Battle Ready: "One of a Kind ": Ephesians 4.4-6 Pastor Daniel Reese

Good morning.

If you have your Bibles Ephesians chapter 4,

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

here's where we're going to be.

We're gonna do verses 4 through 6 this morning.

And we're just gonna jump right into it. How about that?

So here we go. There's one body and one spirit.

This is your call to one hope that belongs to your call.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all

who is over all and through all and in all.

Amen.

So in the previous three verses that we covered last week,

Paul was discussing unity as believers.

Because of the calling that we have received,

and in light of who God is and in light of what he has done,

he's beginning to show us what that looks like and how we are supposed to live.

Now Paul is kind of breaking down what that looks like.

And in these three verses, Paul is going to show us exactly what should unite us.

We all have different backgrounds.

We all have different families, different hobbies, different interests.

But as believers, we can celebrate our differences

while also being united in what we believe about God.

Unity does not mean uniformity.

We're not asking you to conform to how we do things.

We don't all have to be exactly alike.

But these verses are the fundamentals with which we must agree

in order to have unity.

When you think of the number seven in the context of Scripture,

it is the number of God.

It's the number of completion.

So as Paul gives us seven things that unify,

he is referring not to how we are just unified together,

but how we are unified with God.

So let's look at seven things that all believers in Jesus should have in common.

The first one is one body.

One body.

Paul is not talking about the church here at Cornerstone,

or he's not speaking only to this church body here at Cornerstone.

He is referring to the body of believers all over the world.

All those that proclaim faith in Jesus, that surrender to him as Savior,

that's who he is speaking of.

He's referring, believe it or not, to different denominations.

Now it can be said that as individuals, as an individual body,

we are to function as one.

1 Corinthians 12 states that we are members of one body.

We need our body to be healthy and striving for the same purpose.

Colossians 3, 15 says,

let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,

to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,

teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom,

singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

What unites us is Christ,

and as His words dwell in us, dwell in our hearts,

we will become more unified.

It is coming in here and understanding that we might think different politically.

We might have different views on what it means to raise children,

but we put that aside to function with one purpose.

We have to begin to believe what the Bible says we are.

Too many people try to be someone else,

not understanding that God has gifted each one of us

with certain gifts for the purpose of His kingdom.

If we are truly one body, like the Bible says that we are,

then we need each person living out their giftings as part of God's grand design.

When it came out several years ago,

I would watch American Idol with my family.

If you think back to American Idol,

and you think back to the audition round,

my family and I would laugh and cringe at some of the contestants.

People hated Simon Cowell because he said it like it was.

He said what needed to be said,

you cannot sing. That was horrible.

You are wasting my time.

In reality, that was one of the most loving things that Simon could have done for them.

Because reality is their parents, their family have been telling them all along,

you can sing, go embarrass yourself on national television.

Too many people in their lives had told them they could sing

when in reality they couldn't hold a pitch if their life depended on it.

Mom and Dad weren't showing love by encouraging them to go make a full of themselves.

As one body, we need to understand who we are as Christians,

who we are in the image of God and stand together.

Too many churches are living the American Idol syndrome

and being told by culture that they will be more successful

if they forget what the Word of God says and go with what is popular at this time.

That hurts the body of believers all around the world.

The most loving thing we can do as a body of believers is to understand who we are,

let the words of God dwell in us so that we can point out off pitch singing when it comes our way.

So that we can point out sin when it's right before us.

Now we do that with the help of one spirit.

When Jesus was on the earth, he told his disciples that when he leaves them,

he will sin for them a helper.

He was referring to the Holy Spirit.

When Jesus was on the earth and the disciples wanted to know something,

they would just ask him, hey, which way should we go?

What do we do next?

What does it mean to follow you?

They would ask and he would answer.

Now that he has ascended into heaven, we now have the Holy Spirit.

Hey, what should I do here?

Where do I go?

What is your purpose in this situation?

The Holy Spirit is the one who guides and directs our step to those questions.

