Sunday Sermon: Growing Up Into Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16)

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You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas.

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Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a

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New Testament book. On Thursday is a study in the Old Testament, and then we answer questions from the listeners on Friday.

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Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series, presently going through the book of Ephesians. Here's Pastor Gabe.

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We are in Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 through 16. In honor of the word of the king, would you please stand.

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Ephesians chapter 4, starting in verse 11. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.

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Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

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Let us pray. Heavenly Father, as we come to our passage today, I pray that you would guide us and lead us into all truth as we continue to explore and understand the unity to which we have been called as the body of Christ.

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Let us aspire to this together in your precious name. Lord, we have so much going on in our culture right now, the talk about impeachment and politics that are being thrown back and forth and things of this nature.

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Then we have our own personal lives that we have been absorbed with this past week, things we're thinking about coming up this next week.

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And I pray as we come to your word this morning that it is refreshing our hearts and it is renewing our minds.

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We're not thinking about those things that are going on beyond what is happening in this room right now.

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We know that you are sovereign. We know that you are in control. And our political opinions right now are not going to change some of the things that are happening in the news at the present.

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We desire to know Christ and we desire to grow closer to you all the more. And in the process of doing this, we grow closer to each other, as this passage illustrates.

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So lead us in your truth this morning by your Holy Spirit. In the name of Christ, we pray and all

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God's people said, amen. Thank you. You may be seated. So we're coming back to this passage again today, and it's a good thing that we are because last week

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I lost the message. I don't really know what happened to it on the flash drive on which it is, those messages are recorded.

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I eventually just wiped the flash drive and started over from scratch. So this time when I go to get this message and upload it to the website,

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I'll know exactly where it is. It's the only file that's on there. So pardon me for that.

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I'm sorry that I didn't get the message uploaded this week. But we're still back in the same section of Scripture because last week we really only got as far as verses 11 and 12.

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Understanding that he gave the apostles, he gave the prophets, he gave the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry for building up the body of Christ.

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Now, very quickly to summarize all of last week's sermon here at the very beginning, the apostles and the prophets are those who gave us the

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Scriptures. The apostles gave us the New Testament, Christ speaking through his apostles.

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The prophets gave us the Old Testament, God speaking to his prophets to speak to his people.

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And then we have the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers. Evangelists, you would consider those who go out into communities, who travel the globe, the missionaries who will go out with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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And they may stay in one place for an extended period of time, maybe a year or two, or it could be that they just have that itinerant ministry where they're hopping from place to place sharing the gospel.

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And once they have shared the gospel in one place and got a body of believers together and are kind of moving things in the direction of getting a church planted, then they move to another place and they start the same.

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You have some of those persons in ministry that I've met in the past who just have a gift for church planting.

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They are really good at preaching the gospel in one place, getting a church started, and then maybe even going on to the next place to do that.

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Some have that kind of gifting to plant churches, and they would be under that category of evangelists.

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Now, every Christian is supposed to be an evangelist to a certain degree. Even to Timothy, whom

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Paul was sending to pastor the church in Ephesus, he said, fulfill your ministry, do the work of an evangelist.

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So everyone must have that call to evangelism, all of us who are in Christ. You will share the gospel with somebody.

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Moms, raising up children in your homes, you're an evangelist in your own home. You are sharing the gospel of Christ with your children.

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Fathers, you have the responsibility of not only sharing that with your children, but you as the head of the household also lead your wife in these things.

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You share the gospel with your neighbors. And in fact, there are people that you are going to make contact with that I'm not going to see.

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And so though you may, you know, in answering a neighbor's questions, kind of struggle with something deeply theologically probing, and then you can say to that person, well, let me introduce you to my pastor, and then

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I would love to answer whatever questions I'm able to answer. But most of the time, you're going to encounter those persons that I'm not going to encounter.

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To have an evangelistic ministry does not mean that you need to be Billy Graham. Some have been put or given the responsibility of much as Billy Graham was.

