The Description of Christ Gifts
Ephesians 4:11-13 · Randy Peterman · Jul 29, 2018
Ephesians (2018-19), No. 28
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261911151072

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

One of the things that I want to emphasize as we get into this is that Paul has carried on through this passage here this idea of gifts. That there is a gifting that is going on here. Christ is given grace and he is given this gifting. And he gave gifts to men in verse 8.

So when we pick up in verse 11, and I'll go ahead and read this out loud, but please follow along in your Bibles. He says, 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. and I was complaining to my wife yesterday, and I'm being sarcastic when I say complain, that this is three verses of list things. So that gives me, I apologize I didn't have time to make this a shorter handout is really what it comes down to. Because this is almost six pages of notes and we have a limited amount of time.

But Paul covers a lot of theology in such a short period of time, so hopefully we can get through it and kind of wrestle with some of the interesting things that are here. So I think it's worth calling out that when we were looking at the beginning of Chapter 3, do you remember what in Chapter 3 Paul was emphasizing?

There was an animal involved and it has antlers. Paul was talking about the mystery of the church, that the church was this mysterious entity that people had not picked up on. I want to tie that back into what we're looking at here. The mystery of the church, as a principle, is carrying on. We see something different as we look at verse 11.

If you came from a Jewish background, you wouldn't see this order of foundation and structure. The Jews didn't grow up with apostles in the Old Testament. They had Moses, they had the prophets, they had David, they had Abraham, but they didn't have apostles. So the Jews coming into the church and coming into the mystery came into this with a perspective of spiritual heritage that maybe didn't line up with their previous growing up experiences.

And so Paul is articulating this because it's something that's part of the new revelation he's received. Now if you're a Gentile and you grew up with the cults, they had the mystery religions, and you grew up with maybe the mythological gods and the deities that they had, those were really high quality gods to be worshipping. They come down and they sneak around and sleep with people. That's some weird stuff. So the Gentiles didn't have this either.

So what Paul is telling them is, we're comfortable with this. We're 2000 years later, right? So we're pretty good with apostles. There's some stuff that comes in here. Paul is talking about the gifts that Christ gave and he's talking about how they have a purpose here. So we want to keep that in context for us. They created a foundation that could be built on.

So I drew up here on the whiteboard this really lovely, you guys are familiar with this, this is the Food and Drug Administration's food chart, you know you need to have breads, right? No. It's also not an Egyptian pyramid. But Paul has established here with this revelation the idea that we have a foundation of the apostles, okay? And we have them and then we have the prophets, right? And then we have the event. I need a bigger pyramid. That's what the Egyptians said too, right? Evangelists, and then we have pastors, and at the very end we have teachers. So we're going to talk about these things, but as it turns out, as we look at this, there are some important questions we have to ask.

How many of you have noticed down the street off of Yale there's an apostolic succession church. So not all churches look at what we see here and see apostleship the same way that I think we can expose it out of the text and definitely it's not the position we hold. Modern churches, or not churches, I should be careful how I say this, modern groups that have apostolic succession, there's apostolic succession denomination within Protestantism. There's the Catholic Church, as the Pope is an apostle, and the Mormons have apostles.

So as we look at this in our own modern context, let's do some comparison and contrast as well. Just hold that in your mind. Now we're going to talk about, biblically, why we don't do that. We're going to talk about some exposition on this apostleship. Why are apostles unique to a tiny handful of people at one time in history? Why are the apostles a handful of men 2,000 years ago, plus or minus, and not an ongoing role?

Witness. Witness that Christ himself. Okay, so you've hit at the crux of things is that there is a specific number of things that had to take place that made someone an apostle. They witnessed Christ. Paul even saw Christ on the road to Damascus. Can you come up with that criteria to be defined as an apostle? Well, that's a good question. Because when I was first approached with this doctrinal idea, I too asked that question.

I was like, wait a minute, that seems arbitrary, right? What we notice when we look at the requirements in the beginning of Acts chapter 1, at the beginning of Acts chapter 1, we see that they say, oh, we've got to replace Judas. And so there has to be a certain requirement there. Now, it's worth noting that in Acts chapter 1 that they're not actually dealing with apostles there, they're dealing with the disciples, but they seem to want to preserve that 12 and they have a list of requirements that are there.

