Lord, we want to thank You again for Your great love to us, which has saved us. We want to thank You that You loved us even when we did not love You. We want to thank You that You loved us when we did not even care about You, and we want to thank You that You came after us.
Lord, Your love is very great, and we just want to thank You. It means so much to us.
And now, Lord, we come to Your Word, and we are asking, Lord, that You would open it to us. Lord, this is Your Word. It is not something that man has made up; it is Your Word. So we are asking that Your Holy Spirit would interpret it to us in a way that will encourage us to draw near to You, encourage us to take our place in what You are doing, and strengthen us for those things.
Lord, do not let it be the word of Jim or the word of man. Lord, may it be Your Word, quickened by the Spirit to us today. In Jesus’ name, amen.
We are in Ephesians 4. My daughter was wondering about the microphone this morning. She said, “Was it on?” I said, “No.” She goes, “Please do not let it be on when you are singing.”
We have been looking at Ephesians, and I have been teaching out of Ephesians for the last few months. Again, I just want to start off with good pedagogy and do a little review.
We have looked at Ephesians as looking at our salvation from the heavenly perspective, where Romans looks at it from our perspective as sinners: How do we get saved? In Ephesians, we look at what God has done for us and where we are because of what He has done for us.
But both of them, as we have talked about, come to a point where, now that this has been done, how are we to react to what has been done? How are we to live because of what has been done? That is what we have come to in the portion we have been looking at in Ephesians 4.
We have already seen our place in Christ. We have already seen how He saved us. We have already seen that He has made us into one body. And Paul, even before he gets to the practical part of the letter in Ephesians 4, prays, asking that we would be strengthened in the inner man so that we are able to go on and do this second, more practical part.
Even as we have gotten into Ephesians 4, we have seen that before getting to the practical, there are still some doctrinal things. But we have also seen that the first thing he says is that we are to walk worthy of this calling. In walking worthy, we have talked about it being appropriate—walking appropriately.
I think I brought some ties one time and talked about how we dress appropriately. Like today, all of mine match, so it is appropriate. Okay, yes, it is. Thank you very much. I did it without my wife. No, actually, I did not. I had to ask my wife.
But it is more than that. We found out that the first step the apostle talks about in walking worthy is to maintain the unity of the Spirit. That is what we have been looking at.
Last time, we saw a picture of what unity is, as Jerry read those verses today for Camp Willow Run. Those were the verses we went over last time to see what unity looks like: there is one. We looked at all those things.
Now today, we want to see: How is unity achieved? How do we get this unity? How do we maintain this unity? What is the way that God has for us to maintain this unity? So that is where we are going to start this morning.
But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
Therefore it says, “When He ascended on high, He led captive a host of captives, and He gave gifts to men.”
Now this expression, “He ascended,” what does it mean except that He also had descended into the lower parts of the earth?
He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, so that He might fill all things.
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers,
for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ,
until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.
As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming;
but holding the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ,
from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
Now, I do not know how far we are going to get today. I planned to get through this whole section, but I cannot do it if I am going to say something about everything. I am not a person who can say something about everything. The things the Lord has touched me with, I think those are the things we will go on with.
It starts off by saying, “There is one,” and then we come to this place that says, “But to each one.” So now, in our unity, we have many. How can it be that you have many in unity?
First of all, it is not uniformity. If it were uniformity, it would be like one of those prep schools where everybody wears the same uniform. We all look alike, we all think alike, and we all do alike. That is not what the Lord is after.
We talked about last time the body being a perfect picture of unity. But in the body, in our natural body, everything is not just one big hand, or one big trunk of the body. We have many parts, and inside of us, if you cut us open, there are many other different things that we do not even see, but we know are there.
There is not uniformity, but there is unity. I liken it to baseball because I like baseball so much. On a baseball team, you do not have all pitchers. You have people who specialize in the infield, people who specialize in the outfield, catchers, and pitchers. Even among pitchers, you have those who specialize in different things.
