's not that great instead of just saying, you know,

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I can't deal with this. Let me go to the pastors or let me actually follow Matthew 18 and first go to them and then follow those steps, right?

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Them, then friends, two or three witnesses, you know, and then the church.

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And so what happens then? How are we to respond when we feel as though we've been sinned against?

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Well, we forbear. We forbear, we endure, we suffer. I mean, do you think about that in your relationships, even at church?

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You should. Your job is to suffer with, endure people who maybe you just don't even like all that much.

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Can we be honest? As heritage grows, it would be foolish to think that everybody's going to be everybody's best friend, but what we can do is we can strive, which we'll get to here in a minute, to be diligent in keeping the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

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We can do that and we can make sure that we are humble, gentle, patient, and that we bear with one another.

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Romans chapter five says, by way of illustration, now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves.

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Likewise, Galatians 6 .2 says, bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. So here we have two ideas here that speak of what it means to forbear.

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The first one here is to bear with one another's weaknesses. Did you know you're weak?

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That there are areas of your life that need some work, need some renovation, need a little bit more

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Jesus, right? And you need brothers and sisters to come around you, and yes, to, as we have talked about in the weeks past, lovingly agitate and provoke you towards godliness, but they need to do so in a way that they bear those burdens with you.

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If you're stronger than your brother in a particular area, you need to not seek to please yourself and lord it over them, but to come alongside them and to help them lovingly.

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If you notice a brother is failing in a certain area of his life, let's say he's not doing well with his

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Bible reading. And you know that. You say, how can I meet with you? Can I meet with you? No, I can't believe that guy's not reading his

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Bible. Can I meet with you? And I would love to read the Bible with you and talk about it. Or maybe you noticed a person around you is having trouble showing up to things or coming to things on time or whatever.

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It's like not to turn your nose up, I can't believe they're doing that, but to say, hey, brother, how can I help you get places on time?

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How can I help you show up? Can I pick you up? Maybe there's something going on in their life you don't know about.

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Maybe their life is blowing up and the best thing that they can do is finally get here. But you don't know that if you're fast to act, that you're prideful and you're only seeking external measures, right?

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But we're after internal measures. This is the work of the spirit working in us and it's being externalized out here as we forbear with one another.

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It also means forgiving. Forgiving. So we help the weak and when we are weak, we receive the help of the strong in areas that we need help, but it also means forgiving.

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Colossians 3 .13 says, we are to bear with one another and graciously forgive each other whoever has a complaint against anyone just as the

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Lord graciously forgave you, so also you should you. So here's what this means. In the church, if we wanna preserve unity, if we wanna be a church that is marked by grace and love and all of the things that the church is supposed to be known for, then we need to be willing to forgive people and when we feel attacked, when we feel hurt, when we feel like there is something happening that is not okay, and you need to be able to overlook an offense, reminding yourself of the very gospel of Jesus Christ that you, friend, saint of God, have been forgiven much in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And so what we see here is spiritual unity in the spirit is the result of, or rather is the cause of, not the result of, but the cause of spiritual maturity.

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So as we remember these things and walk in these ways, we grow in maturity.

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We grow in maturity. But the last thing that I want you to see here is verse three.

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So we are to be humble, we are to be gentle, we are to be patient, we are to be loving, but we also have to have a lot of grit.

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We've got to have a lot of grit. Look with me here at verse three.

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It says, being diligent to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

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So we're to bear with one another and we're to bear with one another in love. And bearing with one another in love means you're not just doing it out of duty, but you're actually really concerned about that person.

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You actually really care about their heart. You really care about their minds.

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You really care about where they're headed in sanctification, though it might look different than you. I love the way that Martin Lloyd -Jones talked about this in his commentary.

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He was saying that if we are fulfilling all of these things and we are actually forbearing in love, then what we shouldn't be looking to do is to beat everyone over the head with what we believe, but rather to wean and win them.

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Those are the words he used that I thought were very profound. Wean and win.

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You wean them off of their error and you win them to the truth.

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And you do that with patience. You do that with gentleness.

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You do that with humbleness and you do that with forbearance in love.

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And then in verse three, we must be diligent. We must be diligent to keep the unity of the

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Spirit. So back to what I said earlier, we don't manufacture, we don't create unity, but rather what we do is we maintain it.

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We maintain it. This being diligent here is one word. As a matter of fact, some of your translations, especially

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I think if you use the ESV or even maybe the KJV, it uses the word endeavor. Endeavor.

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This word here is used 11 times and it really means to with quickness and with grit.