I have a question. Just to clarify. Sure. One of the requirements of being an apostle is to physically have seen Christ with your own eyes. Yes. Okay, not in some sort of dream-like stage. Right. I actually saw Christ with my eyes. Yes, and Paul saw Christ with his eyes and then went and had the vision in the heavenlies. So it was a very specific thing.

But if that was one criteria, then we can make an argument, well, somebody had a dream. And I can't see your dreams and you can't see mine, which is probably good because I have some weird dreams. But the thing about dreams is that if we said that the dream is the criteria, that removes a time barrier, right? But the other side of it is that there are some other elements that are required that made the apostles unique. They were evangelistic in a very special time and place to establish the church.

Is the church established globally? I think we can argue that it has generally been established globally now, although there are definitely places where there are heavy persecution. We could look at even where Ephesus, this book is written to the church in Ephesus, right? Ephesus is in a predominantly Muslim country. Due to the genocide in Turkey where they took out the Armenians, the Christian population in that country went from 19% to about 2.5% in 1926. changed there. So while the church is established, there's definitely areas where that's less the case.

The other thing is the Apostles appear to have done miraculous things. That's also important. Now, as it turns out, I have visited an apostolic succession church. I had a relative that went to one. And the thing that was fascinating to me is that the pastor came in as the Apostle and came in and was trying to do prophetic things. He called it prophetic.

I would call it mentalism. Mentalism is the use of common psychological practices and patterns to make people feel like you understand something about them. How many of you have seen those lovely mediums on television? They're going to look in their crystal ball and tell you your fortune. That's a common practice where they use mentalism. They ask you, I'm sensing a woman, right? And you're like, oh, I'm thinking about a woman. And she's blonde. Oh, who's this? And by making inferences indirectly, you can do this.

So I saw this apostolic pastor come in and he said, God's got a word for you. And of course, he walked up to this woman that he happened to know who was very emotional. And he said, God wants you to have more faith. You need to have more faith. And she just began bawling. She's like, I'm sorry, I need more faith. I don't believe enough. And it was a good show. I mean, except for that you just emotionally abused this woman. That's not a good show, right? So the apostles came and did miraculous things. If you've been paying attention during the main service, you know, Paul basically raised somebody who fell out of the window back to new life.

If we look at the beginning of Acts, Peter and John are walking to the temple and they make a guy walk. So there's recorded specific things. They saw Christ. They were establishing the church, which is going to be a tougher scenario in modern day times to have people never heard of Christianity, and then did miraculous things. So those are three. And then the fourth thing that they did, and I'm grateful for it, is they wrote letters that we have as the scriptures. Well, that's important. Because if you have a modern day apostle, are the scriptures done?

One of the historically relevant attacks on Mormonism was that for a long time they they taught that black people were not of the same race as Adam and therefore could not be part of the Mormon Church. But then God revealed to one of their apostles that that was not true and so they updated their doctrine and everything was cool. So while today that might sound a little egregious, that's not that old of a change. Civil liberties happened and then suddenly God decided to change his theology.

So I think that kind of stands out in a different way. So, dealing with apostles, and I'm not trying to say that to be slanderous of other people, other than that I just think it's important for us to identify what Paul is calling out with the apostles. It's a handful of people at a specific time, with a specific purpose, and their role becomes complete. When we talk about the last apostle, does anybody know who the last apostle alive was?

It was John. John lived through a tremendous amount of torture and suffering. Obviously, we have Paul's recording in 2 Corinthians 11 of some of the things he went through. John was boiled in oil or placed in hot oil. Things like that were immense torture, but God wasn't done with him yet. So as hard as that was, he knew that his time was not over yet and so then God gave him the revelation right at the Isle of Patmos. So apostleship, big deal but also for a specific time to establish a foundation. Sure. There were just the apostles were a few amount of people. Yes. The 11 left disciples and Paul?

