Be One! Be Different!

This is a bit embarrassing to say, but I have this thing about doing the Tribune’s crossword puzzle each day, and I couldn’t finish Saturday’s and it’s bugging me. Maybe you can help me out. Then I can focus on our sermon text. Can you help me for a minute? I got most of it already.

This should be easy if we have any Cribbage players, but I’ve never played Cribbage. What’s a three letter word for 'Cribbage marker' that ends in “G”? (Peg)

A 4-letter word, the name of the dog in Peter Pan. (Nana)

Then a 7-letter word for ‘easily conned folk.’ It starts with PA…. (patsies)

Does anybody know the name of a river that runs into Lake Ontario? Its seven letters. It looks like it starts out Gen… (Genesee)

Then I need a four letter word for a Johnnycake. It begins PO…. (pone)

Didn’t that make it easy when we brought all our variety of interests and skills and experiences together? Who knows what we could accomplish if we did that more? I’ll have to do a sermon on that some day.

This morning we move into the middle section of Ephesians 4. Would you please stand for the reading of God’s word? This morning we’ll look at Ephesians 4, verse 7, and then drop down to verses 11-17.

7 But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift… 11 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 14 We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15 But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.

We spent four weeks on the first 6 verses of the chapter. In my own mind, I give them the heading, ‘Be one!’ because the unity of the church was so important to Paul. And I’m sure he would approve of me taking 4 weeks to work on it. In fact he might say, “Was that all you spent?”

You can see from his letters that Paul worked hard to teach his people how to be the church, how to express the very loving heart of God in their relationships with each other, through humility and gentleness and patience. When God’s people get really good at these things, when they really become united into one heart and one mind, when they have really learned to trust one another and be unfailingly trustworthy for one another, then the world looks at the church and it has a chance to understand just how God operates and what God is like and how good God’s ways are. We are the light of the world.

And when you get really good at being one, you start to find wonderful freedom to be really different. In fact you can come to treasure how different we are. And, oh, how different we are.

In fact, if you think there is something about you that there are some ways that you are really different from most of the rest of us, raise your hand. Good for you! God made you to be different.

But if any group doesn’t have that foundation of deep, solid unity in place, people start to criticize over their differences, compete and fight (my vision is more important than your vision) and the church goes nowhere. And if that’s the case you would be smart to just keep your head down and not let anyone know you are different, not let anyone know the real you. But then we aren’t being the church.

In our text for today Paul is talking about the church being made up of persons with different spiritual gifts. In verse 7 he talks about the church receiving grace, by which, he explains further down, he means spiritual gifts. Look at verse 7. How many of the church members got this grace, spiritual gifts from God? Was there just one pastor with spiritual gifts? A few officers or super saints? Who did God give the grace of spiritual gifts to? “Each of us.” Every one of us has at least one spiritual gift from God to contribute to the rest of us. Someone once said about this, “Everybody is a ‘ten’ somewhere.”