Paul’s Vision For The Church

Many years ago (I’m embarrassed to admit how many!) a wise friend passed on to me a little book entitled The Gospel Blimp. Maybe some of you are old enough to have heard of it. Perhaps some have even read it! The story opens with a group of friends from church gathered for a barbecue in the back yard of George and Ethel Griscom. At some point someone notices the Griscoms’ next-door neighbours, who are sitting on their porch drinking beer and playing cards. This leads into a conversation on the Griscoms’ side of the fence about how to reach people with the gospel.

In the midst of the conversation an airplane flies very low overhead—so low, in fact, that everyone on both sides of the fence stops what they are doing to look up and gaze at it—and out of that there sprouts the germ of an idea. That low-flying airplane caught everybody’s attention. How about using a blimp with a message trailing behind it to glide slowly over people’s homes to proclaim the gospel to all the unchurched citizens of the whole town?

Well, the story goes on from there. And lo and behold, the idea becomes a reality. After that it doesn’t take much longer for someone to suggest a further step. How about using the blimp to sprinkle evangelistic pamphlets over entire neighbourhoods? Soon someone else comes up with the further brainwave of installing speaker horns to broadcast sermons and Christian music. Well, as you can imagine (or perhaps you’d prefer not to!) the story goes on from there. And it doesn’t take very much longer for the whole project to collapse in disaster.

But meanwhile, quietly in the midst of all this energy being devoted to the blimp, the Griscoms’ neighbours do become Christians. Not because of the blimp, which only ever served to upset and annoy people. But because somewhere along the way George and Ethel actually began to get to know their neighbours and ended up helping them through a serious health crisis.

All of this reminds me of some advice another friend passed on to me early in my Christian walk: “Be careful not to get so caught up in the work of the Lord that you lose sight of the Lord of the work.”

So it is that Paul is writing to the believers in Ephesus to remind them of their true calling, and to help them focus on God’s intentions for his church. And I hope I’m going to make it easy for you to remember if I summarize what he says under three headings: They needed to be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power, and continuous in praise.

Clear in our Purpose (8-13)

First, then, the believers living in Ephesus were called to be clear in their purpose. Paul sets out that purpose in the opening verse of this morning’s passage. And it is this: to proclaim the boundless, unfathomable, infinite riches of Christ—a riches that beggars all human calculation.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” he writes elsewhere. It’s as though, in spite of all his scholarly training and oratorical eloquence, Paul is scarcely able to find the words to express himself. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33)

John, at the very end of his gospel, after setting down more than twenty chapters of his memories of Jesus, finds himself coming to a similar conclusion: “Jesus did many other things as well,” he writes. “If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) He just couldn’t ever say enough about Jesus.

So it is that Paul writes that his whole calling—and by extension yours and mine—is to make plain God’s eternal plan, which has now been realized in Jesus Christ. The verb that Paul uses here is photizo. Perhaps you can hear in it our English words photograph, photoelectric, photon, photosensitive, photosynthesis… They all have to do with light.

Of course, behind Paul’s words is the command that Jesus gave to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:16). So it is that you and I are called and empowered and commissioned to live lives shining with the light of Jesus—his all-embracing love, his unchanging truth, his pure goodness—in what today seems to be an ever-increasingly dark and threatening world.

And that light will shine only as our words are backed up by our actions, by the quality of our lives. It is our lives that give authenticity to our words. A century and a half after the apostle Paul, believers were going through a period of terrible persecution. Yet the church continued to grow. Why? It was the Christian author Tertullian who recognized the reason when he wrote, “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, … how they are ready even to die for one another!” Theirs was a love that also overflowed outside the Christian community to the poor, the destitute and the hungry, to widows and orphans. And it was through that love tangibly demonstrated that people also discovered the love of a Saviour. Through their integrity people encountered him who is the truth. And through their willingness to be tortured and even to die for their faith that people found him who came to bring life in all its fullness.