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You know, when he passed away, I think there was an estimate of something like a billion people on planet

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Earth had heard the gospel from Billy Graham. Isn't that incredible? A billion persons.

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You will not have that ministry. As far as I can tell, I mean, maybe the Lord's going to call you to something great.

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I don't know. Somebody's raising up the next Billy Graham in here. That would be tremendous. But there are going to be people that you encounter that I'm not going to encounter.

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Or that John MacArthur is not going to encounter. Or, you know, whatever preacher, John Piper, any of these other guys.

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I was about to start throwing out names like R .C. Sproul and Adrian Rogers. They're dead. So of course, of course, they're not going to encounter your neighbors.

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But you have that opportunity to share the gospel with somebody else. And then once they've heard the gospel, and if they repent of their sin, then invite them to church.

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They need to be baptized. That's part of the commission that we've been given. That we go into all nations baptizing in the name of the

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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And then you have the shepherds and the teachers that are mentioned here at the end of verse 11.

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The word pastor means shepherd. If you have the New American Standard Bible, that's actually the word that gets used there.

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Pastors and teachers. The shepherds would be those who generally sit as head of the eldership over the church.

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The teachers might not be limited to just the pastor, but even those Sunday school teachers, or even those who lead a

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Bible study over at the high school, or maybe at your place of business. They would count also as a teacher.

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God has given these persons with these giftings and these callings to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.

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So recognize there that they've been called to equip the saints for the work of ministry.

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They've not been called to do all of the ministry, right? So you have elders at this church.

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Myself, Dave, Dwight. If I stand right here, we're all right in a row.

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Tic -tac -toe. You can draw a line through us. So myself, Dave, and Pastor Dwight, we sit as the eldership that has been elected by this body to serve in those teaching positions over this church.

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Then you've got men that have been appointed by this church to help meet physical needs of members within the body, and they would be our deacons.

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Jim being one. Archie that you met when you came in. Matt Mikeal, who has helped take up the offering today.

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Raymond, who's also played up here in the band. And who am I missing? Alistair, thank you.

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Alistair, his wife Zenaida is here. Give Alistair a punch in the arm for me for not being here this morning.

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So these are those who have been also called by the body to help meet some of the physical needs of the church.

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And then we have people who teach in various avenues, whether that's Janet with the Sunday school on Sunday morning, or Julie that helps with Awana on Wednesday night.

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People who have these different positions and appointments as teachers. And they also help to build the body up.

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They're teaching little kids, but aren't our little children also part of this body?

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And we're raising them up and building them up in the knowledge of Christ Jesus. So that when the day comes that they understand their responsibility to declare their faith in Christ and want to follow him, that they might be baptized and evidence in themselves a change that has taken place.

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That God has taken out a heart of stone and given them a soft heart that has been regenerated in the

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Holy Spirit, washed by his holy water. And so we do the work of ministry.

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We have persons that have been appointed to these places to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.

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So that's as far as we got last week, verses 11 and 12. Now looking at verse 13, until we all attain to the unity of the faith.

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So how long is this going to last? How long is this building up the body of Christ going to last?

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Until we all attain to the unity of the faith. When is that going to happen? Well, the true unity that we will all attain in the faith will be on the day of Christ.

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Because who will be added will not just be the persons who are alive here, but also those who have gone before us.

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There are many saints who have been Christians and preached the word and have done the work of ministry long before we ever came on the scene.

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One of the things that I had to learn as a minister and as I grew in a maturity of the scriptures was also growing in a knowledge of church history.

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One of those things that that helped me to do was to humble me to realize that I haven't had all the answers and I'm not the first one to have come up with these answers.

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There are men much smarter than me that came along before me who had thought these things through before I ever cracked open a

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Bible to think about them. Sometimes we can have this pride and this arrogance to think that we finally got the church figured out.

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Those persons for the last 1900 plus years didn't get it, but we got it. But when we go through church history, it connects us to the past.

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It connects us to those saints that have been preaching the gospel long before we ever heard it.

