Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Our dear Heavenly Father, I call upon you your name, for there is no one like you.
[00:00:13] I open my heart to you because you have the ability to make me a better man.
[00:00:23] I invite your spirit to be with us this morning and help us to sense that there is something very stable about who you are.
[00:00:37] And your stability makes us stable and we are able to live life in Christ Jesus.
[00:00:46] So I hope in you.
[00:00:49] In Christ's name, amen.
[00:00:53] We're studying the fourth chapter of Ephesians.
[00:00:58] I want to remind you that Ephesians is divided into two sections.
[00:01:03] The first three chapters are Christian Theology.
[00:01:10] Chapters 4, 5, and 6. They're on how do I live it out in my daily life?
[00:01:20] And Paul is saying in chapter four, An unstable life is not very influential.
[00:01:35] It's not very effective.
[00:01:40] But a stable life has great influence and is very effective.
[00:01:49] In 2021, in South Florida, the Champlain Tower became unstable.
[00:01:59] Something happened in the foundation in the base, and a major section of the. Of the tower collapsed.
[00:02:12] And you can see the ruin that's left there.
[00:02:16] The problem was not the building itself.
[00:02:21] The problem was the foundation that it was on.
[00:02:27] And when the foundation wasn't stable, the whole thing fell apart.
[00:02:34] Now, that's the way human living is.
[00:02:39] If we have a stable foundation, we're going to live a consistent life without that stable foundation. Look, collapse after collapse is coming.
[00:02:57] I know people who move from one disaster to the next, one disaster after another after another, and they somehow or another say to themselves, ah, ah, this. I don't know why life is doing this to me. All right, I want to say it's not life.
[00:03:23] It's the person that's looking back at you in the mirror every day.
[00:03:27] That's the one who has to change.
[00:03:30] And Paul is saying, we can live life in Christ Jesus, but to do that, we have to start looking at what is the. What is the foundation of our life? What are we really building our life on?
[00:03:49] So Paul says, 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.
[00:04:10] Paul starts out by saying, instability in our life exposes immaturity.
[00:04:18] What makes me unstable?
[00:04:21] Ah, there's some part of me that. That is not developed.
[00:04:28] There's some aspect of my character that is infantile.
[00:04:35] And because that part of me is not developed, it leads to these instabilities in life.
[00:04:44] So where I don't have stability in my life, I have to start examining myself and say, where am I spiritually underdeveloped. That's creating this instability.
[00:04:58] And then Paul likes to use images, and he uses this.
[00:05:04] He uses this surf image.
[00:05:10] If you can remember watching Planet Earth or whatever, and you see these giant waves and they come breaking on the beach, and they. And they. And they sweep up the beach and then they recede back.
[00:05:25] That's this image Paul has in his mind. An unstable life is like the seashore where the wave rolls up, washes up on the beach, retreats back.
[00:05:41] Often in our lives, we are. We. We think we're surging forward only to find out we're going backwards.
[00:05:51] Ah, the.
[00:05:53] Sometimes the undertow is stronger than the waves.
[00:05:59] And so Paul is saying, think about your life.
[00:06:03] If you find that you're being rolled around in the surf, you got to make some changes.
[00:06:11] And then he uses a second image.
[00:06:14] This is the idea of the wind is blowing really hard and it's blowing stuff around.
[00:06:22] When I look at this, I'm thinking of pictures I've seen of tornadoes where they're spinning around and the air is just full of garbage. They're just. It's just unbelievable what that strong wind is able to carry. All right, Paul says if life is blowing you around, if you're.
[00:06:44] If it's blown you off your feet and it's blowing you around, it's time for you to say, I got to make some changes. All right?
[00:06:57] Then he connects these things with a. With a.
[00:07:04] The spiritual teaching we're getting.
[00:07:06] If you're immature, you have to get better spiritual instruction.
[00:07:12] Do you hear this?
[00:07:15] If you're immature, you have to have a better plan to coming to know the things of God.
[00:07:24] If you feel like the waves are rolling you, ah, you have to stop and say, what have I learned that can redirect me in times like this one more time? Church. Christianity is a thinking religion, and it matters how we think.
[00:07:46] It matters what we're listening to.
[00:07:49] There's false teaching out there.