Well, there are different people who have different lists and I was intentionally skipping that. The reason why I was skipping it is because I was not prepared to give you an argument for why I have the list that I have. As a teacher, I always feel like I'm responsible for giving you as accurate of information as I have. and I wasn't prepared for that. Don't ever apologize. Let me tell you this, it's worth it for me to do the homework and then come back and at least have a supplement or handout worth looking at. It could be that if I ask my dad, he'll send me like 16 different documents. He's never short on documents. But it's one of those things where What's fascinating when we look at apostleship as well is that how much of the New Testament is Paul versus the other apostles? It's overwhelmingly Paul, right?

But the Holy Spirit preserved the text of the Scriptures. So after the apostles, we have this important thing. The apostles had companions. Paul had Titus, Timothy, Onesimus, and John Mark that he worked with. Those are some examples. If you go through the letters you see there's even more people that he's kind of referring to. He uses this plural we in some places and we can kind of have some question marks as to who those are. But they helped optimize communication. That's the way I think of it. It was before the internet, right? There were no smartphones. Paul's smartphone was Titus or Timothy.

He was able to send them as a representative and they could take a pulse of what was going on in the church. They could carry letters. Sometimes we get the impression they carried funding. They were able to work as not apostles but as helpers to make sure that the gospel was preached and the churches were established.

Next thing Paul says, he gave some as Prophets. Why was being a prophet an establishing role within the church? What was a prophet doing? This is super duper important because I've heard people use the term prophet and then define it very differently.

So we want to have a common definition that makes sense. So why was being a prophet an establishing role within the church? in the connotation of being a truth teller? Well, and that's the thing is we want to have a definition. So, let's say that's a good definition.

This person is sharing the truth that God has revealed to them in this context and they can relay it. This is not the same as, for example, Isaiah was a prophet but we have recorded scripture. So, Isaiah was a prophet that recorded scripture These are prophets that very clearly we don't have recorded scripture from. That's a pretty significant gap. And that's a purposeful gap.

Why was the role of prophet critical in the church at this time? The New Testament wasn't complete. You couldn't say, hey, let's turn to Ephesians. There wasn't Ephesians until Paul wrote this letter. So even if you were getting this letter for the first time and you get this letter from Paul, you don't even know what chapter 5 and chapter 6 say if you're reading it for the first time. So you don't even know the truths that are there necessarily.

But the church is brand new. There are issues that people are dealing with. If you came from a Gentile background, you have a cultural expectation. You have a life experience and you get your parents and all the things that kind of came together to make you you. And you're a Christian now, but you don't have the New Testament. And so issues came up. I know that nobody's ever had issues at church, but let's pretend they happened at this time.

The prophets would be given special revelation. Now I think it's important. How many of you remember when we were in 2 Corinthians 14? I'm sorry, 1 Corinthians 14. 2 Corinthians 14 doesn't exist. If you remember that, we should talk. 1 Corinthians 14, where Paul talks about the church coming together and In starting in verse 31, so 1 Corinthians 14, 31, he says, For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn, and all may be exhorted.

And the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. For God is not a God of confusion, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints. Now, is he saying everyone in the church was a prophet? That's not what he's saying, but he's saying if somebody has a prophecy in the church, it's going to come in order, and it's going to be edifying, and it's going to be something people can learn. Does that sound like some of the stuff maybe you've seen in, well I hate to say it, but in some of the other denominations or churches. I had somebody come up and prophesy on me. He came up, put his hands on my shoulders and said, God is going to give you broad shoulders. That's his prophecy for me. I don't know what that means. I still don't know. Is this the extent of the broadness? Or does that mean I'm going to have a lot of burdens? Again, this is like mentalism. You can kind of derive your own output.

But these prophets were teaching specific, learnable doctrine. Right? And so when we take a look at the prophets here and we consider what this is, they're clarifying New Testament theology, New Testament doctrine, and the Holy Spirit is giving that to the believers to fill in the gap until the New Testament is completed. And that's important because once the New Testament is completed, do we need clarification on Christian living kind of doctrines?

I think we can all agree, Paul wrote explicitly here in the book of Ephesians, stop stealing. I think we can all agree that we don't need an update to that theology. There's other theology I'd love clarity on, like the baptism of the dead. Paul, I could ask some questions. But that's not a doctrine that is salvific, so to speak, where we're going to have salvation impacted. It's a nuance.

So the role of the prophet was critical at the time, but once the New Testament was completed, that gift doesn't need to function in a further way. Once we have these two establishing roles accomplishing a mature foundation, you don't keep adding to the foundation.