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So with quickness and with grit, with strength of power, with precision to keep something.

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Here it's the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. Unity. So this is something that's going to take work.

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This is something that's going to take time. This is something that's gonna require of you different emotions than you immediately act out of your heart of.

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It's gonna require you, as Romans 12 says, to be renewed in your mind. And it's gonna require you to move forward, putting one foot in front of the other.

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Walking worthy is hard. And it requires us to be diligent.

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Diligent to do what? To keep. To keep. Now this helps us to understand what it means by, or what

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I've mean by preserved. Because this word keep can also mean guard or keep inside the bounds of.

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In fact, this word is often used in the New Testament Gospels, for example, for the soldiers who guarded

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Jesus during the crucifixion and his tomb prior to his resurrection. They were standing guards so that nobody could steal his body, so that no one could hurt him before they got a chance to kill him.

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All of these sorts of things, right? So nobody could try to help him kidnap, so that he couldn't just run away.

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And of course they had the guard standing at the tomb because all of the

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Roman guard and so on and so forth were hearing the rumors that he would rise from the dead.

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And they knew that somebody was going to try to come and steal the body. Although of course we know that's not what happened.

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So they sent those guards up there. And this idea here is they're guarding it with fervor.

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So we are to be diligent. We are to with speed and grit, guard unity.

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It's a gift of God by the Spirit to those who are dwelt by the Spirit. And it's already here.

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And the only thing, like I said, the only thing that we can do is just let our hands off of it. And it will go because we are sinners.

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And so what we wanna do is we wanna wrap our arms around that unity in the Spirit as those of us who are indwelt by the

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Spirit and guard it with our very lives. And we don't move.

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And we aren't gonna be pushed around by people who will not listen to the scriptures. And we will do our best to apply ourselves to the scriptures, because that's what is called of us to do, right?

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We are to walk worthy as those called of God. Remembering the calling with which we have been called.

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Verse one, we don't get to woe is me.

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We don't get to do any of that. We have to press in when it seems easy to run away. We must press in when it's time to, as if you feel this way, run away.

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Now don't hear what I'm not saying, right? There's a time to leave the church. If we stop preaching the Bible, you should find a church that preaches the

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Bible, right? If we're inept at pastoring and shepherding the flock, you should find another church.

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If we jump on the woke bandwagon and we start talking about how it's cool and right for abortion to exist in our cities, in our states and in our world even, just because the

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Republican Party decided that's what they do now, you should find another church.

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But you should never find another church because somebody made you feel a certain way sometime, right?

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You should never leave a church because sometimes relationships are hard. Well, guess what? Relationships are hard no matter where you go, no matter what you're doing and no matter who you're doing it for, right?

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Everything that matters is hard. Everything that matters is costly and everything that matters requires precise, gritty and quick guarding if we don't wanna lose it.

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And here's the thing about Heritage Church, friends, if you haven't already noticed and I know that you have, we have a beautiful thing going on here.

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I have told you many times from this pulpit and in fellowship group and in just private conversation that this seemingly is the most loving and unified church

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I have ever been a part of, that I've ever even heard of, generally speaking, as I talk to my pastor friends.

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And the only way we can lose that is if we stop caring about it, if we take it for granted.

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And if we pretend like, for example, that's just the way it is around here. No, it's not the way it is around here.

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I know you guys are working hard to be that way because Christ has called you to be that way. So keep being that way and keep doing it with precision, keep doing it with quickness and keep doing it with grit because that's how you kill a church, by taking it for granted and not caring and ignoring what

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Paul is saying here. The last thing that I want you to see before we close is the heart of unity, the heart of unity.

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We've seen the ground of unity, the person of unity. We've seen the dispositions of unity.

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But now I want you to see the very heart of it. The very heart of it. It says here at the end of verse three that we are to keep, to guard the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

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So what is everything aimed at? Peace, peace.

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Our God is a God, not of war, but of peace. Now he will go to war if he has to, and he does make war with darkness and he goes to war with us if he desires to save us until we become tame like the horse that was spoken about earlier, until we are subdued by him.

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But peace is what God is after in the world, in the church, at your homes, everywhere.

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Isaiah nine, the prophecy of the son to come that we preach on every single Christmas time says that he is what?

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The prince of peace. And so we are to be a peaceful people.

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Not having false peace, saying peace, peace, where there is no peace, address issues that need addressed, but to live peaceably among one another, right?

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Hebrews says that we are to live, as far as it depends on us, at peace with all men. Well, I know

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Martin Luther said, peace if possible and truth at all cost. And to some degree, that's right, right?

