Starting 5 . Unity & Maturity

Hey Red Door family, well, welcome to this Sunday's house church content.

or on whatever day you happen to be participating in September's House Church.

So I just have a few announcements to share with you before Adam comes

and brings the final installment on our starting five series.

So what do you need to know about what is going on over the next

couple of weeks here at Red Door?

Well, firstly, just wanted to let you know Bye.

Bye.

Project 73 kicks off again for a new rotation for another 73

weeks on the 30th of September.

We would really encourage you to jump on.

You can do this at thereddoor.

cc forward slash 73.

where all the information is there for you to access this Bible reading plan.

Reading through the entirety of the word of God is a very, very good

thing to do on multiple levels.

The word of God is our authority in life, in faith and in practice.

And so it's so important that we know it.

It is also alive and it is active.

It is fuel.

It is food for our souls and for our minds.

It is truth.

It is goodness.

It is something that is so important that we hold to, that we return

to, that we daily are alive.

feeding on, learning, trusting in, so it encourage you strongly.

And even if you don't start on the 30th of September, you can jump in at any time.

This Bible reading plan is awesome.

It is wonderful.

It is incredibly helpful.

So jump online and have a look.

Beautiful.

All right, our next announcement is called a prayer, which is coming up this

Tuesday, which is the 1st of October.

Come gather here at seven o'clock for a 7.

30 start, where we're going to press into a time of prayer and worship.

Like last month, we're going to encourage you to spend the day leading up.

To our prayer and worship gathering, fasting, and then we'll gather

together for this corporate time of prayer and worship as well.

And again, we really want to keep pressing in to what are the promises

of God that you are standing on, that you are holding to.

So we really want you to come and be able to.

You know, share what is that promise that you are standing on to encourage

others to encourage your own soul also and, yeah, to come collectively and to

bring that voice of what it is that we are holding to, in the various, I guess,

challenges and, Testings that many of us are finding ourselves in, in this season.

And so that is the 1st of October.

Then finally on the 6th of October, we have our worship night at

the Naval Store in Fremantle.

This is beginning at 4.

30 for a five o'clock start.

We'd encourage you all to be there for 4.

30 because there is going to be a bit of a recording going on.

Just recording some of our worship for future house.

Church content, not the main purpose of the evening.

The main purpose of the evening is to worship God together,

corporately, collectively.

So come ready to participate.

Worship is so incredibly powerful.

It's so incredibly precious and there is just something that is so when

God's children gather together with the simple agenda of lifting up his name

with our voices in praise and worship.

So feel free to invite friends, family, strangers along.

You are more than welcome.

And so 4.

30, come along.

It's going to be an absolutely beautiful night together.

All right, church family.

Now, Adam is going to come, bring the word around a final

installment for Starting Five.

Hey Church family, welcome to House Church, great to see you.

What a rich season we've had in this series over the last

two months, Starting Five.

As we've been jumping into, looking deeper into, Ephesians chapter

four, verses one to sixteen.

We're not going to read that entire book.

Passage of Scripture right now.

I would love you to read it together as a group during your discussion

time But in these last two months we've been looking at the five

callings, intelligences, giftings, functions of the apest, the apostolic,

the prophetic, the evangelistic, the shepherding, the teacher.

As we've been looking at those, sometimes it can be easy to forget The main

vision, the main why, the main context of what God has in mind for his church.

A way of thinking about those first 16 verses is to break

it down into these four ideas.

Grace for unity, ground for unity, gifts for unity, and growth for unity.

Or in another way, maturity for unity.

The main thrust of this section is unity for the purpose of growing

us into mature followers of Jesus.

Amen.

Unity is not about conformity or uniformity, even though at certain

times in our society, in certain areas of life, those things are necessary.

But this unity we speak of here is not what the Church of Jesus is called into.

We are called, not called to create unity.

We're called to maintain unity.

Jesus has created our unity.

He has established our unity through His death on the cross, through

His resurrection from the dead.

You We are spiritually one.

We are family.

We are one in Christ, spiritually speaking.

But the Spirit of God is calling all of us to live like that is true.

The defining factor concerning biblical unity, the kind of unity that requires us

all to bring our differences to the table, to our relationships, to our connections.

Actually, unity needs our differences.