I mean there's a house in California where somebody kept adding to the house room by room and it's really weird. There's like stairs go up to a door and there's a wall behind the door. And there's people who've decided to add to houses ad hoc like that, but it's not a good plan. I think God is a planner and orderly. We just read that in 1 Corinthians 14. I keep doing 2nd for no reason. So God is a God of order, and so once we have this established foundation of the church, now we've got to tell people about it. And we have evangelists, this gift of evangelists.

How many of you have ever met somebody who the gospel pours out of them all the time? And you're like, dude, how did the salt become the gospel? I don't know, but he's the salt of the earth, and suddenly the gospel is pouring out of him. And I've met evangelists before. Sometimes I've felt maybe I'm deficient in some way because I just can't do that. I think my giftedness is elsewhere, so that's probably the case.

But the evangelist goes and preaches the gospel. He's excited about the gospel. He preaches the gospel. He shares it. People respond to the gospel. Then, what did we all learn from Billy Graham? Once you preach the gospel and somebody gets saved, what do you say to them? Go find a good church.

So you've birthed this infant. The way I would put this is imagine if you will that a mother goes into the hospital and the baby's born and the doctor places the baby on the table next to the mom and says okay go find a good mom or go find food. That would be child abuse. We don't do that. Instead we connect them to the mother. We have this infantile baby who cannot make a decision about food or anything else. It's just freaked out because it was just born. And so you have this brand new baby who has no teaching, no proper Christian doctrine, and you have all these evangelists that are just like, see you later. And they've got a new notch in their Bible for people who responded right. And I'm being a little sarcastic there.

I believe the truth is that In the modern day church, people who are truly gifted with evangelism probably bring people back to their church, right? That's what should happen. But we have kind of this parachurch evangelist role that somehow we've adopted in the United States through organizations like Billy Graham or Luis Palau or wherever, where they come in and they do this big event and then they're gone. And they try to leave an infrastructure of whatever the local church is in that area, but often times that's completely insufficient to really equip somebody. So I'm calling that out not because I want to make fun of these parachurch organizations, but because Paul seems to have a purpose here. The gospel gets preached, someone responds to the gospel, and then the evangelist has... it's almost like he's got an organism that he's part of, a church body that he's part of, that can handle the new believer.

It's almost like God knew what he was doing. Just almost. So the evangelist preaches the gospel. He says Christ died on the cross, he was buried, and on the third day he rose again according to scripture so that he could pay for your sins. All you have to do is believe. And the person responds to the gospel. They say, man, I know I'm a sinner. I need Jesus.

And they respond and the evangelist says, great. And if we were in Uganda or parts of Africa, they'd grab hands and they'd walk together excitedly in the church. But we don't do that in the United States. We just give each other our phone numbers so we can text, right? So the evangelist brings the person to church.

And it's awesome because the next person that's there is the pastor. Now I want to take a moment because we have this word here, this word pastor. This is the only place this is translated this way. It's shepherd. So you'll notice in your handout there I actually have it say shepherd in parentheses there. The word pastor here is shepherd.

It isn't an authoritarian or power focused role but a service focused role and we'll see why in just a minute. But I think it's funny because I've known at different times different people who are in the role of being pastor or elder or overseer and it gets twisted. And I have to say that I don't observe that at Holly Hills and I'm not just saying that because this is getting recorded. That's not the attitude here at Holly Hills. But I have seen people and Paul warns against people having this power-hungry attitude. Let's take a brief moment and turn to 1 Timothy chapter 3, and we'll read what an elder, and this is really important here, this is an elder, but an elder or pastor, those are synonyms we see in other places, It is a trustworthy statement.

If any man aspires to the office of overseer, it is a fine work he desires to do. An overseer then must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity. But if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God? And not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil. And he must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he will not fall into reproach in the snare of the devil.

Those are all low-hanging fruit and really easy and if you talk to any elder they'll tell you they feel like they still don't measure up to that. Or at least all the ones I've met who are qualified for the role. The thing that's funny about this is Paul's writing to Timothy saying, hey, you're trying to establish these churches. Look for men that already have these qualities. Okay, so they're existing qualities. They're not things you're going to train into somebody. They're things that the Holy Spirit has already worked out in their lives. So we have this idea here that he gave some as pastors or shepherds.

