Walking Worthy of Our Calling

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The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject

Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty

God is hanging over our head. They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the

Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us. Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

All right, if you do have a Bible today, please turn to Ephesians 4, and we're going to be reading Ephesians 4, 1 through 3.

Ephesians 4, I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity in spirit and the bond of peace.

Now, if you've been in church for any length of time, you might realize that there is almost no reason that is too petty for people to leave churches or to refuse to come to a church, okay?

So I've been involved in leadership in churches for over a decade now, and I've seen a lot of things in the course of my ministry within churches that are related to how strong of a culture of church shopping there is in many churches.

So when you're talking about the American church in general, you're talking about a church that seems to have this high priority of unity.

It's a church that talks and talks incessantly about the importance of unity. And they're trying to do everything that they possibly can to manufacture some sort of unity centered around something.

But then the problem is that the kind of unity that they're trying to achieve is a kind of unity that, for the most part, is divorced of truth, is divorced of doctrine, is divorced of theological propositions.

And as I've said, I mean, if you've been at church for any length of time, you know, I'm sure that you can even think within your own mind of scenarios where individuals are either not feeling unified with a particular church.

You may have invited people to come to this church, and they've communicated to you that they didn't feel at home here, or they didn't feel welcome here, or they didn't feel unified with this place.

And, you know, if you think about the reasons that they might give for these kind of things or the reasons that I've heard over the course of my ministry, most of the things that people mention are, you know, they're pretty petty when it comes down to it.

So, I mean, I've been involved in churches where behind the scenes these churches were about to face a church split over issues about what color paint the church was going to pick to paint the church or what color carpet the church was going to pick.

I mean, we've had people who will come into this place and not want to come back because there isn't enough people that are in their own demographic, their own stage of life.

And then you have couples who will come and say that they don't feel unified with this place because there's not couples that match their unique age difference, you know, within themselves.

And so we've had couples like that. I mean, and if you think about it, like, we've had people leave our churches over particular stances that we've taken.

And, I mean, I've been in churches, like, in the course of my ministry where people have left because we decided to change the worship time from 1045 to 1030.

And those 15 minutes were so precious to them to the point where they refused to come anymore because that change was just beyond, you know, the pale of their imagination for what they thought was acceptable.

But as I'm saying, I mean, like, we live in a church shopper culture, and we live in a time where churches in general in America, they feel a lot of pressure to try to cave to this church shopper culture.

And so the basic question that most pastors are trying to ask is, you know, what is the minimum amount of truth that we can give to a group of people in order to build the biggest, you know, gathering of people and figure out what kind of music they want to hear so we can give them what kind of music they want to hear, figure out what topics they want us to talk about, what topics they're going to find offensive.

And so for many people, particularly as it relates to, like, the secret sensitive movement in general, they're going to tailor their services to exactly what they perceive their people will want to hear in an effort to manufacture some sort of false sense of unity that's centered around, ultimately, the

God of self. So ultimately in this kind of framework, the individual, the consumer, he or she is sovereign, their will is sovereign, and what you have is you have a group of pastors who are trying to do whatever they can to figure out what these people want, to try to give them the most of what they want so they'll feel compelled to want to come back because it's a church that's ultimately built around people and it's not built around God.

But then when you read a passage like this, as we're studying through Ephesians, we've been walking through a series of messages that are centered around this concept of unity, and we're getting into Ephesians 4 as basically the application portion of the book of Ephesians in general.

And so as we've been talking about this subject of unity, what we find here within Ephesians is we find some instructions that are given to us to tell us how we're supposed to be achieving this unity that so many people crave, and the way that we achieve this unity that so many people crave is not the way that most people think.

And so the way that Paul wants Church at Ephesus and all Christians by extension to pursue unity is going to be very different than the way that you might imagine and the way that people in our culture imagine in general.

And it all centers around this broader idea of walking worthy of the calling with which you've been called.

So Ephesians 4, 1 starts by saying, I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called.

And so what we're going to be talking about today is how to do this. How do we walk worthy of this calling with which you've been called?

And what is the natural results of walking worthy of the calling with which you've been called? But then in order to do that, you basically have to say a few words about what we're even talking about when we're talking about this idea of walking in a manner worthy of your calling.

So the idea of your Christian walk, I'm sure that if you've been in the Church for any length of time, you've heard people talk about your walk.

That really is a pretty distinctly Christian way of speaking. I don't know that many... I've never heard a pagan come up to me and ask me, hey

Tim, how's your walk going? Right? I've never heard that before. And I remember growing up in the Church around my college age or something like that,

I have a youth pastor come up to me, and this is the first time I heard someone speak this way. Even though I knew that the

Bible talks like this in some sense, it was just an odd way to speak. So I had a youth pastor come up to me at some point and say,

Tim, how's your walk going? And I just kind of looked at him and got a little bit of a grin on my face, and I was trying to figure out how to answer.

And I said, well, I think I normally lead with my left leg. And then after that, I try to move my right, try to keep them moving at equal distant lengths so that I don't walk crooked.

But I knew what he was talking about, but the point there is just to say that it is a distinctly Christian way of speaking, and it is something you have to think about.