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And also we learn from their mistakes because they didn't do everything right either. But we understand that those men that we read from 500 years ago, as you know, it was a couple of years ago, we celebrated the 500th anniversary of the

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Protestant Reformation, or a thousand years back, or all the way back to Augustine, or the early church fathers that came right after the apostles.

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When we read from these men, it connects us with brothers in Christ.

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For these men also, though they might be passed away, though they have come before us and they are already dead and gone, they too are our brothers in the faith and sisters in the faith.

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And so when we get to heaven one day, we will all be together as that body and we will have been perfected in Christ in that true unity which we have not yet attained and won't attain it until the day of Christ.

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Even the day that you die and you go to be with the Lord in glory, you've still not yet attained that perfect unity because the fullness of time has not yet come.

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When God finally reconciles all things to Himself through the person and work of Christ, but as you are being sanctified now, as you are growing in holiness now, guess what?

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Here's something mind -blowing. You are also sanctifying those saints that came before you.

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Have you considered that? Look at Hebrews chapter 11. If you would turn with me over to Hebrews 11.

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Hebrews 11 is where we read about the heroes of the faith. We read about those men in the

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Old Testament who against all odds put their faith in God and though they did not receive the thing promised while they were here on earth, they desired something even better and that was a heavenly kingdom.

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At the very end of Hebrews 11 verses 39 and 40, here is what we read.

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And all of these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised since God had provided something better for us that apart from us, they should not be made perfect.

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Let me read that again. God had provided something better for us that apart from us, they, those saints who have gone before us, they should not be made perfect.

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As we're growing in sanctification, believe it or not, we are even as we are being perfected in Christ, perfecting those saints that have come before us because they have not yet attained that final perfection and that perfection won't happen until the day of Christ.

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So what are they doing right now? Well, they're in heaven in glory praising God. That's what they're doing. But that final perfection hasn't yet come.

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When the perfected bride of Christ, which means every single person whom God has chosen for salvation to himself, when every single one of those persons as the bride will be presented to Christ on the day of Christ, that's the day of perfection.

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That's the day of that final perfection when we will be together with him forever in that perfect unity in glory.

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Amen? Are you with me on that? I know that's like, that's way beyond our scope or our imagination right now, right?

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I mean, we can barely think past our grocery list today sometimes to be thinking about this perfect unity that we will have with all the saints, even those that have gone before us from the time of Christ until now, and even those prophets and the men and women of the

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Old Testament who had come before the cross. But we will all be together perfected in this unity which happens through the

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Spirit of God. This kind of unity, it's evident that this is a

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God -made unity for who of us could actually surpass time and space to make it happen?

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Only God can do that. So what is our responsibility then in the here and now to grow in holiness and righteousness?

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And know, my friends, that you do have a respective calling to grow in holiness.

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God has called you to repentance, to turn from sin and follow Christ. Yes, and I'm hoping that you're here today because you responded to that call and you are a follower of Christ.

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That's why you're sitting here. That's why you come to church, to worship God with the people of God.

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But he has not only called you to your respective calling, he has also called you to be a part of a body.

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In America, in particular, we contend to have a little bit of an arrogance about our Christianity.

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It's something that I've heard Jared C. Wilson refer to as me and my Bible Christianity. So it's just me,

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I got my Bible, just doing my thing, and I'm doing my Christian thing and I'm getting it done. And I am not so proud of myself to say that I'm the best preacher that you could potentially be listening to.

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There are many preachers greater than me that you can go home and turn on the internet and listen to.

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I listen to those guys so that I could learn from them. But there's no replacement for what happens in the church.

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You can listen to those guys and it can be in addition to the work that you do with your church and the fellowship that you do with that body, but it can't replace it.

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You can't make the church something artificial. And that's what you get when you're going to, quote unquote, church online.

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It's artificial church. It's not real church. And an artificial church isn't the church at all.

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If we're part of the body of Christ, then we must be together, we must be unified, and we grow one another into the head who is

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Christ, as Paul talks about here in Ephesians chapter 4. That can only be done together.