[00:07:53] You can turn on radio any day of the week and hear some heretic.
[00:07:58] You can turn on the TV any day of the week and hear some heretic preaching away.
[00:08:07] It matters what we pay attention to.
[00:08:10] Do you hear this?
[00:08:12] All right, young people, would you let me speak to you for a minute?
[00:08:21] In every generation, ah, a.
[00:08:28] A attitude develops that we have finally figured stuff out.
[00:08:38] We are smarter than anybody else who ever lived.
[00:08:42] Every generation has this.
[00:08:45] This generational arrogance. Everybody who was before us, they're Neanderthals, but we're the smart ones.
[00:08:54] Only to find out that some of the Stuff we said was smart was stupid.
[00:09:02] Church.
[00:09:03] Ah, ah, ah. Wear a mask, don't wear a mask.
[00:09:09] Get a shot, don't get a shot.
[00:09:13] All right, don't get me wrong. I appreciate science. I appreciate the modern world. I love having a refrigerator. But what I don't want, I don't want to replace what has worked in the church for 2,000 years with some modern hair brain guessing at life.
[00:09:49] Our church holds historic theology.
[00:09:56] It's called the analogy of faith.
[00:09:59] It, it means what has the church believed for 2000 years.
[00:10:04] That's what we hold because we don't have the freedom to make up our own religion.
[00:10:11] We are following the teaching that God gave to us through the apostles and prophets. Do you hear this?
[00:10:20] So then I want to remind you again, theology matters.
[00:10:27] What we are teaching and what we are learning has a profound effect on the stability of our life.
[00:10:36] And then Paul says, ah, this false teaching has a method.
[00:10:47] The word method actually gets translate translated to schemes. But listen, this is, this is it. In the original method, we get our English word method from this Greek word method day on. Method day on becomes method. All right, there is a method to people who are teaching false things.
[00:11:16] There is a method to that.
[00:11:19] The unholy one has always been skilled at deceiving and leading people astray.
[00:11:27] He's got a method. Church.
[00:11:31] All right, then. Paul uses three words to describe a deception.
[00:11:39] The first word he uses, this is the only time it's ever used in the Bible.
[00:11:44] And I might translate it a trickery.
[00:11:50] I looked this word up and I found out interestingly, when it's not used in the Bible, when it's used in everyday Greek, it, it meant cheating at playing dice.
[00:12:04] There were a lot of dice games and people learned how to cheat at playing dice. But you had to trick people if you're going to cheat playing dice.
[00:12:16] So the word came from cheating at playing dice and it came to mean somebody who is practiced in tricking people.
[00:12:26] All right, there is a.
[00:12:32] There is a spirit in the world that is at odds with God, but it rarely presents itself that way. It always cloaks itself in something.
[00:12:53] I've read a theology book by a professor who actually teaches at a Catholic university.
[00:13:04] He doesn't come right out and say in the book that he doesn't believe that Jesus Christ is God. But through the whole book, all he does is suddenly try to downplay what the gospel says and offer his alternative to it.
[00:13:22] You see, he doesn't come out and say, I'm a heretic and I don't Believe in Jesus. He comes, he says, I'm a theologian.
[00:13:30] But we have learned, we're smarter now than the apostles. And we've learned that Jesus didn't walk on water at all. And, and nobody was really healed. It was just a mass hysteria. And. Okay, do you see what I'm saying?
[00:13:48] He doesn't come out and say, I'm a heretic, but he does everything he can to refute the truth of Jesus Christ.
[00:13:58] And that spirit is in the world.
[00:14:02] I've been to the university.
[00:14:05] I've heard university professors make snide remarks about somebody being a believer. It had nothing to do with the class. It had nothing to do with the topic we were talking about. But they felt, they felt absolutely comfortable in being snide and, and, and implying if you're a believer, you're probably not very smart. Because we unbelievers, we're, we're really the intelligent ones.
[00:14:40] That's the spirit that's Paul's talking about. It was in the world when he was there, and it's in the world now. All right, the second word he uses is a word for craftiness, and it's, it's related to villainy. So you're going to do something wrong, but you want to do it in the most crafty way you can so you don't get caught.
[00:15:07] That's what this word means.
[00:15:09] You intend to do something wrong, but you want to do it in the most crafty way you can so you don't get caught.