Well, what is actually being communicated with those kinds of expressions? So what does Paul mean when he urges us to walk in a manner worthy of the calling of which you've been called?

Well, the idea of a walk is the idea of someone's conduct of life. It's the manner in which they live their life.

It reflects all the habits, all the practices that they engage in, the way they order their affairs, the way they order their life.

And so what we're going to be talking about today is how to have a Christian walk that is worthy of the calling with which we've been called.

And the first thing I want to say about this is just talk about the basis for a walk. So Ephesians 4, 1 begins with the words,

I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called. But that therefore is a very significant therefore.

And as we've said in the past, that whenever you see the word therefore, you're supposed to ask yourself, what is this word therefore?

And in this case, this therefore is a very pregnant therefore. So it's a therefore that has a lot of content that's attached to it.

Now, as you read through Paul's letters, one of the things you're going to find is that frequently Paul spends the first half of the letters dealing with basically the theology that he wants his people to hear.

And then as you get to the second half of the letters, what you're going to find is you're going to find the practice or the application that's related to that theology that he just taught.

So basically, what happens in most of Paul's letters is he lays the groundwork in the first three letters, like a theological groundwork for what he's talking about.

And then in the last portion of the letters, you're going to have the application. And this is a book where, you know,

I know that the chapter divisions aren't inspired here, but you have a six -chapter book that's divided very neatly up between theology and application.

So first three chapters are theology, second three chapters are application. The same thing happens in many of his other letters as well, particularly the

Colossians. It's the same kind of formula that you're going to find there. So the point here is to say when we're talking about walking worthy of the calling with which we've been called, and we're going to talk about the basis for our walk, the basis for his instruction about how we should be living is found in the first three chapters of this book.

And so what you're meant to do when he says, I therefore, prisoner of the Lord, encourage you to walk worthy of the calling with which you've been called, you're supposed to ask, well, therefore, on the basis of what?

And that therefore is on the basis of basically everything that he's said in the letter up until this point. And I know that we've spent, you know, sermon after sermon after sermon walking through Ephesians to get to this point, but it may do us some good to try to reflect on all the things that are included in this therefore.

So I'm not going to read the first three chapters of Ephesians for you today, but I do want to remind you of some of the things that we're talking about.

Now, you talk about the opening chapter of Ephesians, the book starts with the words, Blessed be the

God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

So this book starts with thanksgiving to God for all the things that God has done for Christians.

So blessed be the God and father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. This book starts with thanksgiving to God for what he's done for us in Christ.

Okay, and what he's done for us in Christ is he's given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.

And then as you read the letter, what you're gonna find is he's gonna make a list of those blessings. So what are the blessings?

What are we thanking God for? What is Paul thanking God for? Well, you know, one, three, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, what did

God do for us? He chose Christians in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him.

In love, what did he do? He predestined us for adoptions as sons through Jesus Christ. Verse seven, in him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins.

So he chose us in him before the foundation of the world. He predestined us for adoption as sons. In him, we have redemption through his blood.

Verse 11, in him, we've obtained an inheritance having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.

So we've been chosen, adopted. We've received redemption. We've obtained an inheritance. Verse 13, in him also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, you were sealed with the

Holy Spirit of promise. You were sealed with the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 2 .1, and you were dead. What is our fundamental condition for Christ?

You were dead in your trespasses of sin, but God, verse four, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, he made us alive together with Christ.

By grace, you've been saved. Verse six, and he raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Chapter two, verse 11, remember at one time you were Gentiles in the flesh, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God and world, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.

Verse 19, so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

On the basis of all these things, God choosing us before the foundation of the world, giving us an inheritance, adopting us into his family, redeeming us, breaking down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles, making them all members of one family.

On the basis of all of these things that God has done, these blessings that we have in our union with Christ, Paul tells us that we need to walk worthy of the calling with which we have been called.

And so the point here is just to say that these doctrines are not abstract doctrines, okay? These doctrines are not just unnecessary doctrines.

These are not just things that we say that might be meaningful to us in a very narrow sense of telling us how we're gonna be saved.

These are doctrines that affect the entirety of the way that you not only live your life, but how you relate to other people.

And if the vast majority of American church shoppers understood these doctrines, they would realize that coming into a church that doesn't have the carpet color that you want it to have, or the paint color that you want it to have, or the specific demographic makeup of people that you want it to have, or the age ranges of people that you want it to have, or the types of ministries that are geared particularly towards you that you want it to have.

If you understand all of these things that Jesus has done for you, and you as a person who once walked according to the course of the world, according to the mercy of the power of the air, the spirit that's now at work in the sense of disobedience, if you understood that you were dead in your trespasses of sin, and God being rich in his mercy made you alive, he raised you up, he's sealed you with the

Holy Spirit, who is the down payment for your inheritance, he's made you one with fellow believers.

If you understood those things and valued those things, then what you would do is you would be eager to find a group of people who are very different than you, very different than you, and none of that would matter.

What would matter is that God's broken down the dividing wall of hostility, and these are your people, and they're your people because they're the same people that Jesus died on the cross for, so that you could all be devoted to not just finding a place that looks like you and shares all of your self -centered preferences and does everything exactly the way you think it should do, but you would be set free to learn to love a group of people just the way that God sacrificially loved you.