The problem that many of us have with hearing the Holy Spirit

is that we think he is going to answer questions differently than Jesus did.

How many times did the disciples ask Jesus a question?

And they would walk away confused when he would answer them.

He was always speaking in parables.

He could have just flat out given an answer, could he?

Do you not think they just wanted to grab him and yell at him?

Is it a yes or is it a no?

Don't you think they wanted to do that?

If Jesus didn't give easy answers,

why would we think that the Holy Spirit would give us easy answers?

When we don't have an answer, we have to continue seeking.

We have to continue asking those questions.

We have to pray, as Jesus instructed his disciples,

that our eyes be open, our ears be open, that we will be able to understand.

Here's what we know. We have one body because of one spirit.

The Holy Spirit was given to us, as Paul has said previously in this book,

as a guarantee of our inheritance in Jesus.

If we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit,

then we can rest assured that our salvation is secure.

And we can be sure that God is going to guide us through the leading of the Holy Spirit.

We also know that God is not going to guide us in a direction

that is contrary to what his word says.

That is where a lot of problems start to creep in regarding unity.

We begin to trust our emotions more than we trust the Spirit's leading.

Scripture says that the heart is misleading.

The heart is deceitful.

The heart is sinful.

When we choose to follow our emotions,

deceit is introduced into the situation.

When I begin to see division occurring in anything,

it is because we are believing our emotions,

because the reality is the Spirit is what unites us, not divides us.

At my last church, I had this lady that was being a distraction in the church service.

Almost every single week, she would make a scene during our worship service

to the point where it was upsetting people,

to the point where it was starting to create some issues.

So I first go and I address it with her husband.

Maybe, hey, this is the situation.

Can you talk to her about it and let's figure out a different way to make that happen?

That didn't work.

So then I go talk to her.

Hey, this is the situation.

Things aren't going well.

You're upsetting people.

It's distracting all these other things.

Can you stop doing it?

That didn't work.

So finally, I flat out tell her,

if you continue to act in this way, you can't be a part of our church.

You can't be a part of our worship service.

She flat out told me that God had told her that she needed to do it.

Now, I am not arrogant enough to think that I am the only one that God speaks to,

but I did tell her God didn't tell you that.

And here's, I know he didn't,

because as the leader of the church, I was asking her not to do it.

He's not going to go contrary to his word.

And because the scripture says, hey, don't be a distraction.

Don't be a stumbling block.

God was not going to go against his word.

She was going off her emotions.

We have to be united in one spirit.

She chose her emotions over the spirit of God.

The spirit of God unites believers.

He does not divide them.

We have to be careful that we are seeking after the will of God

and not just our preferences or our emotions.

Because of the work of the spirit, we then have one hope.

Now, I've done my fair share of funerals.

There have been funerals that I have done that there was no doubt that the person that was in the casket

was with the Lord and spending eternity in heaven.

Those are awesome funerals.

I've also done my fair share of funerals, or there is a little bit of a question.

We're not real sure, but we're going to hope that they're there.

I've also done some funerals where there is no doubt that person is not spending eternity in heaven with Jesus.

I've done all of those things.

In the last two situations, people are clinging to hope,

but not in things that can hold the weight of it.

It almost feels like they are grasping at straws to justify why their loved one is in a better place.

Well, they did some really good things.

Well, they went to church when they were younger.

Remember that time?

He helped that old lady on the side of the road fix her flat tire.

There were a lot of fun to be around.

They lit up every room that they walked in.

They were a great father, a great mother.

Those are all examples of the kinds of things that people put their hope in regarding being in heaven.

The truth is that none of those things give you salvation.

There are tons of people who are great parents, that have great personalities,

that are not going to spend eternity with Christ.

The gospel is our hope.

The gospel that Jesus lived a perfect life and was the final sacrifice for our sins.

The gospel that if we believe in Him as our Savior, we will have eternal life.

That is the only thing that we can put our hope in.

Now, I've been to mission trips all over the world.

And as I have spoken with non-believers from different faith backgrounds,

the one thing I always see is they are missing hope.