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And if you disassociate yourself from the body, if you cut yourself off from the body, what's going to happen to you?

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If you cut your hand off, will your hand survive? If you cut a finger off, which speaking of Aaron Dunn this morning, he tried to do that a couple of years ago, cut his own finger off.

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Not paying attention while he was doing some carpentry work. If you cut a finger off and you let it be, it's going to rot and die, right?

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Nothing you can do about it. There's been some wonders in modern medicine where certain things like a toe or a finger have been able to be reattached, but you kind of have a certain period of time that you can do that or it's totally lost.

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You know, the apostle Paul talked with Timothy about how false teachers have come into the church and they're leading people astray so that it actually causes parts of the body to fall off and die.

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It says their false teaching spreads like gangrene. You understand like the metaphor there in gangrene?

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That parts of the body become infected and they actually rot and fall off. And apart from the body, we're not even connected to Christ.

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You can't be a foot in the body of Christ and just automatically want to attach yourself to the head.

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You know, that'd look like a pretty deformed body, but we're all connected together and all of us holding fast to the head who is

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Christ Jesus. And so we can't fake church. We can't go to an artificial church.

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We need the church. And my friends, the church needs you. If you cut yourself off from the church, you are depriving the church of that which you could have helped the church with in growing in sanctification and holiness.

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Now, I say that from a very meek standpoint, attempting to give that to you in humility, not to make you think to yourself, yeah, the church needs me.

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Thanks for saying so, Pastor Gabe. But just that you understand that we're all in this work together and we all need one another.

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And there's not one part of the body that's more important than the other parts. And Paul talked about the same thing with the

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Corinthians and said, there may be those parts of the body that deserve greater modesty, but nevertheless, every part is important and the body would not function without those parts.

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A person who does the smallest task is still needed. When you go to the book of Acts chapter six and the first deacons were appointed, the reason those deacons were appointed was so that the elders would not have to stop teaching to go wait tables.

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And that's really the way that that's exactly put. There were widows in the church that needed tended to, but there was a teaching in the church that needed to be done.

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So the elders didn't want to have to stop administering what they were called to administer in the teaching in order to go serve with hands and feet.

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Rather, there's going to be parts of the body that are made to be those hands and feet and do exactly that work.

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So they appointed the first deacons. And the deacons became those who served hand and foot, those who had physical needs, while the elders continued to meet those spiritual needs.

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And we're all going to have different talents, different giftings in the Holy Spirit that we can contribute to the body of Christ.

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But all of this is for equipping the saints for the work of ministry and building the body up so that it grows itself up in love.

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If you disconnect yourself from the body, you will languish and die.

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There's an old parable I've heard, and maybe you've seen this as well. I saw this in an email forward before social media was around and things were being shared through like Facebook and Twitter and things like that.

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But this particular story involved a man who had not been to church in a long time.

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And he was sitting in his chair in his living room one evening and he's just watching the fire burn.

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Just watching the fire in the fireplace. It's specified the fire is in the fireplace, maybe, to go along with the story.

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And he was sitting there wondering, why don't people pay attention to me? Why is it that people are not reaching out to me?

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Here I haven't been at church in a long time, and I've maybe heard from one or two people, but not really a whole lot.

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So he's kind of sitting around feeling sorry for himself, and then he has a knock at his door. And he goes to the door and opens the door up, and it's his pastor.

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His pastor said, hey, you mind if I come and sit with you for a little while? And he said, sure, pastor would love to have you come in.

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So the pastor comes in and sits down, and the pastor just sits without a word. Doesn't even say anything. And the man starts talking about the things that he's frustrated with about the church.

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The way things are not going well for him. How he's not getting out of it what he thought he should be getting out of it.

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And people just don't seem to pay much mind to him. And as he was talking, the pastor went over to the fire, and he kind of prodded it with the poker a little bit.

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And then using the tongs, he grabbed a coal, and he took it out of the fire, and he set it there on the hearth. And the pastor went and sat back down.

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As the man continued to talk and complain about the things that he didn't like about his church. And as he sat there complaining, his own eye caught the coal that was sitting there on the hearth.