That is what we are talking about. There is not uniformity in the body, but there is unity. The question is: How is that unity maintained?
Paul goes on, saying, “But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.”
Now, grace—we know that we are saved by grace. In reading this, some say, “Well, this is not saving grace.” Brothers and sisters, I think all grace is saving grace. That is my own opinion.
When it talks in Ephesians 2 that we are saved by grace, I think there are different facets of grace that we look at. As we look at a diamond, you can see light reflected in different ways.
I think one facet of the grace we were talking about even this morning is the love of God for us—the love of God that goes out to us who are unworthy. That unmerited love, that unmerited favor. That is the thing that first brings us to repentance: to know that someone loves us this way, and we repent.
But also, when we read those familiar verses, Ephesians 2:8–10, where it says that we are saved by grace, not of ourselves, it also says in verse 10 that we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. I think there is another aspect of grace.
Grace is also something that enables us. We are going to be talking a little bit about gifts, and the gifts that are given are gifts of grace. These are graces. I think the word is charis. But also, with those gifts comes the enabling—not the enabling of a natural man, but the enabling of the Holy Spirit of God.
That enabling, in the use of that gift, builds up other brothers and sisters. That is how unity is maintained.
So when we look at verse 7, it says grace is given according to the measure of Christ. This is not like looking in my cupboard and seeing cups of all different shapes and sizes. It does not make any one of them less than a cup. They are all cups; they are just different shapes and sizes.
When I am really thirsty, I use a real big one. When one of my daughters is drinking, she uses a little cup because she does not drink as much. But let us not get caught up on, “Well, I have got a bigger measure than you,” because that is not the issue.
The issue is what is in you—Who is in you. What is in that cup? What is it filled with? It is the measure of Christ. If we are going to get caught up on the size of the cup, then we have lost unity altogether. It is what He puts in the cup that is the unity.
It does not have to do with how much we have. It is our brothers and sisters, and people in the world, touching that measure of Christ.
He has filled us up. Then, if you look at the parable of the talents, there are two versions of it: one where everybody gets the same, and one where everybody gets different. But the whole thing is, He says, “Go out and do business with it. Go out and let it be touched. Go out and spend it, because that is what I have given for you to do.”
As we talk about maintaining unity, it is not just that we have this measure of Christ. It is: Are we letting others touch it? Are we spending it? Are we spending it? That is where it is at.
Of course, this is Christ’s gift. Then Paul goes on and recites a psalm, or part of a psalm. The psalm, to my knowledge, is not a Messianic psalm, so to speak. I do not think the Jews look at this as Messianic. But it is a picture in Psalm 68.
In it, there is a picture of somebody coming in. People say different things about who is coming in: the ark coming up to Jerusalem, or a conqueror coming in. To me, if we read Psalm 68, it looks like somebody coming in who has conquered.
In this picture, it says, “When He ascended on high.” In other words, this conqueror is coming up the hill to take His place. It says, “He led captive a host of captives, and He gave gifts to men.”
I am not going to expound on the psalm itself. There is a little difference in it. The psalm says, “He received,” but the Hebrew actually has the idea that He received to give.
What Paul is saying is, “When He ascended,” and the picture is Christ ascending into heaven. Before he goes on, he says, “Let me stop here and tell you this: the One who has ascended, before He could ascend, first He had to come down.”
Now, brothers and sisters, this right here is a capsule of the gospel. There is no gospel first without Him descending. That is what we were worshiping this morning: that the Lord came down from heaven. He became man for us.
It says that He came to the earth. There are different interpretations: Is He talking about just coming to earth? Is He talking about going into the grave? Is He talking about going to hell? I think He came down; He came to earth. I would even go as far as saying He went to the grave.
But our salvation is based on the fact that He came to earth and became man. He became like us because there was no redeeming outside of Him doing that. So He had to descend.
It was not just that He descended. In His descent, He had to become like us. Is it not wonderful to think that He was not born in a palace? How many of us could relate to that? But He was born in a lowly estate.