They have no hope.

They don't have it in anything that can bring some sort of assurance.

They hope they do enough good things.

They hope they don't upset God by their behavior.

They hope for good things to happen to them.

The truth of the matter is that they have this fear that it will never be enough.

They hope in something that will never be enough.

Now, I don't know how they sleep well at night.

Because their hope is in what they can do, but never really knowing if they've done enough.

When we put our hope in Jesus,

all of the burden on being good enough is on Him, not on me.

I am as confident in Jesus as I am that the sun will rise again tomorrow.

We cannot confuse this hope with other things that we hope for

because there's too many variables, right?

There's too many variables.

The bears are playing the chiefs today.

Now, we can hope that our team wins, but there's too many variables.

There's too many variables at stake for you to be 100% confident that your team is going to win.

There's always a chance for a fumble.

There's always a chance for an interception.

Bears fans are hoping that the chiefs will throw an interception or fumble the ball.

And the chiefs fans are hoping that they don't.

There are no variables when it comes to Jesus.

He is our hope. It's a sure thing.

That hope is joyous so that when the believer passes on, we know that we will see them again.

We know that they are healed.

We know that they are in a better place.

We're not hoping. We know.

Please do not hope in your good works.

Because next to all of your good works, there's a whole bunch of bad ones.

There's a whole bunch of things that are not honoring to the Lord.

Scripture says that all of our righteous deeds are about filthy rags before Him.

Our hope is in Jesus.

Our hope is that when God looks at me,

He sees His broken son as my replacement.

Our hope is in one Lord.

Now what am I about to say? My sound offenses.

But I want you to know it's not my goal or my intention.

I've had the opportunity to travel to Israel twice.

And there's many places that you want to go visit if you go to Israel.

They call them the holy sites in which people come from all over the world to come

and worship the Lord in these places.

But what I noticed there is that there was worship of buildings and landmarks and saints.

If you were to walk into some of these churches that are built on these holy sites,

it looks like idol worship to me.

It all started, it seems, when Constantine converted to Christianity.

Now in Rome, there are over 900 Catholic churches.

Many of those churches that is estimated were once pagan temples that got converted.

Many of the statues of false gods were just renamed Peter, Paul, as well as others.

So what the Catholic church has done over the centuries is elevate these men who were humble.

Elevate these men who walked with the Lord.

And they've turned them into little deities that we now call saints.

There's a belief out there that these men and women are somehow elevated over us

and that we need to go through them to have communication with God as our Father.

So they pray to Mary.

They pray to Peter.

They pray to God hoping that they will pass their request onto God.

The problem with that is that Peter is not the intermediary between me and God.

Mary is not the intermediary.

Because of Jesus, we can boldly approach the throne of grace with confidence.

And we can't approach anybody else.

They've made it seem like these saints are the bouncers outside of a club.

I don't need to go to a priest to seek forgiveness.

I have that in Jesus.

I don't need to pray to Mary because I know that I can make my request to God, myself.

We don't worship saints.

We worship one Lord and that is Jesus.

We worship one cross for our sins, for us to only be able to communicate to God through dead people.

This isn't the sixth sense.

He died on the cross and lives ever more so that we can have a relationship with Him.

When He died, the veil was torn.

Now there's no need for anyone to guide you into the Holy of Holies.

You can just go because of your faith.

You can approach Him because of your faith.

And that is the one faith that Paul is referring to in this text.

Jude writes in 1-3.

I made a mistake.

I think I put 1-7 on the notes.

Cross that out.

Put 1-3.

Go read 1-7.

You'll see that it doesn't make sense before I'm talking about.

Jude writes in 1-3.

Although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation,

I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

Early in the Scriptures, Luke writes that the early followers of Jesus met daily to receive teaching and to gather together.

What that tells me in these two passages is that our faith has to be fought for.

Hebrews tells us that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.

So what do we hope for?

As believers, we should hope to spend eternity with God in heaven.

If we have that faith in Jesus, we have the assurance that that is our destiny.