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And he noticed that the bright orange glow that it had when it was first set there began to diminish more and more and more.

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Until it was just that gray ball of ash with a single ember burning inside.

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And the man had stopped talking as he and the pastor were both looking at that single burning ember inside the coal.

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The pastor got up again, and he took the tongs, and he gripped that coal, and he set it back in the fire.

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And sat back down as they watched, and the orange started to grow on that coal once again.

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The pastor looked at the man, and he said, Good talk. I'll see you on Sunday. And then went home.

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But I hope you understand the illustration. If we're separated from the body of Christ, we'll begin to cool.

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That fire that was once in our heart burning for God will begin to be lost. So you might have in your imagination the idea of the perfect church.

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But you're not a perfect person, and neither am I. And that's why we need one another.

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That we can grow each other in holiness to keep that fire alive. Burning until Christ comes.

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One of the songs that we sang this morning was, There is a Redeemer written by Keith Green. There's another song by Keith Green, Oh Lord You're Beautiful.

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And in the verse to this song, he says that he wants that holy fire back again.

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That fire that used to burn so bright and clear. Renew the faith of my first love that burned with holy fear.

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And so we must have a fire in our hearts that's been ignited by the Holy Spirit.

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And we must continue to feed that fire. And that fire is fed by the word of God, by fellowship, by prayer, by joining together in communion, by praying for one another, and committing our hearts unto the

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Lord daily. Becky had talked this morning with the kids about being grateful and being thankful.

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Well, you need to be thankful for your church. I am. I'm thankful for this church.

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And of course, I need to say that. You pay me. Probably be a bad thing if I'm standing up here saying that I'm not grateful for this church.

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I've been here for nine years. And there's not a day that goes by where I've not been grateful for the things that the church has provided for me and for my family.

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We all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God. To mature manhood.

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So we grow in maturity. We're supposed to be growing up. Just as we grow our children in maturity, teaching them right from wrong, understanding how to use wisdom and how to apply the wisdom of God to everyday situations.

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So we do the same thing in the body of Christ. And we do this to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

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What we're aspiring toward, what we desire to attain, is Christ -likeness.

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We want to be like Jesus. And my friends, you want the person who's sitting next to you today to be like Jesus.

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Is the person you're sitting next to today annoying you to some degree? I mean, not like right now.

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They're reaching over and poking you and that's just irritating. I'm trying to listen to the message. But have you ever been annoyed by that person that's sitting next to you?

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You know how you can solve that problem? Make them more like Christ. Then they annoy you less.

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As you're growing in Christ, then you become less annoying to them. So as we are aspiring to be like Jesus, to be like our

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Savior, we help one another do this. And why?

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Verse 14 even gives us the why. So that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.

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See, my friends, the church is a safety. It's a harbor.

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We know that when we come in here, we're not being tossed to and fro by all the stuff that's going on in the world right now.

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Let's just take something I've prayed about already this morning, the whole discussion about the president's impeachment.

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Whether or not this is even going to happen, we don't know. It's always been talk, even before Trump got elected president, there was talk about if he becomes president, we're going to impeach the guy.

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Same thing with Hillary. If Hillary becomes president, we're going to impeach her. So this conversation has been going on long before we even knew who the president of the

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United States was going to be. But just talking about impeachment, you got so many different opinions that are being tossed about all over the place.

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You turn on the news, you're going to hear one set of opinions. You turn on a different news channel, you're going to hear a different set of opinions.

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You open up one newspaper or bring it up on your smartphone, whatever you do, you're going to hear a different set of opinions.

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Everybody's got a different opinion in this, and everybody's going to try to persuade you to their opinion, right?

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My opinion is the right one, his is the wrong one. That's how the debates tend to go whenever you're watching them on television.

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Well, you just take that issue and you expand it out to things that are going on in the world. And there is always somebody that is wanting to get you to be on their side, on their side of the debate or the discussion on whatever the issue or topic is.