So pastors or shepherds are often dealing with doctrinal clarity. I know at Holly Hills here, when the elders get together, they usually meet on Tuesdays. And there'll be times when, at least in conversation with my dad, he said, you know, I know I'm coming up to a doctrinal area where there might be division in acts or somewhere else. And I want to talk with Mike and Roger so that we can come to one mind and make sure that we say the same thing.

So doctrinal clarification is super important, but it's not something that necessarily you want to do by committee. This isn't doctrinal clarification where we're going to take a vote as a church. This is doctrinal clarification where we're going to, with this responsibility, with this mantle, we're going to study God's Word together and we're going to make sure we come up with what the authors intended. So they're going to deal with clarification of doctrine. They're going to have to deal with resolving problems between sheep. If you are a shepherd, there are sheep. And sometimes there's problems between sheep.

And Paul even shames, I remember in his letter to the Corinthians, he shames them for, you're all suing each other. Why don't you just forgive each other and walk in Christ? But the elders are dealing with that kind of stuff that happens. they're also probably dealing with fixing spiritual health issues. Galatians 6 says, you who are spiritual, come alongside those who have stumbled. Well, that often falls on the shoulders of the elders and they get to come in and say, hey, you're rolling in the sewage.

Let's get that fixed, shall we? And lastly, but I think worth noting, is that We have counseling that often happens and that falls on the role of the elder or the shepherd. Sometimes people have any number of background issues that need to be resolved and you need somebody who is spiritually mature to come alongside. One of the things that I learned from Mike, which I guess he told me he learned it from Hal Molloy, was that we don't want to focus on somebody's past when we're counseling. What do we want to focus on instead? Who they are in Christ, right? In grace.

Because when we cling to the past, it's like Velcro on our minds, right? Like we keep circling back to it and it's grabbing on. That's not who we are. We're going to spend eternity with Christ. And do you think God's going to spend a lot of time going, you should really work out who you were when you were 14 and you did that one thing. That's not how God is. He's going to be like, Oh, my bride. And we're going to be like, this is pretty cool. And we're going to forget about the junk that happened when we were 14 or whatever age it was. That isn't to say that those things don't end up impacting us. But the idea is that eternally focused teaching is where the biblical counselor is going to go to. But anyways, counseling is one of those things that the elder often has fallen on their shoulders. So I've got the next question here.

Are pastors men? And this is one of those things where as our culture has shifted more and more into having gender issues, this kind of question has come up more critically and even to the point where there are people experiencing legal issues on account of a doctrine. We want to answer this carefully, but respecting what is written. Paul makes it clear that elders or pastors or overseers are to be men. We just read that in his letter to Timothy. But in saying that, let's also look at one other thing. In verse 7, he says they are the husband of one wife.

I have to say that if you talk to most elders' wives, I've got a short list of my own anecdotal data here. But when you talk to most elders' wives, never does the elder come home and then not be able to have his heart impacted by some of the stuff going on with the sheep. And I'm not going to put you on the spot, Bonnie. But I suspect that Roger comes home sometimes from elders' meetings or gets emails or phone calls or whatever else, and you watch your husband's heart break. And I've watched my mom do that and I know Donna and Mike have had that happen in other churches I've been to where junk happens.

And so the wife of an elder is not called out here, but her helpmate supporting role is very substantial. That's sometimes a lot to take on. So yes, pastors are men or elders are men, but the role of the husband often impacts the relationship with the wife. And further beyond that, when we take a look at Titus chapter 2, what do older women do? Do they just cook and stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Is that what Paul writes to Titus? And I'm being totally exaggerated there. I'm sorry for how terrible that is.

But he says, no, older women need to be teaching younger women. So even though there's not a role of woman elder, There are a lot of godly older women that have a responsibility to a lot of learning younger women. And as the father of two daughters, I can tell you, I desperately need you in my life. My daughters desperately need you in their lives. Because they look at their mom, and they look at their grandma, and they look at other women that are in their lives, and they try to figure out, what does a godly woman look like?