That goes back to the ceiling of the Holy Spirit.

The battle that all of us face is that a lot of times what is seen, what we can touch, wins out over our convictions.

Our faith in Jesus says that we should take on His yoke because it is easy.

But how many of us have a hard time doing that because we want to do things the hard way?

Our faith in Jesus says that we should be like Him and turn the other cheek.

But that's pretty difficult when you have a bunch of people coming at you, isn't it?

Our faith says that we are to forgive those who sin against us.

But that is not what the world says.

Our faith is given to us by God, but we have to fight for it.

We have to contend for it.

Jesus tells us we have to contend for it. There are going to be all kinds of things that come at us.

They are going to try to rob us of growing in our faith and we have to fight those things off.

The early church had to meet daily so that they could learn and they could be encouraged by others.

If your faith is private, then it is really hard to grow like it should.

I tell people all the time, don't isolate.

Because that's what the enemy wants. He wants you to isolate so that you are not encouraged and equipped by the church.

If you are struggling with understanding, come to a Bible study.

If you are having doubts, ask questions, be careful to who you let influence you.

Now my boys love baseball and they spend a lot of time outside playing catch.

If the weather is good, you can always assume my kids are outside playing baseball of some sort.

I love to play catch with them in the yard and work on things that they can do better.

I like to train them in that way.

A few years ago I had a season where I was just really busy and I hadn't been able to play catch with them,

hadn't been able to work with them, but they still wanted to play catch.

Now my boys are persistent and they will wear you down until you get what you want.

Since I wasn't available, they start pestering their momma.

Their momma went outside and played catch.

I'm grateful that they have that option.

However, the next time I played catch with them, I began to notice some things that just didn't look right.

They were throwing like their mother, which wasn't good.

They were copying the motion in which she threw and it just wasn't good.

So I had to take some time to correct some things with their throwing motion.

That is why our faith needs to do life in community so that we can correct things when needed.

So that we can be encouraged when we are feeling down.

So that we can be reminded of who God is and what his plans are and how they lead to life.

And if we are not careful, our faith in the Lord will be weakened by what we can physically see around us

because we'll start hoping in those things.

That leads us to one baptism.

If faith is the inward reality, then baptism is the outward expression of that reality.

This is a reference to water baptism.

Now water baptism was extremely important to the early church.

Not because it was a means of salvation, but as a testimony of identity.

They wanted to be unified with Jesus.

Those who are of one Lord in one faith are unified in one baptism.

This is one of those verses that really makes me struggle with infant baptism.

An infant doesn't have faith in the Lord because they really can't comprehend that they are a sinner.

They have no comprehension that there is one Lord.

They just want to have all their needs met.

Feed me when I'm hungry, change me when I'm dirty, and let me sleep.

That's what they want. They can't comprehend that.

However, once they come of age and they understand that they are little sinners,

they understand the reality of the gospel,

they should want to be identified with Jesus by taking the step of obedience and baptism.

As believers, we should all have a baptism story.

It's the story of, this is who I once was.

This is my past.

And then once I received the grace of Jesus, this is my new identity in Him.

That's our story.

I hear pretty often stories of people not wanting to be baptized.

Because it's going to be embarrassing to have to do that in front of a whole bunch of people.

More often than not, pride really seems to get in the way of us walking in obedience.

I hear things, well, I was baptized when I was an infant, so I'm covered.

We have to understand that this is not a salvation issue.

This is an issue of obedience.

Galatians chapter 3 says that when we are baptized, we put on Christ.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

We want to be identified as a football fan, right?

So we wear their t-shirts, we wear their jerseys.

We want to be identified as employees of a certain company, so we put on a uniform.

One of the ways we identify as a Christian is by being baptized.

And this is what unites us regardless of background.

And 1 Corinthians 12 says that regardless of background, Jew or Greek, slave or free,

we are united together in Christ by identifying with Him in baptism.

If you are unwilling to take the step of obedience in baptism, what other areas are you unwilling to obey?