And so the point here is just to say, how do we pursue unity as a church? How do we live the Christian life? How do we walk together?

What is that all gonna look like? The basis for all of that is going to be found not in some disconnected doctrines that you argue about on a theology exam or something like that, but you look to all this list of what

Jesus has done for you and that fundamentally should shape how you live, how you walk in life, and how you interact with other people.

So the basis of your walk is gonna be found in all these blessings that God has given you in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

A second thing we see in this passage is the gravitas of your walk. So Paul says, I therefore, a prisoner of the

Lord, urge you to walk in the manner worthy of which you've been called. This prisoner of the Lord phrase, it may seem like a throwaway phrase when you look at it.

So you think, well, why did he include that there? It seems like a kind of a throwaway phrase, but really it is a phrase that's pointing to the gravitas of what

Paul is talking about. And by extension, it has very serious implications for how we think about the nature of what we are even doing in the

Christian life. So gravitas is a word that means high seriousness, as in a person's bearing or in the treatment of a subject.

And so there's often people who, when they speak, you listen, you pay attention, right? There's people who, when they have something to say, they may have a long track record of saying things that are particularly helpful.

So I mean, you can imagine this in like a business scenario where you have a group of board members arguing over things.

And whenever that one board member speaks, everyone shuts up and listens because they've learned over the course of their life that when that individual says something, if they don't listen, bad things typically happen.

Well, that's a word to describe just the bearing of an individual, the seriousness of an individual, the high seriousness with which people even respond to a certain kind of individual.

And when Paul is making a statement like this, he's saying, I as a prisoner of the Lord, that's a statement that basically tells all of us to shut up and listen, essentially.

That's what he's saying. And that's not Paul demanding that, that's Paul just saying, when I'm talking about you walking in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called,

I am saying that not just as some Joe Doe that just has some tips for you that will help you that I think you should pay attention to and give me some money and so I can be an influencer on social media or something like that.

Paul is saying that as an individual who's lived this truth out to such a degree that now he's in jail for these things, right?

So he's an individual who has said, I'm so committed to walking in a manner worthy of the calling with which we've all been called that me trying to be faithful to do that has meant that I've ended up in jail as a prisoner for the

Lord. So over and over again, as you read the Bible, one of the things you're gonna find is that Jesus tells us all those who desire to live righteously in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

The servant is not above his master. If they persecuted the master, they're gonna persecute you. Jesus says,

I didn't come to bring peace on earth. Don't think I've come to bring peace. I came to bring a sword to set father against mother, sister against brother.

Men's enemies will be those of his own household. These enemies, they're gonna be so deceived that they're even gonna think that they do

God a favor when they throw you over to jail, when they hand you over to be flogged in their synagogues and they put you out of the market, everything else.

And so Paul is just looking at church and he's saying, all those things that Jesus said are right.

And he's saying, follow me as I follow Christ. And if you follow me as I follow Christ, and if you walk the way

I walk, there's a destination that is ahead of you that you need to be aware of. And that destination might be jail, right?

But this is anyone who loves Jesus is gonna wanna honor Jesus so much that they're gonna willingly face that destination with Paul.

And that's part of what you have to think about when you think about being a Christian. I mean, growing up when you live in a nominal Christian culture, there's a strong, unspoken, powerful agreement among basically every church you're gonna go to.

And that strong, powerful, unspoken agreement basically is that I'm not gonna talk about your sin if you don't talk about my sin, right?

We're all sinners. I'm not gonna talk about yours. You're not gonna talk about mine. And I remember growing up in kind of a nominal

Christian environment, in general, there's a lot of pressure to basically just not take the

Christian life too seriously. Like whatever you did, you didn't wanna be one of those Christians who took this thing too seriously, right?

See, because you don't wanna be crazy. You don't wanna get carried away with all this stuff, right? What you wanna do is you wanna kinda go through the motions, just show that you're trying a little bit, but you don't wanna get crazy, okay?

Because like if you just really commit yourself to the things the Bible says, then you'll know that there's a lot of cultural expectation around you that you don't do that.

And then the moment you do that, people are gonna start getting mad at you, okay? And one of the things

I've found is that the more that I've read the Bible, the more difficult it is to interact with the world around you.

You know, at some point, people really have to understand that if you decide like I'm all in, like whatever this says

I'm gonna do, that simple decision will instantaneously make you the bad guy in almost every encounter you're in.

I mean, I could tell you story after story after story of church scenarios where, you know, for instance, you have a lady who works in the nursery before church and immediately after working in the nursery, she leaves.

And you look at that and you say, why is that happening? That's weird, right? Someone ought to talk to her and ask her, why is she leaving right after nursery every week and not going to the main service?

What's going on with that? And if you're a committed Christian, what are you supposed to do in that kind of scenario if you notice that?

Just ignore it? So there's been situations like that in my life where I'm looking at a situation just like that and I'm saying, everyone around is just ignoring this and they've been ignoring it for years.

No one has even had to talk with her about why she's doing that. And I know the moment that anyone talks to her, what's gonna happen?