So it's clear that there's something else in this case a someone who makes us

one and not our sameness Our similarity.

No, we are all different.

Our differences actually prove that our unity in Jesus is Real.

The unity we speak of here is not just a work of the flesh like trying

better, doing better, trying harder It's actually a work of the Spirit,

a work of the grace of God through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And so when we consider, firstly, grace for unity in those verses two

and three, it says to be completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing

with one another in love, make every effort to keep the unity of the

Spirit through the bond of peace.

Just quickly picking up on those.

Four first, four concepts there.

Humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another.

Humility, being humble, is the opposite of pride.

Do I want to be right at the expense of unity?

It's a choice.

I value unity above being right.

A spirit birth humility is thinking less of myself and trusting God

for His efforts in the midst of my journey, not my own personal effort.

Gentleness is the idea of Firstly, avoiding being domineering.

Dominate, not dominating, being gentle in our approach with one another.

When I think about that idea, we, to be gentle has got a concept around thinking

about when we're having a conversation, the timing of that conversation,

the tone of that conversation, and the tact of that conversation.

Do we have gentleness?

But there's another side to gentleness, and it's, it actually isn't being nice.

Gentleness doesn't mean being nice.

Nowhere in the Bible does the word nice appear, actually.

Because nice is this sort of fearful dynamic where we're not

going to talk about things that are difficult, not talking about things

that are challenging to talk about.

Actually, I can still be gentle and speak about difficult things

to each other in relationships.

Gentleness is not, doesn't restrict me from having truthful conversations.

Thirdly, patience.

Every good thing in life takes time.

It's a necessity.

Have you ever tried to run five kilometers?

I'm recently trying to run five kilometers at the moment.

Running is not my forte.

What's interesting is if you've ever taken that journey of, of learning how to

run at a certain, to a certain distance, you immediately have patience for other

people who are learning as well, because you had to go through the same journey.

Patience.

These are graces for unity.

The last one, bearing with one another.

Yeah.

I have to put up with you.

You have to put up with me.

What do I mean?

Bearing with one another is not talking about sweeping sin under the carpet.

It's talking about bearing one another.

Yes, forgiving one another when we sin against one another.

Yes, forgiving one another.

But it also includes This idea of forbearance.

Interesting word, we might not use it a lot, but to forbear with one another's

quirks, strangeness, uniquenesses, those idiosyncrasies that make us us.

Those weird parts of us.

Bearing with one another is how we show grace towards unity.

Those four aspects, being humble, gentle, patient, bearing with one another.

But when you experience the grace of God, his kiss on your heart, these

things flow out of our lives as a response to that grace, grace for unity,

so important as we move through this early part of Ephesians chapter four.

So grace for unity, ground for unity, very simply.

The scripture from verse four says there's one body, one spirit, just as you were

called to one hope when you were called, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one

God and father of all who is over all.

In all and through all.

This is the foundation of where our unity is located.

Our unity is in God.

Just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one, we are called to be likewise.

If you can't find unity in Jesus because of a particular matter of

conflict, there's reason to ask the question if you have made that

matter more important than Jesus.

Like, is Jesus big enough to handle your conflict?

Or, no, I can't have a relationship with you anymore, you know?

Because we don't have a strong enough ground to stand on.

The ground is shaky, but the revelation, the truth, is that the

ground we stand on is so firm, we can still maintain relationship because

Jesus work on the cross makes our ground a firm foundation to stand on.

So ground for unity.

Thirdly, gifts for unity.

Verses 7 to 11.

It's important to see that Christ does not give people the gift of apest.

He gives you, yes you, equipped with apest as a gift to the people around you.

Do you see the difference?

One way of seeing it is you see the idea of the fivefold as a gift to you.

Versus, seeing yourself as a gift to the church, and yes, you are

a gift, equipped to be a gift to the church, the people around you.

The quote that's in this section of Psalm 68 verse 5.

Psalms 68:5

Which is an interesting little part of the Ephesians four is a warfare image,

a warfare image, the conquering king Captures a city and he gives the plunder.

He gives the gifts to his people.

Then there's this Explanatory in brackets you'll read there, which when you first

read it can be quite confusing But basically Jesus came down from heaven.