The first thing that Jesus did before he started his public ministry

was to go down to the river where John was and be baptized.

That tells me that baptism is not a salvation issue because Jesus didn't need to do anything to be united with His Father.

He wanted to identify and be an example of how to publicly become one with the Father.

Jesus was showing that this one faith and one baptism connect us to the one God and Father of all.

One God and Father of all.

That means there isn't a God for the Jew and there's a God for the Greeks and there's a God for this people group.

Paul tells us that in Romans chapter 3, Isaiah says that there is one God and there is no other.

Romans 3 · chapter mention

There is no other creator, no other redeemer, no other giver of life, no other one that is in control.

There is one God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit united as one.

This is what differentiates us from a lot of different religions.

Hindus believe there are thousands of gods and when they forget one, they just add them to the list.

Mormons believe that you and I can become gods.

Jews don't believe that Jesus was God.

The Muslims don't believe that Jesus was God.

This is not Oprah Christianity where you take your path and you take your path and eventually we'll all get to where we want to be.

This passage is the essence of Christianity. Take away any one of these aspects and you lose it.

It ceases to be Christianity.

This is a one of a kind thing and if we start tweaking it, we lose unity.

I mean, why are there so many denominations out there?

I love that in the book of Acts, the followers of Jesus were simply known as the way.

Not Baptist, not Lutherans, not Catholics, they were known as the way.

They were identified as people who lived their lives a certain way.

They were looked at as people who lived their lives in unity.

A way that was counter cultural because they were unified in the bond of peace.

There is one God who deserves our worship.

He holds the earth in the right position in relation to the sun.

He spends it at the right speed to sustain life.

That does not happen by accident.

No matter what scientists tell you, that does not happen by accident.

The sovereign God overall has called you into relationship with him and he has provided everything that you need.

I want you to notice the things that matter.

Read through these verses again. It does not say one preference.

It does not say one feeling is the way that we are united.

We are united when we come together as one body functioning in the way God created us to be.

United in one spirit that guides and leads us in spite of our emotions.

We are united in one hope that believes and trusts that Jesus has made a way for us.

We are united in Jesus who is our one Lord above all.

We are united in one faith and we work together to strengthen it as we put on Christ in one baptism.

What holds us all together is one God and a Father of all.

Seven things to have complete unity as believers.

So that's it.

That's these verses.

I don't know how you feel about them.

I don't know if you want more. I don't have any more to give you.

This is what Christianity is.

This is what unites us.

And anytime we start adding to unity or we take away one of these things from the list,

we begin to be disunified.

And the enemy wants nothing more than to bring confusion and disunity to our church body.

There's nothing the enemy wants more than to bring disunity to other fellow believers in our area.

We might do things differently, but we're all united under the banner of Jesus who is our one hope and our one Lord.

And so I'm going to pray for us.

This is one of those Sundays that I just don't have something to...

What's the word?

Pull your heart strings.

Not that I try to pull your heart strings, but the reality is if this doesn't awaken you,

then my hope for you, my prayer for you is that God would open your eyes,

that God would open your ears so that you would be able to understand.

And so as I pray, maybe you just sit there and just ask the Spirit to minister to you.

Let Him speak to you.

Listen for His voice.

What is He calling you?

How is He calling you to repent?

How is He calling you to lead the charge in bringing unity?

I can't wait to see what He does.

Let's pray.

Father God, I pray for our church right now.

And I pray, God, that you will speak to our hearts.

We thank you for you being our one God, our one Father that holds everything together.

We thank you for Jesus.

We thank you for sending us your Spirit.

I pray, God, that as we think about unity as a church,

as we think about unity as believers,

that these seven things will be at the forefront of our minds.

So God, I pray that you speak.

I pray that you will open our ears and open our eyes to see you for who you are.

I pray, Father, that you will strengthen our faith.

I pray for that individual that's isolated.

I pray, Father, that you will surround them with people that care and that want to walk with them.

I pray for steps of obedience to happen today.

I pray, God, that you move in this place.

I ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.