Live What You've Been Called (Ephesians 4:1-6)

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Our text this morning is our reading from the book of Ephesians.

We hear again these words.

St.

Paul writes, I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.

Thus far the text.

Many years ago I stumbled upon bad things in new hymn books.

It's a blog devoted to the damage done by modern hymnals to some of the church's most beloved hymns.

Take, for example, the English hymn, The Church's One Foundation.

Great hymn.

One of my wife's and my favorite hymns.

It was one of the hymns in our wedding.

My mother-in-law will say it's one of the 17 hymns in our wedding.

Had a lot of music at that service.

But it's a great hymn, and we Lutherans at least have changed it.

The second half of the final stanza originally read, O happy ones and holy, Lord, give us grace that we, like them, the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.

Clearly, that was not Lutheran enough for the hymnal committee, and so our version goes, we're going to sing it later in this service, O blessed heavenly chorus, Lord, save us by your grace, that we like saints before us may see you face to face.

We got rid of the meek and lowly bit and replaced it with God's grace, which is a good move, generally speaking.

Nothing wrong with the Lutheran ending.

But there was nothing wrong with the original ending either.

We've taken a good hymn and cut out the meekness and lowliness in us part.

And you might think, good job, Lutheran hymnal editors.

After all, what legalist came up with this idea that we have to be meek and lowly?

Well, you turn to Matthew chapter 5, where Jesus says, Blessed are the meek.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

So if you have a problem with that, you have a problem with Jesus.

Likewise, in our reading from Ephesians, we're called to all humility and gentleness.

And that word gentleness is the same word that is meekness in other places.

And in fact, Jesus elsewhere says, Learn from me, for I am meek and lowly.

One could almost go so far to say that if you're not meek and lowly, then you should really question whether you have received that grace of God by which you will dwell before God and see him face to face.

Meekness and lowliness are at the heart of what it is to live the Christian life.

But that makes us very uncomfortable.

And this discomfort with lowliness and meekness goes back a long way.

In the ancient world, that Greek word Paul uses for lowliness was a word for slaves.

A free man would never want to be called lowly.

The real virtue was pride.

Humility was the posture of the defeated.

And centuries later, one of the few honest Western philosophers of the Christian era, Friedrich Nietzsche, sneered at Christianity for this very reason, calling it a slave morality.

And the world still largely agrees with him.

And so does our sinful nature.

We are as the guests at that dinner party our Lord attends in our gospel reading today.

We all want the head table.

We want to be noticed.

We want to be right and we want people to know that we're right.

Come on, Pastor.

Everybody knows today that humility and gentleness are virtues.

Who likes pride?

Well, it turns out we all do.

Oh, we like to be thought of as humble and lowly.

We like the appearance of it.

We like to be praised for it.

Everybody to say, oh, what a humble man he is.

But that's just another form of pride.

We don't want to live by humility, not by nature.

And what Paul's urging the Ephesian Christians, what Paul is urging the Christians gathered here today, is to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

You have been called to a calling.

God has called you out of one particular kind of life and given you a new post, a new position, a new role.

And so now walk in accordance with that calling.

And perhaps the very first thing that needs pointing out is that it is a calling to which you have been called.

It is what you already have.

And as in all the other places where the Bible teaches Christians how to live, we're dealing with two realities.

We're dealing with the God-given status that we have, and that's a gift that's been given once for all.

And once you have it, you are it.

It's like an on-off switch.

Either you is or you isn't.

Either you are a Christian or you aren't a Christian.

Either you are saved or you are not saved.

Either you are holy or you are not holy.

Either you are justified or you are not justified, and either you are called or you are not called.

And you are called.

That calling came when you were made one with Jesus in your baptism.

In the words of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, you are all Christophers.

Christ-bearers.

Bearers of Christ in your body.

That's what that name means.

We all bear Christ in our very bodies because we have been made one with him.

And now Paul says, walk in a manner that's worthy of the calling to which you've been called.

In other words, you have this status, and now we need to bring the actual reality of our daily lives into harmony with our God-given status.

The one of them's a given status, and it's as sure as God's promise is sure.

The other one's a process that takes us our whole lives and is never completed.

We will spend our whole lives, however long we live, between our baptism and our burial, growing into Christ.

And that'll never be perfected.

It'll never be completed in this life.

Nevertheless, it is the life to which we have been called.

And now we ask ourselves if we've been called to be disciples of Christ, which is to say students of his, we learn from him.

If we're called to be bearers of Christ, we are his and he is ours.

And if we've called to be the light of the world as he is the light of the world, how should we conduct ourselves so that it matches our actual calling?

With patience, bear with one another in love.

We are to bear with one another in love, in all humility and gentleness, with patience.

And this is hard.

Because we are not naturally humble.

We are not naturally meek or gentle.

We are not naturally patient.

Some are more than others.

There are some of you who have a quick temper, and others who are quite slow to react.

But we all have a limit to our patience, and then when our patience runs out with our neighbor, love goes out the window.

But our calling is to be Christians, to bear the image of Christ in our lives, in our conduct.

We've been called to learn from Christ meekness and gentleness and to live in the love as he lives in love.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who did not count a quality with God, something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a slave, and was obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

This is what Jesus did for you.

And now you should have the same mindset.

And the cultivation of this mindset comes from being a Christian, done, gift of God for you.

And now hearing the word of God, heeding the word of God, and then consciously and deliberately applying it to ourselves through a daily process of repentance, faith, and effort, of actually applying this word to ourselves, calling ourselves out when we fail, which then leads to renewed repentance, renewed faith, renewed effort.

And if you think by such and such date this process should be done and finished, and you're finally a finished product, A, you're wrong.

And B, if you think that way, you will despair.

It isn't true.

The truth is you will carry your flesh and your sinful desires with you to your grave.

The process is never done.

The more you go digging for sin, the more you're gonna find.

And at the same time, this is the life to which you've been called.

Dying to sin and rising to faith in Christ.

Rinse and repeat.

And this isn't an added task Paul's giving us or some extra layer to the Christian life.

It is simply a call to consistency.

Our Lord calls us to be mindful of who we are, his redeemed people, and then act accordingly.

In the earliest days of the Christian church, when adult baptisms were so commonplace because of the missionary status of the church, it was the custom in some places that when a person was baptized, he or she would be clothed with white garments.

We have baptism gowns for the babies today as a kind of remnant of that practice.

But when the baptized came out of the water, he or she would be given a white garment to wear, and would wear that garment for the following week, sometimes longer.

The newly baptized would go everywhere in his baptismal garment, and everybody would see and say, Whoa, what are you wearing?

And every time they put it on, it was like a physical reminder, I am now Christ's.

And when we follow the suggestion in the small catechism and start our day by making the sign of the cross and saying, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we're doing the same thing.

We have put on Christ in our baptism, and now we're remembering that so that we make every effort to keep that garment clean by our conduct.

Knowing full well that we will fail, but also knowing that when we fail, we have an unending fount of forgiveness in the blood of Christ.

So, dear Christian friends, you have been given a glorious calling.

And the urgent call of the apostle is for us to walk in a manner worthy of that.

And even though it places burdens on us because of our sinful nature, this too is a glorious calling.

Because at the end of the road, we find, as Paul declares in the last half of our passage, the unity of all things with God the Father through his Son Jesus Christ in the bond of the Holy Spirit and the end of all conflict, the end of all enmity, the end of all sorrow, the end of all damage and destruction and blindness and willfulness, all the effects of sins.

This gracious call has been given to you.

Hold fast to it, just as God Himself holds fast to you.

Amen.

Please stand.

The peace that passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting.

Amen.