And there's two ways you can learn. How many of you have ever found out stuff the hard way? I tend to remember the hard way sometimes better than the not hard way. But if we remember things the hard way, that's because we learn them the hard way. But God has established the church and He's put things in order so that maybe we don't learn everything the hard way. Have you ever used a cheese grater and added a little protein? It was already protein in the cheese, but they got a little bit of me in there too. You got to start over. That shouldn't be necessary.

So the shepherd is equipping and guiding another layer. And I think Holly Hills is a unique church because of this next item, which you can barely read, it says teachers. But Paul says that there's teachers and the teachers are under the shepherds. Now the shepherds needed to teach. Timothy said the shepherds needed to be to be teachers, right? They need to be able to teach. But Paul adds teachers to this list and that's where I think I fall in as a category.

And I think that's important because you have You have the doctrinal authority with the elders to be able to establish this is where the Bible says we need to be. But then you have people who are teaching throughout the church and moving within the body, communicating the truth. Now, let's step back 2,000 years, okay? Because we could miss connecting a dot here. The evangelists are still active today. So we talked about those. But we talked about the prophets. And what were the prophets bringing? We read it in 1 Corinthians. What were the prophets bringing? The Word of God. They were bringing truth for edification.

But if the evangelists are doing their job, we're getting new people all the time. And when I say doing their job, I don't mean that legalistically, okay? But if the evangelists are preaching the gospel and the Holy Spirit is drawing people into the church, they come in and guess how much they know when they're infants? They know nothing other than the gospel.

They'd have to know that or they're not saved, right? And so they come into the faith and they come in and the pastors may be doing counseling and guiding and helping with the doctrine, but the teachers are coming along and they would have taken some of the truth that the prophets, or all of the truth depending on what it was that the prophets gave, and they would have been teaching that amongst the body as well.

So now we have our pyramid, we've covered a lot of area, and I have a to-do list item to make sure I can get my list of apostles. Any questions about this? Because we're going to keep going here, but I don't want to keep going unless everybody's comfortable with what we've established so far.

Pat? In the wording, where it had bishops and So that's a pastor, and then the next one down... You've got the King James there, right? Is that what you're looking at? Yeah. I forget what the second one was. I think it was a deacon. A deacon? Yeah, obviously the King James. Oh, are you looking at 1 Timothy?

Yes. Oh, okay. Sorry, I was so confused for a second. I was like, the second one was prophets. Okay, so we're in 1 Timothy chapter 3. Okay, what's the question? Sorry, I'm with you on the same page now. Yeah, so the two positions here were bishop and deacon. That's the deacon two husbands and one wife. So, in the terminology, So are these deacons elders? No, a deacon is a servant. In fact, we're going to see that in this passage. We're literally getting to that word. So if you'll hold on, I'll answer that in just a moment. And we'll keep going.

Bishop is elder. Bishop is elder? Yes. Elder is pastor, bishop is overseer. Episcopalian, if you've heard of Episcopalian, that is the word for elder. If you've heard of Presbyterian, that's a different word for elder. So they're all used synonymously in the New Testament, depending on which...

So we have churches based on... Their denomination is based on a transliteration of a Greek word that means overseer or shepherd. Alright, let's keep going, but we'll answer that because actually that was one of the points I was going to make in what we're coming up to here. We're going to skip the section on relevancy because I already did that.

He says, serving the church in verse 12 there, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ. That word service is diakonos, where we get deacon. Deacon is just a transliteration of diakonos, the Greek word for servant.

So even in the book of Acts, when the apostles got into teaching, they had somehow got roped into also feeding the widows and the fatherless and homeless. And they were like, we can't preach what God is revealing to us and feed these people. And so They said select godly men from among you and let's establish this role of deacon to make sure that these things all come together and there's order and their role as servant. This is a total rabbit trail, but I want to make one more comment. I've been in churches where you had to be a deacon before you could be an elder. Paul doesn't reveal that. That's not in the scriptures. He doesn't write it. We don't find it in the book of Acts.

So you don't have to be a deacon before you're an elder. A deacon is serving the body in a specific capacity that the Lord has called them to. They're not in this list because they're kind of behind the scenes. We all see the impact of their work, but we don't necessarily see them working.