The moment you ask her just a simple question, why are you leaving every week? What's gonna happen? Who's the bad guy? You're gonna be the bad guy, right?

And what's she gonna do? She's gonna leave, right? She's gonna leave the church. That's the way it's gonna go down. But then what does the

Bible say? What does Jesus do for the lost sheep? Goes after them, right? Are we our brother's keeper or aren't we our brother's keeper?

If anyone's caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual, what do we do? We restore such a one in the spirit of gentleness, looking to yourself also lest you be tempted.

If you see your brother sin, what do you do? You go and you tell them their fault between you and him alone. What does

Hebrews 10 .25 say? We're not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some. What do all those verses mean for that scenario?

What should happen in that scenario? If you try to apply all those verses to that scenario, if you're aware of those verses, if you read the

Bible, you're aware of those verses, you're looking at this scenario. You have a person who's forsaken the assembly of the saints for years, right?

She's caught in some kind of transgression, isn't she? Something's happening there. We need to be people who go after lost sheep.

She seems to be prone to wander, right? Someone's gotta say something. Someone's gotta love her enough to speak the truth and love to her.

But then the moment you do that, then who's the bad guy? You're the bad guy, right? Who's really the bad guy in this scenario?

Not the one who talks to her, right? Do you understand what I'm saying? The one who talks to her is not the bad guy.

Objectively, who's the bad guy in this scenario? She's the bad guy in this scenario. But then the point I'm trying to say is,

Paul says, I, a prisoner of the Lord, Paul understands this basic point. If you commit yourself to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called, that means that whatever the

Bible says goes. And that means that the strong and powerful, unspoken expectation that you don't talk about my sin,

I won't talk about your sin needs to go. And the moment you do that is the moment you might end up in prison, right? That's the way it works.

And that's what Paul was saying. Like, I know that all of us in this room, like we face certain temptations to not fully do everything that we think the

Bible is saying because we know that there will be entailments to that for our relationships, for our life.

You know, maybe things we don't wanna give up. And there's some prison or there's some kind of negative consequences you fear if you just say,

I'm all in, whatever it says goes, that you need to be made aware of. And you know what? The Bible isn't a health, wealth, prosperity book.

The Bible isn't a book that's basically saying, hey, don't worry about all that, right? If you just follow Jesus, everything will be great.

Like that isn't actually the message. And actually the message is, if you just follow Jesus, things might get rough.

But we're not people who are looking to hope in this life only, but we're people who are looking to hope in the next.

And so, as I said, I mean, first, as we're thinking about what does it mean to walk worthy of a calling with which we've been called, think about the basis for a walk.

Second, the gravitas of your walk. And third, the motivation for your walk. So Paul says, I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called.

Now, this motivation to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called, Paul's not urging

Christians to try to earn this calling that God has given to them, okay?

So this is not Paul in this chapter four, verse one, basically undoing the entire theology of the first three chapters by saying, now that God has called you, you need to pay him back, or you need to justify it somehow, or you need to show or you prove yourself like that that was a good choice that God made, right?

So when God looked at you before the foundation of the world, now you're gonna show that his trust in you, his confidence in you, man, that was well -placed by the way that you actually walk.

And so the point here is just to say that worthy in this context doesn't mean like worthy in the sense of now you're demonstrating that all of that was justified.

In fact, everything in the passage up until this point, like everything in the book goes to show that you are not a worthy recipient and of yourself at all whatsoever.

In fact, when God chose Christians before the foundation of the world, that means that God chose you before you did anything good and bad.

It chose you before you were born, right? Before you're even a thought in your mom and dad's room. He chose you before anything that could ever be created was created.

And he chose you according to his good pleasure. He didn't chose you according to like looking down the corridors of time and trying to see like what kind of worthy people

I can pick and then I'm gonna pick the most worthy people imaginable. In fact, there's nothing objectively, like in terms of in the mind of God, there's nothing objectively that distinguished you from anyone else.

It was a choice based solely on God's good pleasure. It wasn't based on foreseen faith. It wasn't based on any merit intrinsic to you at all.

So it's made completely on the basis of God's good choice. And when you think about like before you were saved,

Ephesians 2 .1 says, and you were dead in your trespasses of sin. So before salvation, you were dead in your trespasses of sin.

Verse two, in which you once walked, right? So we're talking about walking worthy of the calling which you were called.

Contrast that with how you used to walk. How did you used to walk? You used to walk following the course of the world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, right?

Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. And we were all by nature, children of wrath, just like the rest of mankind.

But what did God do? But God who is rich in mercy because of the great love with which he'd loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses of sin, he made you alive together with Christ for by grace you've been saved through faith, right?

So here's the issue. Like when you walking in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called, what you're not doing is trying to justify this free unmerited grace that God shown to you.

You're simply expressing gratitude for the fact that for whatever reason, not only to God, according to his own good pleasure, he decided to pick you instead of picking someone else, right?

Not because you are wonderful. So what you're not trying to do is you're not trying to justify that choice and trying to pay him back.

What you're trying to do is express like legitimate thanksgiving to the kind of mercy that God showed to you, which was completely undeserved.