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As we have read about already as we've been going through Ephesians, we read in chapter 2 that before we came to Christ, we were following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air.

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What an illustration of the devil that is. That Satan always has his message beaming out.

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And he's always trying to persuade you through however many different voices he wants you.

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He's probably got a thousand different people, a thousand different opinions on a thousand different topics. And that's even putting it lightly.

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But in Christ, there's one voice. There is one truth. There's only one place that we need to be directed to, to know what the right answer is.

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And that's to Christ Jesus. Satan is going to have his minions attempting to persuade you to whatever different viewpoint that you're going to adopt that's something other than Christ.

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It's like Satan doesn't care what view you take as long as it isn't Christ, as long as it isn't the thing that draws you to Christ.

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You could take the extremely liberal view or you could take the moderate view.

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It doesn't matter as long as it isn't Christ, as long as it isn't the thing that draws you to a savior.

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And so because we're bombarded with so many different opinions from so many different sides, the imagery that Paul paints here is like a ship being tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.

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But if we're in Christ, we're not being tossed to and fro. We're on a straight, sure, and steady course in smooth, open water.

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Or we might be sitting in a harbor safe from the storms. Either way, the ship is not being tattered by the wind and the waves.

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In Hebrews 6, 19, we read, this hope that we have is an anchor for the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast, and that is

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Christ, the anchor for our soul. You think also the illustration of a ship being guided in the right direction.

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Well, we use those tools that are fixed and unmoving in order to navigate the ship in the direction that we are to go.

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Navigators will look at the stars, or they'll look at a compass, or they'll follow a map.

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And that's how they know where they are and where they're going and how to get there, by fixed points.

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And so likewise, we who are trying to figure out who are we, where are we going, how do we get there, like the great philosophical questions of the age, right?

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We know the answer to these questions by looking at fixed points. The Word of God, His Holy Spirit, the things that God has given to us to draw us closer to Him through His Son, Jesus Christ, our rock, our steadfastness, our anchor.

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And when an entire church is built on that foundation, when we have a foundation of Christ, we understand the inerrancy of the

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Word of God, that it is without error. It is always true, and it is always sure.

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Then that entire church becomes a benefit to one another in that we protect each other from the

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Prince of the Power of the Air, from all those different messages that Satan is trying to throw at us to lead us astray or toss us to and fro.

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You know, some of those messages might not, you know, not even necessarily talking in the sense of like false philosophy or false religion, but even the message that Satan might give to you from one day to the next, you're not good enough.

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You know, that sin that you committed yesterday, you're now disqualified from the Kingdom of God. Even that's a lie of the devil.

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If we've been adopted into the family of God through Jesus Christ, through faith in Christ, we've been adopted into His family.

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Let me tell you, my friends, God the Father will be displeased with you the moment

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He's displeased with His own Son. When will that happen?

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Never. So if you're in Christ, will God ever be displeased with you?

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No. Does that mean we don't sin? No, we sin, but God loves us and disciplines us.

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That's in Hebrews chapter 12. If God didn't love us, He wouldn't discipline us. His love for us has not changed.

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He's calling us to repentance by His grace because He loves us.

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And we in the body of Christ help one another with that. It's in 1

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Thessalonians chapter 5, beginning in verse 14, where the Apostle Paul says, we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle.

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To admonish means to correct with goodwill. So admonish the idle, encourage the faint -hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.

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To those who follow me on Twitter, I put out just a couple of days ago, write down 1

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Thessalonians 5, 14 through 24. Those are good daily instructions for any

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Christian. If you can remember 1 Thessalonians 5, 14 and just add 10 to that, it's those 10 verses.

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Write that down and post it somewhere on a piece of paper at the office, on your bathroom mirror as you're getting ready in the morning, on the fridge in your kitchen.

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Have those posted somewhere and then ask the Lord, lead me in this today.

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Help me to be this kind of Christian that you are calling me to be.

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And in those instructions, we have the call to consider one another, admonishing the idle, encouraging the faint -hearted.