How many of you walk on that ramp in the sanctuary and every time think, I wish Phil would stand by this so I could shake his hand and thank him. He's just deaconing. He's serving the body. That's what he's doing. But coming back to the text in hand, since we're here and I'm sure I'm going to run out of time. He says, For the equipping of the saints for the work of service. The equipping of the saints.

This is an ongoing process. It's going to be going on until the Lord returns and there are no kingdoms over and the new heavens and new earth come in place. That's when the equipping of the saints will completely and utterly, well actually right to the millennium, because the Jews will have the law written on their hearts. They won't need further equipping. So we have this idea here of this equipping and this work of service.

These are not roles of power and authority. How many of you have heard the televangelists asking for money? Paul asked for money to make sure that he could take care of the church in Israel because they were so heavily persecuted. But these other people? They're not asking for money. That's kind of a big deal. You know, I remember one of the televangelists said, does God deserve a house, a mansion? Yes. Does God deserve a house with a big round circular driveway? Yes. Does God deserve a Porsche? Yes. And he asked me to drive it. And I was like, oh my gosh, he's not an evangelist, let's just say that, that's not the gospel.

So when we come here, this is a role of service, and I'm dead serious, that was a literal, I memorized it because I was just so blown away that someone would say that. But it's one of those things where we find here, it's a role of service, And it requires a tremendous amount of humility, quite frankly, given the intensity of what they're going to deal with in these different roles. And so they're serving the church so that they can equip the saints. So equipping the saints is important.

If I hadn't been taught, I wouldn't know what I know to be able to teach now. So that's an important thing, that we have this idea of equipping and facilitating Do you need to not be equipped if you're not going to be a teacher? So, I'm not going to be a teacher. I can just sit on the pews, turn my brain off, and I will be at church, so therefore I'm a Christian.

You said they're equipping the saints. Who are you referring to as saints? In the New Testament, a saint is anyone who believes the gospel and becomes a Christian. In the Old Testament, a saint is anyone who believes what... That's a rabbit trail. We'll talk after Sunday school. There's an acronym called C.O.M.E. that is really great for memorizing.

Salvation is always by faith throughout all of the Bible. But the content of the faith changes as God reveals truth. But the object of their faith is always God. The means of salvation is always faith. And the basis is always the work of Christ on the cross.

And I said we'd wait until after Sunday school, but there you go. So saints, in the New Testament context here, so they're building up the saints, they're equipping the saints to the building up of the body of Christ. So the building up of the body of Christ, once your foundation is set, now you've got to build the building.

And the Greek word there for building is really cool. It's house building. It's almost two words that mean building, but one could mean house or building, and the other one is the building of the building, but it's a compound word Paul makes there. It's building building. It's building up of the body of Christ.

And so this role is not a role of power, and it's a role of equipping and passing things down, and passing these things on. Then Paul moves in from 12 to the idea of the long-term purpose of establishing and equipping the church. We tend to be surrounded culturally by a very immediate instant gratification mindset.

How many of you have ever started a diet or an exercise program and it's lasted long-term? Some people do, and most people don't. Like, you go, I'm on my diet. I'm on a new diet. How long is it going to last? 30 minutes. But the thing is that as we make these changes that are there and these things, we're surrounded by instant gratification. You deserve a whatever, right? But what Paul is calling for here is a long-term mindset. This is a longer-than-you're-going-to-be-alive probably sort of a thinking. And that's a really big deal. Because if I'm focused myopically on myself, and I'm only thinking about me, and I'm only thinking about what I'm going to be doing in the next 30 minutes to three days.

Some people have daily planners. They go out for a whole year. I'm not that sophisticated as Roger can testify. I had to request a shift on the schedule for teaching because I'd made plans months ago and didn't document them well. Paul is talking about this idea of a long-term legacy that is the church.

When we take a look at 2 Timothy 2.2, Paul says, find men who will teach other men. Because it can't stay with you. It can't stay with Paul. It can't stay with Timothy. It can't stay with just that small circle of people.

