FBC Morning Light – June 22, 2022

Good Wednesday morning to you. We are in the middle of the week, and I trust your week is going well. In our

Bible reading today, we're in Ephesians chapter 4, the first half of the chapter anyway, and Paul begins this chapter with a very significant exhortation.

He says, I, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you, I urge you, I exhort you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called.

Walk worthy of the calling with which you were called. Well, to what calling were you called?

Obviously, he's not talking about your vocation, he's not talking like everybody has been called into the ministry kind of a thing.

No, he's talking about your calling as a Christian. You were called by the grace of God to become a follower of Jesus Christ.

You inevitably responded to that call with faith in Christ.

This is your calling. You're called to be a Christian. You're called to follow Christ. He says, you need to walk worthy of that calling.

Walk worthy of being a Christian. There is an awful lot that could be said about that, isn't there?

At the end of this chapter, he's going to talk about some very practical things as far as living out the

Christian life, but that's not where he starts. He starts in the next couple of verses with focusing on how we relate to one another within the body of Christ.

Listen to what he says. He says, I beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you are called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with long -suffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the

Spirit in the bond of peace. So clearly he's talking about our relationships to one another within the framework of the ministry of the local church.

He's writing to the church at Ephesus, and he's telling them, okay, if you're going to walk worthy of being a

Christian, then that's going to affect how you get along with one another. You're going to treat one another with lowliness and gentleness.

There's not going to be any room for pride, for the lifting up of oneself, and harshness in your treatment of somebody that maybe you don't happen to agree with, somebody you don't get along with, or whatever.

Let's be honest. In the typical congregation, there are different personalities, and some personalities, they kind of grate on one another like sandpaper or something, and we understand that.

That's part of humanity, part of being a human being. But how do we walk worthy in those circumstances?

We don't walk worthy by avoiding the person and not having anything to do with the person that just kind of grates on us.

No. We treat them with humility, lowliness. We treat them gently, not with harshness and abrasiveness.

What if they treat me that way? What if they do? How are you to respond with lowliness and gentleness?

He goes on here to give us some other ideas, to do so with long -suffering.

That is, you put up with, you endure, a great deal of suffering for a long time.

Again, some people may be like that to you. They may just be difficult for you to endure, because of your different personalities and so on and so forth.

You deal with them with long -suffering. Then he says, bearing with one another in love.

You should do that at work, you should do that in your neighborhood with your neighbors, you should be a loving individual toward your neighbors and so forth.

But he's talking here about relationships within the local church, where there's a more significant relationship, where you have ongoing interaction with one another.

In those circumstances, it's possible for us to offend one another, isn't it?

It's possible for us to say things in a way that can be taken wrong and is taken wrong sometimes.

It's possible to do things that are hurtful to somebody else. If we're on the receiving end of that, how should we handle it?

The first thing is to deal with it in love. As much as possible, let love cover it.

Love covers a multitude of sins. When he says, bearing with one another in love, I think that's what Paul is getting at.

That there will be those occasions when somebody says something off the cuff or without much thinking, and it stings, it hurts you.

What do you do? Retaliate? Hold a grudge? Get back at them in some way?

Go tell everybody what this person did to you to try to tear them down or whatever? No. Bear with one another in love.

Let love cover it. Give the benefit of the doubt. If you need any more examples of what that might look like, turn to 1

Corinthians 13 and look at the qualities of love. These should guide our relationship with one another.

Why behave like this? Because he says in verse 3, endeavoring to keep the unity of the

Spirit in the bond of peace. We behave like this because we want the church to be unified.

The church needs to be at peace, a place of peace and tranquility.

When we come together as God's people, there shouldn't be an air of tension and uncertainty and unrest.

No. It should be the bond of peace. We strive to maintain that unity and the bond of peace.

How do we do it? By walking worthy of the calling with which we are called.

I trust that today we'll be encouraged and challenged to walk worthy.

Our Father and our God, help us. We need your Spirit's help to be the people of God that you would have us to be, to walk worthy of our

Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, and our calling in him. We pray that we shall. In Jesus' name, amen.