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Because my friends, there may be people even in here today that are feeling beat up by the world.

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And they've come in here today and it's so hard for them to focus on the worship or the music because of the stuff that they've been handed by the world all week long.

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And it's still bouncing around in their heads. They're here to worship. That's what they're here for.

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But our body betrays us. And sometimes it can be really, really difficult for us even to overcome those psychosomatic things that go on in our brains.

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Consider that person faint -hearted. Consider that person someone who needs encouragement.

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Who needs to be reminded, God loves you and I love you. You are here in the body of Christ.

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You're safe here. We're a protection to one another. We grow one another in love.

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Help the weak, those who may not be able to help themselves. And be patient with them all.

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That's the first qualification of love that Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 13 verse 4.

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Love is patient. We can't fly off the handle with one another.

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We have to be patient with each other because, my friends, the Lord has been patient with you.

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Paul says that plainly in Romans 2 that God's kindness and forbearance and patience is meant to lead you to repentance.

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So even when you see a person wander into sin, that you not get too upset, but you be patient with them because the

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Lord was also patient with you. So how are we to be with one another?

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Coming back again to Ephesians chapter 4 verse 15. We are to speak the truth in love.

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And we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.

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From whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

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Our culture, our society is obsessed with uniqueness. And it's really kind of pathetic how obsessed the culture is.

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Because when you have a person who thinks they've found their style, their niche, you know what I'm talking about?

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Their style is not technically their own. It is a style that somebody else told them that they were to have.

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They saw it from somebody else and then they made it their own. When I was in high school back in the 90s, now this wasn't so much a big deal in southwest

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Kansas where I went to high school. But it was still nevertheless something that I saw within the culture of my teenage peers.

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What was real big was goth. Anybody remember goth? I think they call it emo today.

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Or that might be the evolution of goth. But when I was a teenager in high school, gothic was the thing.

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Doing your face up kind of white, wearing black makeup, black clothing, black hair. You might wear a spiked collar around your neck, chains hanging off you or something.

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I don't know where this style came from. But this was supposed to be a rebellion, right?

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Goth was the rebellion. So I have found myself, I'm expressing myself,

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I'm goth. Just like everybody else who's goth. Or you had the punk rock movement.

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That was the same thing. People who dress up like a punk. The funny thing about that is if you know something about the music industry, that thing was completely manufactured.

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All the punk bands that were put together, these weren't a bunch of guys that were like, ah, we're the rebels. And then record companies signed them to deals.

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Folks, if they're a liability, the record company is not going to sign you to a record deal. The record company knew exactly what they were getting into and the kind of business investment they were making.

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So this whole punk culture, subculture that existed was manufactured to sell products.

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And people bought it up and they thought they were expressing a style and a uniqueness, but they look the same as every other punk.

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You wear polo shirts because a polo shirt is a typical kind of style in our culture.

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You wear t -shirts because we are a t -shirt culture. You wear blue jeans, probably because you listen to too much country music.

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I don't know. But all of the styles that we have are not unique.

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It was dictated to us by the culture. That's why you wear the kind of clothing that you wear.

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And so though the culture is going to try to say something to us to the effect of, well, you Christians, you're just sheeple, right?

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You're just going along with everybody else. You're all of one mind. It's all just group think.

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Look, the whole culture is susceptible to group think. No one has any position to be able to say, well,

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I think for myself. No, you're being influenced or manipulated by someone.

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So for us who are in Christ, may it be that we're slaves to Christ and not slaves to Satan. That's the point that Paul makes in Romans chapter 6.

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You got to be a slave to somebody. You're either going to commit your members as slaves to unrighteousness, or you're going to commit your members to be slaves of righteousness.

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And Paul said, I speak about this as in a human way, because of our limited understanding. Everybody's got to serve somebody.

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It's either going to be the prince of darkness or the prince of peace. And so may we commit ourselves to the

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Lord fully so that all of our parts, every part in the body of Christ, every part that is working, every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

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This is the second time in these last two verses that we see that those two words together, in love, rather speaking the truth in love, that we may be built up in love.