[00:15:16] And then the third word is, it's, it gets translated. Deception. But it means you cause somebody to wander off the path.
[00:15:30] Your approach to life is affecting people in the kind of way that they don't have the stability they need in Christ. They're wandering away from Christ.
[00:15:43] All right, Now Paul says a solid Christian faith makes life in Christ stable.
[00:15:52] Without that solid Christian faith, there is, there is a trickery, there is craftiness, there is deception.
[00:16:03] And without a solid faith in Christ, these, this craftiness, this, this deception, it's going to lead us astray. Can you hear this?
[00:16:16] All right, verse 15, rather, speaking the truth. In love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.
[00:16:29] Here is what Paul is saying.
[00:16:31] The truth is the strongest support for stability.
[00:16:37] This word speaking the truth.
[00:16:41] It's only used twice here and in Galatians.
[00:16:45] And it really means more than speaking the truth. It means living honestly, living honestly in love. We are to grow up in every way unto him who is the head. All right, let's Start.
[00:17:04] Where do I begin to speak the truth if I'm going to be stable and live an influential life, where do I begin to speak the truth? I begin to speak the truth to myself.
[00:17:18] Ah. Some years ago, I did a sermon series on self deception, and I and I read a half a dozen books. It is amazing that we can deceive ourselves the way we do.
[00:17:31] One of the books I read talked about, how is it possible for you to deceive yourself?
[00:17:40] If I'm not telling the truth to myself, something in me should know I'm not telling the truth to myself. How do I hide the fact that I'm not being honest with myself? So there's a whole science on that. All right, but listen to what Paul says.
[00:17:57] Paul says if you want to live a stable life, you got to start speaking the truth to yourself.
[00:18:04] You got to be honest with yourself.
[00:18:06] And it's easy not to Church.
[00:18:12] It's easy for me to say, ah, well, that really wasn't my fault.
[00:18:19] Church mistakes were made, but not by me.
[00:18:25] That's the human way. All right, I begin to say, I am not living the life I want to live.
[00:18:39] I'm not accomplishing what I want to accomplish. I'm not creating the environment in my home that I want.
[00:18:45] I'm not having the influence at work I would like to have. All right?
[00:18:50] And now I speak the truth to myself. If I want that to change, I have to begin to be a different and better person than I am.
[00:19:04] The life of Christ has to be more powerful in me than it is right now. I begin to speak the truth to myself.
[00:19:14] Then the second thing is I speak the truth to others.
[00:19:19] Ah.
[00:19:20] How many times have you said yes when your mind was saying no?
[00:19:27] No one.
[00:19:31] Do you want to do this?
[00:19:33] Your mind is saying no, but you hear your mouth saying, okay, okay.
[00:19:42] And then when you have to do it, you're miserable.
[00:19:46] Why did I say I would do this?
[00:19:50] Okay, I must be in the wrong place.
[00:19:54] That happens to me from time to time. All right.
[00:19:59] Something stabilizing happens when we speak the truth to each other.
[00:20:05] When you are honest and people know you're honest. Something stabilizing happens when you are dishonest and, and people know you're dishonest.
[00:20:17] Something destabilizing happens, and then finally we have to speak the truth to Christ.
[00:20:27] Could I, could we examine our prayer life for a minute?
[00:20:32] Ah.
[00:20:36] Do you listen to yourself pray?
[00:20:40] Ah.
[00:20:41] Ah.
[00:20:42] Has your prayer life fallen into a giant rut where you kind of have this half memorized prayer down and Somehow or another, every time you pray, it's the same kind of half.
[00:21:07] No.
[00:21:09] Okay? Ask the people around you. They can hear it.
[00:21:13] I don't want every one of my prayers to sound the very same as it sounded two weeks ago.
[00:21:23] That's not being honest with Christ in prayer.
[00:21:27] It's. I've learned a.
[00:21:31] I've learned a religious chant that I call prayer, but it's not really honest communication with Christ.
[00:21:40] Do you see? Paul is saying, if you want to live this solid, healthy, Christian life, you got to start paying attention. And when you pray, you have to speak the truth to Christ in prayer.
[00:21:57] Truth is stable.
[00:22:00] Deception always causes instability.