Not only that—and I love this—He grew up. For you who are especially teenagers and below, He submitted to His parents, just like you. He became every bit like us.
I love that section in Luke where His mom and dad came back, and it says that He went back and submitted to His parents. Then He had a job. Praise the Lord that He made Him so He had a job. He worked as a carpenter. He paid bills. He did all the things that we did.
Last time, we talked about baptism being our identifying with Him, but He identified with us totally in every way except sinning. Total identification, so that He could be the High Priest who can relate to us and who can succor us in time of need. He is all that for us.
He descended first. Having descended, He took upon Himself the sin of the world, that we might be reconciled. He died the death of a criminal, and He died the death of a curse so that we might live.
A lot of us leave it there. Or we even go so far as saying, “Yes, He rose from the dead,” which is a wonderful thing, but we leave it even there. He did more than die and rise from the dead. He ascended on high into heaven.
Now, what does that mean for us? I cannot tell you what it means to God to have a man who ascended. I do not know. But I do know what it means for me.
When it says, “He led captivity captive,” I used to think that the captivity He led captive was us. I can justify that. I can go back and say, “Look at the Old Testament. Look at Exodus. You have all the Jews who were captive. Passover comes, and all the captives are let out.”
That is a wonderful picture. I like to think of myself as being let out, captive to the Lord. But that is not what I think He is talking about. I think He is talking about His leading captive all the things—all the ones—that He has conquered.
Who has He conquered? What has He conquered? We know for sure from His death that He has conquered sin—the power of sin. Because He has conquered sin, He has conquered death. His resurrection shows that.
Because He has conquered sin and death, He has conquered the king of sin and death, who was Satan and all his minions. He has led them away, and He is leading them away to their just punishment, to their just separation.
So what does that mean for me? This is a very familiar passage. If we go to Romans 8, I am sure many of you have memorized this. But this is what it means, I believe, to us as believers.
What shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?
He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?
Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the One who justifies;
who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Just as it is written, “For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Brothers and sisters, I think all of that is what we have in that ascension of Christ. It is not just that we are not separated, though. He gave gifts. There was an empowerment.
But I do want to stress this: brothers and sisters, know for certain that there is nothing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ because of what Jesus has done—because He descended, because He has risen, because He has ascended.
There is nothing. Nothing. You may feel otherwise, but the truth of the matter is that He has led captivity captive. They are chained.
Even though we see the shaking in the earth today, and we see all these horrible things happening, they are the throes of death for the enemy. Even though we must live through some of them, the thing is, they are chained. They are chained, and they are going to their just deserts.
But we, on the other hand, have been set free. We, on the other hand, cannot be separated because He has won the victory. He has conquered already, and He has given gifts.
Now, what does this mean, that He has given gifts to us? Then it goes on and talks about some, and you look at these gifts. It says apostles, and you say, “Those are gifts? Those are people.” They are gifts. Sometimes people are gifts.
These are gifts. Some of them are positions, but some of them are things given. These are not the gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12, where it talks about all sorts of other gifts, but He gives these four gifts as a means for unity.
Apostles. We read in Ephesians 2 about the gift of apostles. I will tell you what the gift of apostles is: it is to lay a foundation, so that nothing shakes. They are the ones who go through and lay the foundation.
In order to lay that foundation, the Lord gifted many of these men with miracles and with revelation that no one else had, all in order to lay these foundations so that our faith is not in men, but in God who raises the dead.
That is the job of an apostle. Are there apostles today? Well, it depends on who you read. I think the apostles we read about in Acts and such are Apostles with a capital “A”—not that they are big saints or something like that, but because the work they did was the original laying down of foundations.
If you look at the word apostle, it really means someone who was sent. I do believe that there are those who are sent even today who do foundational work. There are missionaries who go into places where the Word has never been, where people do not know, and they lay a foundation.