I mean, so undeserved that before God saved you, you're like a spiritual corpse in the ground that can do nothing whatsoever to earn

God's grace. And in fact, your entire manner of life is walking hostile to God, being defined by all of the things that he hates and all the things that he set in opposition to.

Yeah, and despite all of that, God showed unmerited favor and mercy towards you. And if you understand the magnitude of that grace and that mercy that he's shown to you, what you'll realize is that like, how could

I, who have died to sin, continue to live in that sin? God showed me unmerited favor that I absolutely do not deserve, that I can't do anything to earn.

And so my life no longer belongs to me to live as Christ and to die as gain.

My life belongs to him. He is Lord, what he says goes. And out of love for what he's done for me,

I'm gonna live to him. As a show of gratitude, not like as a, hey, I'm gonna pay you back, but as just pure gratitude, thanksgiving to the unmerited grace and favor that he's shown to you.

So we've seen the basis for a walk, the gravitas of our walk and the motivation of our walk. And finally, we're gonna talk through the nature of our walk.

Now, this nature of our walk, it basically has three points here, and I'll list them out and then we'll talk about them one by one.

But if you're gonna ask the question, what does it mean to walk worthy of the calling of which you've been called? There's three basic components to what that walk is meant to look like.

And those three components are the nature of our walk should be humble, should be patient, and it should be peaceable. And you find that in verse, you know, from two to three.

So we're told to walk worthy of the calling with which we've been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing one another in love, and then eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and peace.

So, you know, this unity that we long for is gonna be found in reflection of how we walk.

How we walk is determined by all the things that God's done for us, right?

Being motivated by a desire to please Him. But what is that walk that's gonna result in all this unity that we long for?

What is it gonna look like? What's gonna be humble, patient, and peaceable? Now, if you notice the first two words here, you have with all humility and gentleness.

In English, it may seem like these are two distinct concepts, okay? But then if you understand the

Greek behind these English words, you'll realize that these are meant to be synonyms in certain ways. And you do have three distinct thoughts that are separated by commas here.

Look at verse two. It says, with humility and gentleness, comma, right? With patience, bearing with one another in love.

So the bearing with one another in love is an expansion on the patience, if that makes sense. And then eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and bond of peace.

So this with humility and gentleness, that's a distinct first thought. Does that make sense? Humility and gentleness, distinct thought.

With patience, bearing one another in love, thought two. Eager to maintain the unity in the spirit and bond of peace, thought three.

Three thoughts, right? First thought is humility. And you have, basically, you have two Greek words here.

Now, the first of these words is the word that's being translated with all humility. This is a word that, basically, in first century

Greek, it had a lot of negative connotations. The word is tapenaphrasone in Greek, but that's a word that basically had negative connotations.

So Josephus is a first century Jewish historian. He tells us a story about the Roman emperor Galba, who was accused of this tapenaphrasone by the

Praetorian guard because he refused to offer an expected celebratory pay bonus at his extension.

And so this is a word that, basically, kind of meant like low, scummy. Like, if you think about that, like scum.

Like, if you don't offer an expected pay bonus, people are gonna look at you and think, oh, that's kind of dirty, right?

That's low. Like, you did them wrong, man. Not that you necessarily have to do it, but it's just expected that you do it and you think, oh, that's the opposite of being noble, right?

So the opposite idea of this tapenaphrasone word is the idea of nobility, basically.

So being like high. So you have like a word that means high, high -minded, magnanimous kind of thing, and then you have a word that means low.

But then to the Christians who were informed by the Old Testament, they thought of this word that had negative connotations as if it was a good thing.

So it's kind of like, what they were trying to do with this word was something that we might try to do with certain words that are thrown around in our culture today, okay?

So there's a lot of words that are thrown around in our culture today, which like our culture views as just like the worst possible things.

So like racism is one of those words that our culture is incessantly throwing at people. Racism is basically in our culture anytime you argue with a liberal, essentially, right?

So if you argue with a liberal, you're racist, and they're gonna call you racist. And there's a lot of Christians who have an impulse to say, well, if that makes me a racist,

I guess I'm a racist then, right? Meaning like, I'm not really a racist, but if this is just a word you're gonna keep on throwing at me, at some point,

I'm just gonna own it. And so like in the same way, like there's a Christian nationalism discussion in the broader

Christian world that's going on right now. But part of what's happening with that kind of discussion is you have, like if I look at people and I say, hey, you shouldn't kill babies in their mother's womb, because that's wrong.

They're gonna say, oh, you can't impose your morality on us. I don't accept your morality. You're just some kind of Christian nationalist or whatever.

And I think a lot of people have an impulse to say, well, I guess I am a Christian nationalist then, whatever. If being a

Christian nationalist means I don't wanna murder baby, then call me a Christian nationalist, whatever. What I mean is like,

I'm trying to give you examples of how Christians might, if they're unjustly being accused of certain things, or a word has certain negative connotations, lean into those negative connotations and say, well, all right, fine.

I'm just gonna go with it then, right? In a similar way, you have a word here that means low. And this was kind of a criticism that was being leveled against God's people, because God's people weren't the kind of people who were incessantly trying to be the best, right?