[00:22:05] And then he says, this stability, this stability is supported by love.
[00:22:11] If you want to live a more stable life, the stability is supported by love.
[00:22:21] You see, the proverbs say, If you weave two ropes together, it's stronger than one.
[00:22:36] If you weave three together, it's even more strong.
[00:22:42] You know what he's saying?
[00:22:44] When you have healthy relationships, you have a strength in life. All right? The opposite works, too. If you have a rope of three strands and you unwind them and make them one strand, all the three, the one into three ropes, that's weaker.
[00:23:03] So what he's saying, in love, there is a bond in life that makes us stronger without that love, pretty much on our own.
[00:23:20] Fidelity produces solid relationships.
[00:23:24] All right, married people, I'm going to tell you something very important.
[00:23:29] If you've been daydreaming, come home, married people.
[00:23:37] Never give your spouse a reason to doubt your love.
[00:23:44] It makes your home unstable.
[00:23:47] All right, I want to say this one more time.
[00:23:50] Never give your spouse a reason to doubt your love.
[00:23:55] It makes your home unstable.
[00:24:00] Parents.
[00:24:01] Never give your kids a reason to doubt your love.
[00:24:05] It makes your home unstable.
[00:24:08] The.
[00:24:09] The grand idea of God, this perfect idea he had, is families that genuinely love each other the way they're supposed to.
[00:24:23] They create something solid, something stable, a great foundation for living a good life.
[00:24:34] You got that?
[00:24:40] Which is exactly why evil does everything it can to ruin families.
[00:24:48] Every deception in the world is directed toward families.
[00:24:53] When we have this stability, we start growing up in Christ.
[00:24:59] You know that growth is a consistent theme in the New Testament.
[00:25:03] All through the New Testament, there is this theme about we should be growing, we should be growing.
[00:25:11] Do you have a spiritual growth plan?
[00:25:19] I'm guessing very few people in this room have a spiritual growth plan.
[00:25:26] Ah, look, you got a retirement plan.
[00:25:32] You have a health plan.
[00:25:35] You got all these plans, and you can leave all that stuff behind.
[00:25:41] Only thing you're taking with you is your eternal soul. Do you have a spiritual growth plan?
[00:25:48] Do you have something, do you have some agenda so that next year, this time you'll be spiritually more mature than you are right now?
[00:25:59] The more spiritually mature I am, the more stable my life is, the more spiritually immature I am, the more unstable I am. What he said in the very beginning, don't be children.
[00:26:13] Ah.
[00:26:15] And then he says, submitting to the leadership of Christ is the core. Is the core meaning of stability. Who is the head? Christ. We are all to grow up spiritually in the image of who the head is, and that is Jesus Christ.
[00:26:36] There can only be one head church.
[00:26:42] And Jesus said, no man can serve two masters.
[00:26:45] I really need to be serious about living the Christian life. And that begins with allowing Jesus Christ to have the final call and everything.
[00:26:58] This stability is supposed to affect the church.
[00:27:02] Verse 16.
[00:27:05] Growing up into the head Jesus Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, making the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
[00:27:25] Christ is the head, the church is the body.
[00:27:29] Then he uses these two very unique words.
[00:27:32] The first one is joined together.
[00:27:39] Paul uses this one other time in Ephesians chapter two.
[00:27:45] And the midweek service ought to recognize this passage.
[00:27:54] So then you are no longer strangers and aliens.
[00:27:58] You are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God being built up on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.
[00:28:10] Christ himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in God.
[00:28:21] In him you are also being built together into a holy dwelling place for God by the Spirit. All right, I want you to notice a couple of things.
[00:28:33] He says, Christ himself joins us together.
[00:28:40] The church is the result of God working in all of our hearts. And then he brings us together. We did not create this church.
[00:28:52] Christ brought us together.
[00:28:54] You see, you think you wandered in here.
[00:28:59] Christ led you here.
[00:29:01] You think you're here because your friend invited you. You're here because Christ knows your soul. And he brought us together to make a church that's pleasing to him and accomplishes his purpose.
[00:29:17] In fact, Paul says we are kind of like a temple.
[00:29:23] There was a temple in Jerusalem that everyone was proud of. It was beautiful, and they believed the presence of God was there. Uniquely. That's what Paul says. We are a beautiful temple brought together by Jesus Christ.