He had descended to earth And upon his resurrection, he ascended as king of all

kings and seated at the right hand of God, the conquering King, King Jesus captures

the hearts of people, and he gives gifts to those who are now his children.

How do we know that Jesus ascended safely and was actually

seated at the right hand of God?

The Holy Spirit came to us, came down, Pentecost, the birth of the church.

The Holy Spirit comes to seal believers with the gift of the Holy Spirit,

confirming and sealing and guaranteeing the fact that we are children of

God and giving us his church himself through the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the

pastors, the teachers to equip the people for the works of service so

the body of Christ may be built up.

When we talk about, and we've talked about at length in these last number of

weeks, the specifics about each of these gifts, keep in mind that the thrust is

not the individual gifts themselves, but rather the way these gifts operate in

the mindset of a team, the starting five.

So this is not just about knowing your individual gift.

It's also about being very aware, almost more conscious of those

gifts of the people around you.

So you can operate together.

If you haven't done the, the, the, APEST, questionnaire, the, the,

the test, you can go to it, it's on the website right now, 5qtests.

com.

I encourage you to do that.

And a few people in the last few weeks have been sending me

their numbers, their results.

I'd love to get those.

You don't have to send them to me, but just an option as we continue

to look at the, the makeup of our church family here at Red Door.

So lastly.

Just to recap, grace for unity, ground for unity, gifts for

unity, and growth for unity.

Growth for unity.

This is growing in maturity.

One way of thinking about growing up.

Growing up is a movement from and to something.

So these few statements might help.

It's a movement, maturity is a movement from growing, growing from toys to tools.

Growing from me to tools.

Growing from rights to responsibilities.

Growing from convenience to conviction.

Growing from now to later.

Growing in our ability to speak truth in love.

So let's take the problem, let's take an example of how the fullness

of the apest is meant to minister to the fullness of the apest.

What do I mean by that?

How the fullness of the church is meant to minister to the church itself.

Thank you.

The problem at hand here, the example I'm going to use, is the idea of

when your marriage has a problem.

The fullness of the apest is that when you're with a person who's more

apostolic, they may say something to the effect of, your marriage

cannot stay the same as it is today.

Do you know that your marriage can be the greatest witness of the gospel?

Do you know that your marriage could have a vision like that?

The apostolic giving vision, giving, giving a sense of what the future holds,

something better than it is today.

The prophet, the prophet might say this, Hey, your work life balance sucks.

Actually, you're so lazy, you're not investing into your marriage.

It's important.

There's a directness in the prophet.

We need people to speak truth the way things really are into our lives.

The evangelist might come to your marriage and say, Hey, without, without Jesus in

your marriage, it's going to be tough.

Have you invited him into your marriage?

Have you invited him to take part in the everyday parts of your marriage?

Have you invited him?

The shepherd would say, Hey, can we meet for the next three

weeks at our house over dinner?

I think there's some wounds that might need to be soothed and given time to heal.

The teacher might come and say, Hey, there's five things.

I don't think you know about marriage, about biblical marriage.

Can I explain them to you?

If you're an A in that situation, you don't necessarily

need to hear from more A's.

You probably got that.

When we allow these differences, 'cause we're all different, if we allow

these differences to push others away from us, because, well, that person's

just not, not like, not like me.

We're gonna struggle to grow up.

We're gonna struggle to grow into maturity.

It's the rubbing up against one another.

The friction of those differences, those differences, in people who are different.

To me, those differences form us.

They shape us.

That more, the more we welcome those differences.

of others and come to celebrate those differences in others, the more we

grow up, I would suggest the more we would grow up into Jesus, because we

have to access more of those graces for unity that I mentioned at the

beginning, humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another.

Don't those sound like the fruit of the spirit to you?

And so as we ponder these dynamics towards unity and maturity, I'd love

you to share communion with one another.

Communion is a statement that we are one.

In the discussion time, there's questions on the one page, on the on one page notes

you'll find on the app and on the website.

Click on that.

The PDF will come up with some discussion questions.

What's not on there on those on that one page discussion sheet is have you

spent time just sharing a little bit more about who you think you are in the

apest model so that everyone in your house church has a clearer understanding

of the makeup of their house church.

I'd love you to spend time doing that.

Thanks for tuning in today.

God bless you and we'll look forward to seeing you soon.

Take care.