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We're unified by truth, but the reality is we, if we are Christian, trust the sovereignty of God enough to be a peaceful people.

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And the thing that gets obscured about that Martin Luther quote, at least in my opinion, and you can argue with me about this later after the service if you want, is it kind of creates somewhat of a false dichotomy.

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And what I mean by that is, if you believe the truth of the

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Bible, I mean, really believe it. And it is the thing that is unifying, that's going to breed peace.

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And if it's not breeding peace, then you're either trying to make it an intellectual game, you're not saved, or you're coming to some wrong conclusions exegetically about what's being said.

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And so we do believe with Martin Luther then, if truth is abandoned, then peace cannot be had.

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But we have to, we have to, at least in the church, be peaceful.

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You know, I see so many things online, I know this doesn't really affect too many people in this room, you know, but you see all of these people arguing for like pressing the crown rights of King Jesus on the world, and yes, and amen, we ought to do that.

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You know how we feel about that around here. And talking about, you know, having a Christian nation and all these sorts of things, and yes, we want a

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Christian nation, don't hear what I'm not saying. But here's what I often wonder when I keep seeing all of this stuff happening, I keep wondering like, what do we actually have to offer the world right now if our churches can't even act

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Christian? If Christians can't even act Christian, what do we actually have to offer the world?

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We have a gospel message, of course. But the place that the gospel message should explode in like a hand grenade or a claymore is the church of Jesus Christ.

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And we ought to be peaceful. We ought to be peaceful.

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In fact, this is the very piece that has already been talked about in the book of Ephesians. If you look back at Ephesians chapter two, verses 14 through 16, it says, for in he himself is our peace who made both groups one and broke down the dividing wall of the partition by abolishing in his flesh the enmity.

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The law of commandments contained in ordinance so that in himself he might create the two into one new man, making peace and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, having in himself put to death the enmity.

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Jesus Christ in himself by shedding blood on the cross made peace a long time ago between the

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Jew and the Gentile. And friends, if you back up, and I know we're getting into the context a little bit late, but who would have a hard time being unified, do you think?

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Well, it'd be the first century Christians and the first century Jews, right?

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Because the Jewish people thought they were the only ones who were saved, that God only showed favor upon them.

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And they had the covenants. They had the law.

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They had the robes. They, you see, they had the festivals.

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And all those Gentiles, well, they're infidels. All those Gentiles, they're disgusting, you know?

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They weren't even allowed to get very close to the temple at all. In fact, dogs, remember me talking about this when we were talking about the temple?

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They had a court that was for animals before the Gentiles. If you were a dog of a

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Jewish person, you had more access to God than the Gentiles.

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And then, of course, the Gentiles are gonna show up and think, man, these Jewish people are really full of themselves. And they have just been converted, right?

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And they are filled with the spirit, and yet they're still struggling. Paul still feels like he needs to, even though he's really just preaching the gospel and he's talking about the beauty of this one new man, he's leaning in and saying, hey, you need to act a certain way.

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You need to have a certain set of dispositions. I know it's hard in there. And it's gonna be hard in every church.

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The question is, what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna live like that? Are you gonna look to Christ and understand that he, in fact, has made the peace, right?

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This is why he made one new man, and he didn't make us, for example, Jews. He made a new man, a new thing, with a new covenant, with new ordinances and new statutes that are all resting in God's moral character.

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Do you see this movement of peace? The heart of unity is peace that has already been purchased by Jesus Christ that has brought us reconciliation to him, to one another, and that continues on throughout the church age.

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Children, would you look at me one last time? Do you know that the

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Lord Jesus Christ, if you bow your knee to him, if you love him, if you place your faith in him and repenting of your sin, has made peace with God for you, and he's made peace with everybody else who bears the name of Christ.

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And so you don't always have to live combatively. That is, you don't always have to fight with everybody because we worship a

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God who is peace and who has accomplished peace for us.

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It's a beautiful reality. And so in closing, the thing that I want you to walk away with is it's almost like Paul is saying, if you haven't been paying attention, if you want to not kill your church, if you want to be a unified body, then don't quench the spirit.

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Do not grieve the spirit, but allow the spirit to produce his glorious fruit in you and amongst us all.

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And walk in gentleness, walk in humbleness, walk in patience, bear one another's burdens and inadequacies and do it all in love.

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And be quick and vigilant and grittiness and in grittiness, seek to guard that unity that has been wrought in you and in us by the very spirit himself, intelligent.

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And we can do that because Christ, Christ purchased that for us. And so walk worthy.