It needs to continue on. I think of a rope where the fibers of the rope continue and they interconnect. Most ropes, although there's some good modern day technology, most historical ropes were short fibers tightly wound together and they're all interjoined. So it turns out that my great-grandpa Jennison, who was born in the 1800s, taught my grandpa Peterman, who was born in the 1900s, who taught my dad and my uncle, who were born in the 1900s, who taught me, who was born in the late or part of the 1900s, who then I'm teaching my children, who were born in the 2000s. And all of those links come together. I don't think of it as a chain, because a chain is usually just individual links, but it's more like the fibers of a rope.

And so there's a legacy and a length that's part of what's being established here for the equipping of the saints in perpetuity all the way until the return of Christ. So we have this long-term purpose. And he says, until we all attain to the unity of the faith. Now, some of you are probably tired of the idea of unity. We've talked about unity for far too long, since chapter 2. Right? Chapter 2, verse 11, he starts on unity and he hasn't shut up about it. Come on, Paul. Right?

Except for now, we're starting to see what that unity looks like. It's not just here's why you should be unified. It's here's what the unity looks like. And when we know what the unity looks like, we can look at our own lives and we can do some comparative analysis, can't we?

I have to say, that's always a little convicting. But one of the things that is important about doing that comparative analysis is if I say, you know what, I don't feel unified with somebody at church, or I don't feel unified with somebody that God has brought into my life, I need to ask why. And I can often look at what's in the context here and go, okay, I need to maybe approach Sometimes you gotta leave people alone. There are porcupines God lets you run into and you say, you're a porcupine, I don't hug porcupines, we're good. But in general within the church body that should be a rarity. That's why Paul emphasizes love.

So we have equipping the saints until they attain the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. So the unity of the faith, the faith is the gospel and the doctrines surrounding that, that we consider the New Testament doctrine. And he gives us this parallel idea of the knowledge of the Son of God. So we need a unity of the knowledge of the Son of God. So why would we have unity in the knowledge of the Son of God?

I think there's a lot of good reasons why. But one of the key things is that when I see myself and I see you in light of Christ, how does it impact our interactions? If I see you and you're like, Oh, well, watch out for that person. They have this personality type problem or watch out for this person. They're this way. Is that who they are in Christ? and also then interact with each other.

Yeah, well suddenly you're my precious friend in Jesus Christ and I met a guy in Canada on a work trip and we saw each other for two days but I knew right away he was a believer and when I approached him about it later on he goes, I am a Christian, how did you know?

I'm like, I just knew, like literally I just knew. I don't mean to be weird and heebie-jeebie about it, it was just like I knew. And we had this intimate deep fellowship instantly We became friends on Facebook. But that was kind of the extent of the depth of our relationship. But because we had Christ, it was this thing. He was safe immediately. He was somebody I could know deeper and learn about immediately. Because we had the same knowledge of Christ. We're being grown in the same knowledge of Christ, right?

So last thing, and this is a really big deal, he says to a mature man, the word mature can be translated perfect or complete. I think we want to argue in the case of mature as not complete, because that would mean as Christians we stop sinning, right? That could be a questionable doctrinal interpretation. There's whole cults wrapped around that, so we don't want to follow that rabbit hole.

But the idea of maturity is having reached a stable spiritually knowledgeable state in our walk with the Lord. Continuing to grow. I've never met anybody who's been a believer in their older years who hasn't continued to grow. And he says, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. So there you go. That's the yardstick. The yardstick is Jesus. That's why we know that the maturity is not perfection, right?

But will we reach the yardstick of Christ? Is there a time that we know in the future where we will reach that perfection? Colossians 3 verse 4 tells us that when Christ is revealed, we will be revealed in our glorified state. We will no longer be wrestling with sin, but in that perfection, in that glorified state, Ephesians 2 verse 7 still rules, we will still be learning about God's grace. So we'll still be growing even if we've been perfected.

Alright, I blitzed through those last couple of verses. I apologize. Like I said, I didn't have enough time to make this shorter. Any thoughts or questions? I know I owe you a good apostolic write-up. I don't owe it to you. It would be beneficial for all of my own knowledge and I could share it with you. How about we'll say it that way?

All right, let's close in prayer. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would teach us throughout the coming weeks and time until your return about the truths that we've seen here. Thank you for establishing the church, letting us participate in it, and be part of a body that is being matured and grown to the fullness of the stature of Christ. We thank you for who we are in you and the grace that that affords us. In Jesus' name, amen.