I think the Lord gifts them with different things, and different things happen with those people, and they lay down that foundation. I think part of the work of an apostle is seen in translating the Word. What do they need the Word for? It is a foundation for their faith.
There are believers who need that foundation still. I still think there are apostles. As long as there are unsaved people, there are apostles. These apostles were evangelists also, but they went out and laid the foundation.
It was not something to be grasped. Let me tell you something about apostles: You might think, “Oh, if I were only Paul, I would have it made. He had all this knowledge and all this wonderful ministry.”
1 Corinthians 4 is a great passage. In 1 Corinthians 4:9, Paul writes about being an apostle:
For, I think, God has exhibited us apostles last of all, as men condemned to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.
We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are prudent in Christ; we are weak, but you are strong; you are distinguished, but we are without honor.
To this present hour we are both hungry and thirsty, and are poorly clothed, and are roughly treated, and are homeless;
and we toil, working with our own hands; when we are reviled, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure;
when we are slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now.
What a glorious calling. No, it is a glorious calling, because in all of that they knew the overcoming power of the Lord to do what He had called them to do.
These apostles: Peter was crucified, Paul was beheaded, and John, they say, was dipped in boiling oil. But they laid their lives down so the Lord could do His work and so there would be unity in the body.
There will only be unity in the body with the laying down of life. They laid it down for a foundation, but that does not mean other people do not lay down their lives for the things they have to do. Here we see the foundation-laying. They are the stones; they are the pillars.
Prophets—here is another one that people say we do not have anymore because we have the Word of God. At this time, I think New Testament prophets had revelation like the apostles and helped in the teaching because there were no New Testament Scriptures.
The Lord revealed things to them, and I think that was either to show that the apostles’ teaching was right or to enlighten. These prophets also have a foundation-laying ministry.
Now, do we have prophets today? Yes, I think we do, because what is a prophet? A prophet is someone who speaks for God. I think he speaks for God to the generation he is living with, or to the day he is living in.
For example, Hosea spoke as an Old Testament prophet to the time he lived in. When he married the harlot, it was a picture of what was going on in that day, and God’s dealing with him was the way God felt about His people.
What about today? I think one of the people who was a prophet for the generation before me was A. W. Tozer. Read his writings. Something about a prophet is that a prophet has a corrective ministry.
Read Tozer. It is corrective. It is trying to put people back on track, all through his ministry. Read his books. I suggest you do: The Pursuit of God, Born After Midnight, The Incredible Christian.
They are corrective ministries, but they are full of the love of God, and they have a power in them. That is something about the apostles: the apostles had an authority, and the prophets have an authority. Their teaching is not like the teaching of men. It comes from heaven. It has heaven standing behind it.
When the apostles taught, especially as we are talking about the Apostle Paul, it was infallible.
It also says there are evangelists. Evangelists are heralds. They go out spreading the good news. Sometimes these apostles were evangelists themselves, because there is no rule that a person can have only one gift.
Sometimes evangelists went ahead of them. For example, we are studying Acts. Peter did not go to Samaria preaching the gospel. Who did? It was Philip. Peter came afterward.
We were studying Acts 9 and said, “How did they get believers in Lydda and Joppa?” Well, maybe it was the ministry of Philip, because he was down in Azotus, which is down on the coast, and then traveled up to Caesarea. Maybe he was preaching the gospel on the way.
Evangelists lay the groundwork. They are the heralds. They smooth the way.
Then you have pastors and teachers. Pastors and teachers are sometimes looked at as one gift; some people look at them as two gifts. I can go either way with that.
One thing that I lack in my life is that pastoral heart. I know it. I pray about that. But these are a gift to people. A pastor is a shepherd. They give oversight, they guide, they counsel, and they administrate.
A teacher puts you on the right path as far as right ways of thinking, showing you what you do have. Together, they work together.
In the body, there are many pastors and many teachers. That is a gift that should be functioning. It is for us to search our hearts. You know when the Lord is doing something; the Lord is talking to you about things like this.