In everything and trying to achieve notoriety. So, I mean, you think about Jesus, Jesus came humble.

He did the exact opposite of societal expectations for him. So like in the minds of many people, the fact that he didn't come as a conquering king who was gonna take over, destroy the

Romans, exert his will upon the world, but he came riding like the cult of a donkey, that was like utterly disrespectful, right?

That's the opposite of Tapanafrasune. That is lowly, right?

He came low, like who rides a donkey, right? Kind of thing, like you don't do that if you're trying to persuade everyone that you're a big, important person that everyone should listen to.

So that's like the anti -selfie that he just did right there on that, right? Meaning like that was him with all the bad filters on it and bad lighting and that's a bad look, right?

Like, how are we supposed to take you seriously? Because you don't look like you have your stuff together. So the point here is just to say you had a word that had negative connotations and they're looking at that and they're trying to say, hey, we're stepping into that, we're leaning into that and we're trying to own that, right?

So for us, our path to greatness is very different than your path to greatness. Your path to greatness is gonna be found in you trying to persuade everyone around you that you're so important that everyone should listen to you, that you're influential and everything else.

Our path to greatness is not gonna be found in that kind of way. And so for the Christians, we thought of humility as a good thing.

This is like the opposite of a noble spirit in that way. Humility in this context is talking about like, considering others is more important than yourself.

Instead of trying to be the best and have everyone praise you, the idea of humility there is to think, now

I'm trying to help other people be exalted, not just myself. And then you have this idea of gentleness that's corresponding with this and that's

Pratitas essentially. And that idea of Pratitas in that way is the quality of not being overly impressed by one's own sense of self -importance, okay?

So I'll say it again. Quality of not being impressed by one's own sense of self -importance.

So you think about those two ideas, like the first idea being considering others more significant than yourself. And then the second idea of not being overly impressed by your own sense of self -importance.

And you realize that both of these things are talking about what we understand today to be humble, do you understand?

They're both synonyms for humility. So you know someone is not overly impressed by their own sense of self -importance.

In general, if they're willing to laugh at themselves, if they can take a joke, right? So when people are wound pretty tight, easily offended, like the more easily offended a person is, the more they are impressed by their own sense of self -importance.

Like the more offended you are, like in our society, people think of being offended as if it's a virtue and they're constantly offended at almost anything.

But then from a biblical worldview, when you're offended, your mom was always wrong. And it's almost always a reflection of how prideful you actually were and how self -centered you actually are and how you think the world actually revolves around you and how you think that you're so important that everyone in the world exists just to serve you, that they need to serve you so much that they need to figure out all the things you want them to do without you even having to communicate to them, the things that you want them to do and effortlessly respond without any words from you whatsoever, your desires for them to carry out.

And so like that would be being overly impressed by your own sense of self -importance. But like, here's the point though, we live in a society right now, particularly with social media, which trains us, like we're brainwashed into the exact opposite of humility.

And like, this is built into us by the very fabric of how we interact with each other online. Like, you know, if you ever stop and just think about like some of the things that you do on social media and think about how weird they are, like as it relates to this topic of humility, like, isn't it kind of bizarre just that you have like generations of people who are trained to think,

I'm gonna go to Taco Bell and I'm gonna post a picture of it, give everyone a play -by -play of all the things that I'm doing online, as if I'm some like actor in a movie or something like that, that everyone's keeping up with all the things that I'm doing step -by -step, right?

And then, I mean, some of that is somewhat innocent. If you guys are doing that, I don't really look at your social media accounts.

I'm not making fun of you. I'm just talking about things that are odd on the face of it, okay?

Like being overly impressed with your own sense of self -importance. Like constantly taking pictures of yourself everywhere you go in order to tell everyone everything that you're doing, that's a little bit weird, okay?

So we should all be able to agree that that's a little bit weird. And then when you do that related to spiritual things, like we're the kind of people who think that every time we do something spiritual, we need to broadcast it, right?

So look, here's a picture of me reading my Bible, Sepia filter, right? I need to show you.

Look, look at me read my Bible, right? Here's a video of me feeding a homeless person, right? You know, and so like we're people, social media basically trains us to think we're so important.

Like that's the point. Social media trains you to think that you're so important that every time you do anything, every time you're walking worthy of the calling with which you've been called, you need like a record of it online for everyone to see so they could all pat you on the back and congratulate you because you're just such a wonderful person.

And then, you know, if you do put your record out there and no one likes it, isn't that kind of like a dig a little bit?

It's like, man, no one liked my picture. I must be stupid, you know, or whatever else. But then if they do, if they do like it, you can get a bunch of likes.

It's like, yeah, I'm really important, right? And so, but then it's just like, well, what does proud to toss mean?

It means the quality of not being overly impressed by one's own sense of self importance. And then if you think about like how we interact with Christians, and if you were to think about it, like I'm not being overly impressed by my own sense of self importance as I go into a church, what would that look like?

You probably wouldn't be fighting over carpet choices, would you? If you were not overly impressed with your own sense of self importance, if you're not impressed, it'd be like, hey,

I think that color's ugly, but what does it matter? Who am I? Like, why does my opinion matter? Who asked for my opinion?