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How have we been called? As it said at the very beginning of Ephesians, we've been called in love.

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In love, He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will.

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Paul says to the Philippians, it is God who works in you to will and to work to His good pleasure.

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The Holy Spirit of God has given us varied grace, as Paul talks about in Romans 12 .3,

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meaning that God has a different call for each and every one of us. Yes, we are to be of one mind and one body in Christ, but this isn't groupthink, ladies and gentlemen.

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The Bible says that each part in the body of Christ is going to have a different job. We're going to have a different task because God has gifted us in different ways.

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And if you wonder what that job is going to be for you here at the church, well, talk to us because we'd love to figure out something that we know that you can do to serve in the body of Christ.

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We're just five minutes past noon here, so I'm in the mode of wrapping up, but I want to mention to you that in the nine years that I've been here at First Southern Baptist Church, I was first called as a worship minister and did that for two years until, as I mentioned last week,

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Pastor Nate had been called on to plant another church, and then I took over in the position of pastor, and so grateful that the church called me to that.

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My wife and I spent some time praying about that because we didn't know who to trust, if we were supposed to stay here or God was going to call us to something else, but we've continued to serve, and I serve without complaint.

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And it's something my dad taught me years and years ago to just do your work, do it quietly, be thankful for what you get, don't complain if you think you're worth more, don't complain if you think this is supposed to be somebody else's job, not mine, just do your work.

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So this was instilled in me at a young age, and so I just work, and I do the work without complaint, but I've noticed that there's somewhat of a handicap in that.

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Part of the problem in that is that I might develop in my own mind this idea that I need to do it because I'm the only one that can do it right, and that becomes prideful.

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So now it no longer becomes a thing where I'm serving, but now I'm even doing it out of some element of pride. And so as we've been going through Ephesians again, rewind seven years ago we were going through Ephesians chapter four, here we are seven years later going through Ephesians four again, and I said to you last week there has been cause for me to pause and reevaluate, are we doing everything in submission to Christ the way that we should?

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So there are some things that I have realized that I can be letting go of and letting someone else do it, and not because I don't want to do it anymore or I can't do it, but because is my doing that job preventing somebody else from being able to serve in a certain way?

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I've never complained about these jobs. I'm not ungrateful to have to be called to do them, but maybe there's somebody else that can and I would be preventing them from using their gift in the ministry of the body of Christ.

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So two things have happened this week already. I have given up doing the bulletin and I've handed that over to Jerica.

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She's still a little bit scared, so help her along as announcements will now go through Jerica to be put in the bulletin.

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And this one's a little harder to say, but I'm also stepping away from the piano and I'm going to give the worship ministry over to Raymond and Jubilee and they're going to serve in this church in leading us in worship on Sunday morning.

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It has been a privilege to do and it's never been hard, but maybe there's somebody else here that's been called to do it and I can focus more on the preaching and teaching that I've been called to administer here to the church in the position of its pastor.

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In what other ways can a person here serve and use the gifts that the

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Holy Spirit has equipped them with to minister to the body of Christ, to build it up in Christ, to build up in love?

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These are the ways that this passage, Ephesians 4, 11 through 16, has convicted me in just the past week.

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And as I've said to you before, standing up here at this pulpit, I've been convicted by this this week so that I may convict you with it in the coming week.

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So now you, likewise, meditate on these things. Think about our place and our calling to the body of Christ and how we have been called to serve and serve and do it to the glory of God.

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For us, His precious blood, Peace to sing

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His praise, Grace and love,

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Can slay my hateful men, Lives and reigns in resurrection,

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And can get others to men.

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Calling forth, Radiant sun,

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Of heav 'n He stands, Calling home His Father's children,

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Holding forth His...

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Thank you for listening to our weekly sermon presented by First Southern Baptist Church of Junction City, Kansas.

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For more information about our church, visit fsbcjc .org.

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On behalf of our church family, my name is Becky, inviting you to join us again this week, Growing Together in Christ, when we understand the text.