The reason God has given these gifts is for the equipping of the saints. I am going to get into what that means in just a minute, but let us look at how this works. What is God really talking about?
Have you ever seen tract housing built? Let us compare this to tract housing. First, you have graders come through and grade the land. Those are evangelists. They come through and make the land ready for what is next.
Next come the people who do the foundation. They come in with their backhoes, dig out the trenches, and this is really dirty work. They have stakes and sledgehammers. They have to put those stakes far enough into the ground so that when they put the forms up to hold the concrete, they are not going to blow out.
Sometimes the land is really nice, plowed nicely, sandy, and easy. But if you go to Rancho Cucamonga, California—I know because I worked there—it is the rockiest ground. Some of those rocks, you see just the top of them, but underneath they are huge.
Here you are with your little wooden stake and your eight-pound sledge, trying to put that in because the house goes there. You find a way to do it. That is laying the foundation.
Then the prophets are the guys who work the transit. You know what a transit is? You see those guys with little telescopes, looking through them, while another guy stands over there with a pole. Those are the prophets, because they come and say, “Okay, too high. Too low.”
They are also the guys who, once you put up your stakes and nail up your boards to hold the concrete, square the house. They take the measurements and see if it is squared off. They see if it is all right. That is what a prophet does: he makes the corrections. This has to be done.
Then the pastors and teachers are like the contractors, subcontractors, and lead men. First, they know what they are doing and what is going on. They get the workers and say, “Okay, we supply them with what they need. We need drywall, we need lumber, we have all the supplies there,” and then they set them to the places where they work.
The rest of the congregation, who are not in these positions of these gifts, take up their place. You could have drywallers, framers, or plumbers. According to what their contractors show them their job is, they go and do their thing in building that house.
The wonderful thing about these lead men and foremen is that they work right with the other workers. They might go from place to place. They go to one house and say, “Okay, everything is going here.” They go to another house, and if someone is having a problem, they help fix it. They are there with them.
They do not leave them to themselves. They do not just say, “Here are the instructions. Go figure it out yourself,” like when you get a lawnmower. They are there to help you.
What about those of us who do not have these gifts? Does that mean our gift is to sit down and listen? I think sometimes, if you look at America today, that is what most people think their gift is: “What is your gift?” “I sit down. I listen.”
But what is it? It says these gifts—these teachers, these apostles—have been given for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, or for the work of service, for the building up of the saints.
In other words, a teacher is like a quartermaster. He is saying, “Here are the supplies. You take them. You work with them, because it is your gift. Your gift might be this, your gift might be that, your gift might be the other thing. I am just supplying you.”
Maybe it is encouragement. We hear a brother speak, and it means something to some people; it means something else to someone else. I think that depends on their gift. They are convicted in this way. They are encouraged in that way to do this thing or that thing in response to that ministry.
These gifts are not meant to say, “Well, I am a teacher. You just have helps.” Brothers and sisters, if something is really important, do you have a lot of them or a few of them? I think you have a lot.
Do you think more people have the gift of teaching, or more people have the gift of helps? Why? Because the gift of helps and these smaller gifts are something that, when you go off and you are on your own—well, I mean, we are here right now, and a lot of people are sitting down—but when we all go home, how are we connected?
Is this the only place we are connected—right here? If it is, we are in trouble, because that is not a body. A body is connected all the time.
Different parts are connected. I can say that my foot is connected in my body, but one thing that is really important, too, is the ankle. The leg is going to be really concerned with the foot. The arm might say, “That is just the foot,” but there are things in close proximity that are there to help that.
So it is with us. When we go home to our different places, we are set in the body. We are set differently. We are set with people who have gifts, and when they are all functioning, it is like they all fit together. It does not mean they all do the same thing, but they fit together to do something.
For example, to make my foot walk, besides it having to be connected to the brain, I need strong bones. Out of the strong bones, I better have good tendons down there, and good connections to the muscles, which are connected to the legs. I sure better have good circulation, so blood gets down there. I better have a clear way from the spinal cord all the way down here to make it move.