Who cares what I think? Are my eyes so important that they can't be scandalized by that color every week?

You know, that fundamentally, I'm gonna be emotionally damaged if I have to look at a color I don't like week in and week out, so much so that I need to flee this place and like go somewhere else.

You know, if you weren't overly impressed by your own sense of self importance, you probably wouldn't even put that opinion out there like it's some, you know, precious thing to you that someone could reject.

And then in rejecting, they rejected all of you by rejecting your opinion about the carpet color or the paint color, but then you probably wouldn't be going into a church thinking to yourself, man, the only way that I'm gonna feel welcome here is if everyone looks like me and sounds like me.

I mean, this is something that's utterly foreign to the disciples. I mean, you don't have Simon the zealot coming and saying, you know what?

I don't feel safe with that tax collector following you too, Jesus, right? I only want people who are zealots following you.

In order for me to feel okay, we need a bunch of zealots and that's the enemy over there. And so the point here is just to say that the nature of our walk should be humble.

It should be a humble walk, a walk that's considering others as more significant than yourself and not really being overly impressed by yourself in general.

So a nature of a walk should be humble, but it should also be patience. So the text is with patience, bearing with one another in love.

The Bible says it's the glory of a man to overlook an offense. We live in a culture and a society that thinks that it's a virtue to be offended.

Not only is it a virtue to be offended, but you have to constantly be offended. We basically found all sorts of ways in our society to be offended in every way imaginable.

We have intersectional hierarchies in our society which give us victim labels, which tell us all these ways in which we're supposed to be offended.

We have unspoken demands that we give to ourself and other people. The most difficult people to live with in the context of marriage, in the context of churches, are people who have so many demands that they're gonna put in your face.

I had a couple who came to me once at a church with a list of 10 demands for how the nursery should be run that they handed me.

And then I tried to engage in a conversation with them about this list of 10 demands that they gave.

And this was so unfathomable to them that I would ask them to explain why some of these demands were necessary that they got offended at me asking them to explain it.

Then they're asking me to apologize for offending them, for asking them to explain the list of 10 demands that they gave me.

And then I refuse to apologize for asking them to explain.

And then they were offended at me for not apologizing for me asking them to explain the list of demands that they gave me.

And the whole time I was sitting there thinking, you know, we could probably do at least seven or eight of these, but I was just trying to understand the other three.

But then they left mad that we had to have a conversation about the demands instead of just doing the demands instantaneously.

But that just shows you like, there's no way to have peace with that kind of person. You understand what I'm saying? With that kind of person who plops a list of demands in your face and says, do them or else, do them without question.

No, I refuse to talk to about it. No, I refuse to explain any of them. Bow down and serve my list of demands or else we're done.

There's no way to have peace with that kind of person. And the Christian life is not a life like that.

Like Christian life is a life that's filled with patience and bearing with one another. And what does it mean to be patient and to bear with other people?

It means that, you know what? There are other people who exist in the world that have different desires than you.

I know it's shocking. Like sometimes, I know that I'm not like entirely weird here, but there's a word, solipsism essentially, where people like believe that they're the only person who's real and then everyone around them is like projections of their imaginations, basically, that are running around.

And now, I mean, there's people who actually believe that, but then most of us, like if you think about the way that most people live their life, you could live your life and you could think about yourself as like the actor in your story and then everyone else is kind of like the extras, right?

And then sometimes like, you know, I noticed this with me. I mean, these are just natural temptations, but you can walk around and all of a sudden it dawns on you that that person that you kind of just view as an extra in your story, they're actually like the actor in their own story, right?

And they're viewed you like you're the extra, right? And so it kind of dawns on you that this is like a real person who has a life that's just as complicated as me, who has thoughts and desires and feelings just like mine and who think that they're the center of their universe in a way that I'm tempted to be the center of my universe.

But the point here is just to say that everyone in here is like actually a real person. Everyone's a real person and they have real desires and they have desires that are different than your desires.

And who's to say whose desire should be preferred in any given encounter, right? So you have, if you're married, you have a husband, you have a wife, you know what?

They have a set of desires. You know, every time you get mad at your wife or you get mad at your husband, whatever they did, have you ever thought about this?

Whatever they did that you got mad about, they did because they wanted to do it. They wanted to do the thing that they did and you got mad at them about it because you didn't want them to do it.

But who's to say who's right in that encounter? Like if you're selfless, if you say, hey, their desires are more important than mine, what would you conclude?

Well, if they did it, that meant they wanted to do it. So why shouldn't I prefer to do and to embrace the thing they wanted in this moment?

Do you get what I'm saying? Like, if it's just about you getting your way, why should you get your way and they not get their way?

Who's to say who should get their way? And so in a lot of marriages and a lot of churches, like the things you're fighting about is you have one person saying, this is what

I want. And then you have another person saying, I don't want that. This is what I want. There's no fix to that, do you understand?

There's no fix to that. And you can shout and you can scream and you can get mad and you can get really upset, but it doesn't change the fundamental nature of a conflict.

And the fundamental nature of the conflict is you have a set of desires and they have a set of desires and those desires don't match.