[00:29:40] And then he wants to dwell in our presence.
[00:29:44] He wants to abide in this place.
[00:29:48] Ah. We're not just joined together. But we're held together.
[00:29:52] This, this word for holding together.
[00:29:56] It means Christ creates the church and then he sustains us.
[00:30:02] He brings us together and he holds us together.
[00:30:06] Paul uses the same word in Colossians 2:18.
[00:30:10] Let no one disqualify you. Assist. Insisting on asceticism and the worship of angels, going on in detail about visions puffed up without reason by their situous mind, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with the growth that is from God. This is what Paul is saying.
[00:30:39] When the church is working right, Christ is working in every single one of us.
[00:30:46] And his work in us unites us and holds us together.
[00:30:51] And when Christ is uniting us and holding us together, the church thrives, it grows, It's. It's built up.
[00:31:02] If the church isn't growing, thriving and being built up, we got a Jesus problem.
[00:31:08] You hear this?
[00:31:11] The church works best when each one of us serve.
[00:31:16] This is. Paul brought this theme up last week. The church works best when each one of us serve.
[00:31:25] Every body part has to function or we can't function right.
[00:31:35] Many of you been to the doctor. Something's wrong.
[00:31:38] You, you can tell things aren't right, you're not functioning right. And the doctor has to find out what body part isn't doing what it's supposed to do right. Well, the same thing is true in the church. When the. All the body parts are doing what we're supposed to do, the place is healthy. We're running marathons, we're winning games.
[00:32:02] When the church isn't healthy, when the church isn't stable, when we're not serving the way we should serve, the whole body gets weak.
[00:32:12] We become ineffective.
[00:32:16] We have to work at creating and maintaining a stable, growing church.
[00:32:24] I. Ah.
[00:32:26] All right, let me wrap this up.
[00:32:31] Paul's teaching us how to live life in Christ Jesus.
[00:32:35] And in this paragraph, he says life in Christ is meant to be a stable life.
[00:32:45] It's meant to be solid.
[00:32:47] It's meant to be effective.
[00:32:54] It's not meant to be blown around by life.
[00:32:59] A stable life in Christ is based upon growing in our understanding of who God is.
[00:33:08] A stable life in Christ is based on a healthy relationship to other people in the church.
[00:33:15] And when the church is. Is living the life of Christ and we have this stability, something healthy happens. And the church is a beautiful place and good things happen here.
[00:33:28] You think it's just incidental that 108 people got on a bus today to drive somewhere that's in desperate need of help and they're going to spend a whole week giving themselves away in the service of others. You think that just randomly happened?
[00:33:46] It didn't. It happened. Those are the kind of things that happen when the church is healthy and we're living the life of Christ. We're stable and we're building each other up in love.
[00:34:06] And so this is Paul's appeal to every one of us. This is what Paul is saying.
[00:34:12] I want you to live a good life in Christ Jesus.
[00:34:18] And when you. When you start living this good life in Christ Jesus, you're building your life on the solid foundation of who Jesus is and what he teaches.
[00:34:30] You're not being deceived, you're not being led off the path. You're building your life on a solid foundation.
[00:34:39] I believe Wednesday you talked about rooted and founded.
[00:34:49] Paul loves this image that we are rooted in the reality of Jesus Christ.
[00:34:57] Jesus is the foundation on which we build our whole life.
[00:35:02] When that happens, we're living a life of Christ and we're stable, we're solid, we're dependable, we're reliable. Things, good things happen.
[00:35:15] Our dear Heavenly Father, thank you for your truth.
[00:35:21] I pray for myself and I pray for everyone else that we would reconsider how we are building our lives.
[00:35:34] I pray that we would re examine what we're structuring our lives on and around.
[00:35:44] And I pray that we would.
[00:35:46] I pray that we would come to know Christ better and better and more and more of our life would be built on the reality of Christ and we would be less susceptible to the deceptions of our generation.
[00:36:02] I pray that we would build our life on the solid foundation of Christ. And we would be stable.
[00:36:08] We would be healthy, we would be reliable, we would be dependable. We'd be the kind of people that it's easy for you to count on.
[00:36:18] And then I pray that we'd have influence for Christ's name. Amen.