Those are all different things. They are all different parts, but they all make the foot work. That is true for us. We are fitted together in our place according to the gift that He has given us so that we can make the body work. We make it function.
Now, why do we want these gifts? Why do we want it so that we are ministering and building up the body? What is the purpose of all this?
It says, “Until we attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man.” Ladies, let me ask you this. Let us talk about a mature man.
You go into a restaurant and see a guy who is twenty-five. Some of you guys are going to have to imagine that you are younger. The guy is buffed out. I mean, he fills his shirt. Looking good in every way, has the hair down—he is something else.
You go and sit down with him, take the salt shaker, and he grabs it and says, “Mine.” What do you think of this guy? His body sure is mature, but the rest of him is not. He is acting like a child, is he not?
Until we attain to a mature man. It is not the outside that is the only thing that counts; it is the whole man. It is no good to have just a couple of good legs if the rest of the body is emaciated. It is no good just to have the form of something if the character is shot.
We want to bring a mature man. A mature man is not just mature in body, but in mind and spirit. That is what the Lord is after in the giving of these gifts: the maturing man.
What does it mean, the unity of the faith? We could say, “Well, this means everybody believes the same doctrine.” No, it does not. Let me give you a picture of the unity of the faith.
If you go back to Numbers 13 and 14, you have a picture of unity of the faith. Here are twelve spies sent out into the land. They come in, see good things, come back, and give a report.
Ten of them say, “We cannot go in there. There are giants in the land. They are so much bigger than us.” Two of them say, “Oh yes, we can do it because God is with us.” There is no unity there. The ten poisoned the minds of the rest, and they did not go in.
The unity of the faith, I think, is our coming to the place where we trust God in being Who He is and in His plans, and we allow Him to be Who He is. I think that is the unity of the faith.
It is not that we believe in the pre-tribulation rapture of all saints, or that we believe in multiple raptures, or that I believe in baptism by immersion and you believe in some other type of baptism, or that I believe all the gifts are present and you do not. That is not what we are talking about.
The unity of the faith is our believing in God and believing what He says about what He is doing and His ability to do it. We are all believing so that we all go in together, and there is nothing stopping us. That is the unity of the faith.
For thirty-eight years, they had to wander until they came to some unity of the faith to enter into the land, to the place where God wants us. Is it not interesting that Peter says we can hasten the day of His coming? How is that?
I think it is by letting God be God—seeing His plans and agreeing with Him as a whole, not holding back. The unity of faith and the knowledge of Him: He is well able to do what He said. The knowledge of Who He is. There is no doubt about Who Christ is, what He has done, His place, and that He is the head—not just some force in the church.
It says, “Until we attain to that unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” In other words, He is able to do what He wants to do because His body is completely one with Him.
I know I have talked about it before, but it would be so weird if our physical body did not have control of itself. Some people who are quadriplegics or paraplegics have something wrong physically; they do not have control of all their body or all their body functions.
But if we did not have control, just think of the chaos that would happen on this earth. You would be driving your car, and all of a sudden your hand wants to do this and your leg wants to do that. It just does not fit.
For unity, His body works as one in connection with its head, doing what He wants it to do.
It says, “As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming.”
I wonder about this: trickery and deceit. Where does trickery and deceit come from? The father of all lies, right? We know that the father of all lies has been defeated.
We should no longer be like children. Paul said, “When I was a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” There are lots of us, as we grow up in the faith, who have different ideas about this and that, but then we grow up. Those things do not matter.
I remember it was real big: if you did not believe in the tribulation rapture of all saints, man, you were out of there. They looked funny at you. But as I grow older, I start to think, “That is not what makes me able to relate to you.”
What makes me able to relate to you is that you have Christ in you and I have Christ in me. There is fellowship there. That is what does it. Growing up.
It says, “But holding the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head.” I know I am kind of glossing this over, but I want to end with one thing that I think is really important.