And there's no way for you to determine whose desire is right, just by appealing to your own subjective will.

Does that make sense? The only way we're actually gonna be unified is not to be that we're gonna be fighting over who gets their desire more, right?

The only way we're actually gonna be unified is if we go back to the first three chapters of this book and realize that we're all once walking according to the course of the world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is at work in the sense of disobedience.

And God, in his mercy, he made us alive and we're dead. And he's told us to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which we can call.

And what that means is that he sets the rules. And if he sets the rules, that means that what he says goes.

And you know what? Like if we figured out what he said and we devoted ourself to doing that, then instead of all of our fights being,

I don't like that, well, I do, right? I don't like that. Then what it ends up being is, well,

God likes that. And so that's what we're gonna do. And if you don't like what God likes, then

I don't know what to tell you. But I like him more than I like you. So we're gonna do what he says, okay?

But that's not why churches split in the main. And that's not why marriages end in the main.

It's because someone says, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And the other person mostly is saying, no thanks,

I wanna serve the devil. That does happen. And again, most church splits are not about that. They're just about selfish people refusing to bear with one another in love, saying, give me what

I want, or else I'm going to scream. Instead of people saying, let's give God what he wants, because that's what it means to walk worthy of the calling with which we've been called.

So the nature of our walk should be humble. It should be patient, bearing with one another. Only way you're gonna do that is if you not just fundamentally out for you, right?

Realize that other people exist, you have different sets of desires, don't all have to match. And finally, it's peaceable.

So eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. So notice that peace isn't something you force, it's something you maintain.

Like Christians are unified, why? Unified because of all the things that we've said. There's a fundamental unity to Christians based on what

Jesus did. And that unity is one in what Jesus did and the fact that he's

Lord, right? So if he's Lord, that means that what he says goes. That means he calls the shots. That means whatever he says, we're gonna do.

And it's, what do we pray in the Lord's prayer? Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And if you have a bunch of people who are getting together saying, your kingdom come, your will be done, you have unity, right?

I mean, that's the fundamental principle of Christian unity is that Jesus is Lord. And if Jesus is Lord, that means he gets to call the shots.

And you know what? That should be profoundly liberating to us because if it were just up to me to call the shots,

I might call the shots in a different way than you think I should call the shots. But if Jesus is calling the shots, that means it's his agenda that we're after.

And if it's his agenda that we're after, if we could all get on that same page, that's how we're gonna actually be unified.

So the way that you maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond and peace is to realize that there is a fundamental unifying principle and that unifying principle is

Jesus and his word. And so you have a lot of churches out there who are trying to make the fundamental principle of Christian unity, getting rid of as much doctrine as you possibly can and pulling the audience.

But the problem is your audience is very different and they're pushing in different directions. And that's why you end up with like cowboy churches.

And that's why you end up with, you know, here's our contemporary worship service over here. And you know, here's our traditional worship service over here is because you have a bunch of different unifying principles that are all centered around personal preferences in a variety of different ways.

When the real, like the real archaic, the real thing that holds everything together is Jesus and what he wants and his desires and his will, which is the fundamental thing that if you commit yourself to, you might get in trouble because the reality is that not everyone who claims the name of Christ is fundamentally unified around Jesus being

Lord. They may say, I believe in Jesus, but they may not live it. But if we say we believe in Jesus, that means he calls the shots, whatever he says goes, he's the unifying principle.

And then if everyone can get on board with that, you have a lot less conflict. You have a lot less conflict in the church.

You have a lot less conflict in your home. So like in the home, God's made men to be leaders and women to be followers within the home.

But God didn't give men authority to be leaders within the home just to impose their own selfish will on their wife.

God made men leaders in order to be the primary ones charged with carrying out

God's commands for a home. And so when you look at your wife and you say, hey, this is what God says, and this is what we're gonna do.

If your wife wants to fight with you at that point, you need to look at her and say, hey, if you fighting with me is like you fighting with God because God made the rules,

I didn't make the rules, and this is the way it's gonna be, and I'm not gonna budge in that way. But when you have a guy who's leading in a self -centered way what ends up happening is,

I command you woman to watch the show I want to watch. I decided we're gonna watch just because I want to do it.

Point here is just to say that selfishness is gonna be at more selfishness, it's gonna be at more selfishness. God is the one who is the basis for our unity.

And so the way that we walk, here's the broader point, the way that we walk should be humble, it should be patient, and it should be peaceable.

And the way that we're gonna have peace is we're gonna have peace in so far as we look to Jesus to be the one who's calling the shots.

We're eager to maintain that unity. And then when other people are sinning against us in that way, we're eager to forgive, we're gentle, the fruit that's from above is gentle, it's willing to yield, it's patient, forbearing with one another in love, it's saying, hey,

I want to be reconciled with you fundamentally because God forgave me. So if God forgave me,

I can forgive you. We don't have to be mad at each other. And if Christians were to commit themselves to this kind of unity, kind of unity that's humble, not me -focused, me -centered, kind of unity that's patient, that's willing to overlook the faults of others, eager to maintain that kind of unity in others, we could really be a picture of a church that stands out in the midst of a world that just is so hostile to all of these ideas.

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