It says:
Grow up into Him who is the head, even Christ,
from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part,
causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
The point I want to make here is this little word, “joint.” This is a word I started to think about. What does this mean? What does it mean that every joint supplies?
I was trying to think of the body. You can have all these joints and things like that, but it did not do it for me. Then the Lord brought something to mind: I used to work in a greenhouse.
I used to have to do the sprinkler system for the greenhouse. In doing the sprinkler system, you had to attach all the PVC pipe. There were a couple of different joints we used.
One was a coupling joint. All the coupling joint does is this: You take one pipe, take another pipe, put them together, put that coupling joint over them, and they are joined together. That allows the water to go through.
The other is a four-way joint. It takes four pipes. You put them in like this and like that. Now, it does not only join those four together, but each one of the other ones leads to another pipe that has been joined somewhere else. All the supply goes out from there.
All I am saying is this: How do we maintain this unity? It is through these joints, and joints are points of union. That is all it is. A joint is a point of union.
My encouragement today is this: Do you have a joint of union in the body here in our assembly, or are you just by yourself?
We are not meant to be by ourselves. Even when God created Adam, He said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” As believers, it is not good for you to be alone.
We are meant to be joined. If we are part of a body, we are meant to be part of a body. We are meant to be joined. Where is your point of union?
If you know where your point of union is, then you supply what you are and what you give to that. That person supplies back to you, and that is what knits you together. That is how you are built up, because here is where you find the care for one another that builds up the body.
This is where people can say, “See how they love one another.” They will know we are Christians in that way—not just by saying, “I believe this,” but by seeing our care for one another.
Every joint has a supply. Brothers and sisters, all of you have a gift, but that gift is to work in unison with others in that joint of supply.
When we gather together here in the big gathering, we are here to celebrate the Lord. But when we go to those Sunday meetings, those Friday-night meetings, or other meetings in the neighborhood—when we are with the people around our neighborhood and say, “I know you are going through this. Can I pray for you? I am bringing food over,” or whatever—that is a joint of supply.
The joints of supply are not supposed to be a joint for one time. Could you imagine if the wrist were only there for two minutes and then it was gone? What would happen to my hand? It would not be as useful because it would not be as flexible.
The joint of supply is there always. That does not mean you cannot move. I moved from California. The thing is, have you found your joint of supply? Are you looking for it? Are you looking to be connected in that way?
Because that is our unity. Our unity is being connected. It is not in our doctrine; it is in our being connected to one another in love. That is what it says: built up in love, and love for one another.
I know I have not done a great job as far as expounding great truths, but I just want to say this: We are a body. We are meant to be a body, and we are meant to function as a body.
That is what we should be thinking, seeking: “Lord, where is my function? Where is my joint of supply? Help me to find it, so I can be a strength to the brothers and sisters, and they can be a strength to me.”
Let us pray.
Lord, thank You that You would have nobody on the outside. Lord, when You died on the cross, we all came into You, and You would leave none of us outside. Even though You have risen from the dead and You are ascended, You would leave none of us to the side.
Lord, for some of us, this means taking up the cross and denying ourselves—maybe because we do not particularly care for the people we are around, or whatever it is. Lord, if that is the case, then deal with us and change our hearts.
Lord, some of us are just figuring that we do not belong because we feel that we are so different. Lord, bring those alongside who will make us feel that we do belong.
Lord, there are those of us who do not know what gifts are and such. But we are asking, Lord, let us know what You are using us for to supply. Help us, Lord, to be diligent in doing that, even if it is little things.
Oh, bless them, Lord. Secure these joints of supply, Lord. Make them firm, and make them avenues of great blessing to the whole body as the body goes on here.
Lord, we do not know what else to say. We just say, “Lord, this is too great to understand, to think about.” Lord, in another way, we say we want everything that is talked about. We want to be joints of supply. We want to be those doing our part in the building up of the house of God.
Please show us, show us, direct us, we pray, O Great Shepherd, in Jesus’ name.