What We are NOT Doing
Application is not an opportunity to enter into a time of beating ourselves up. When we recognize the fact that Paul identifies saints (that’s anyone who is a believer; we talked about it and you can check it out here) as immature children, that is not code for “What’s the matter with me? I should be further along.” If I had a quarter every time I’ve heard fellow believers say that…
NO, NO, NO!
Not Further Along. Start Today.
I don’t know if you know this about me, but until I was almost 40 years old, I was overweight and baffled as to how I could be so unhealthy when I thought I was active and careful with food. In reality, I was ignorant and disheartened by what I perceived I heard from the culture about my appearance. Plus I could tell there were health-issues pounding on my door like diabetes and what-not. What a horrible predicament.
By God’s grace, when my husband asked me to help him count his caloric intake and I began to join him in it, I recognized what I was missing in my life: math.
What is the point? Like any other effort we make in our lives, we start out a mess. Sometimes it’s a colossal, overwhelming, seriously jacked-up mess. And sometimes it’s even worse. How do we learn and grow and move away from such messes? A step at a time. We recognize the problem, and we take baby steps toward solutions.
Brow-beating, self condemnation, harsh assessment? There is no need for that. What’s done is done. If repentance is required, do that. But if the situation is that immaturity and childishness has been our state? Let’s grow. When we see a 3 year old trip, do we yell at them for being clumsy?
Ok, if you do, stop it. But probably not. So don’t yell at you either.
As I go through this process, I can’t find significance for your life, but I’m going to look at this passage for my life. Will you join me examining your life as I examine my own?
Considering the Whole Passage
On these stickies, I ran through the passage again. My objective was to organize it into a rudimentary outline but paraphrasing in order to verify my own understanding. As we finish up a passage, seeing the relationships altogether will help people like me who love to examine individual trees, see the forest better.
Summary
If you recall from other times we’ve gotten together to discuss application, I try to make this the time that I also write a summary. Reducing the passage down to the skeleton helps us to see and understand the frame onto which Paul has hung the rest. It’s like the idea that Sproul has said that if you know what question a philosopher is answering, you have a better idea of what he is talking about. Paul is a philosopher, theologian, and evangelist: we want to know what questions he’s answering. Summarizing gets us closer to that goal.
Here is my first effort:
Paul urges the churches to be unified as the Trinity is. Jesus has given gifts of workers to teach saints to grow into this maturity which will result in love.
Reading over that, I think I’m satisfied with that summary. The only word I’d like to add is to describe the maturity the saints are growing into, but I’m not going to make it a bigger summary. It’s a summary, not the text itself. It will not contain all that Paul said.
One Application
Looking at this summary, the core Paul is conveying is the church is to be unified as God and all he is is unified. I observed this earlier in the study, and as I’ve continued to study, I think it was an accurate observation: God and all he is is NOT uniform. He is of one mind, unified. But there are multiple functions within all that God is.
To use some doctrine: God is one in essence, three in person. He is the same stuff, but the persons have different purposes. Which is not a contradiction because he is not one in substance and three in substance at the same time and the same relationship. I’m not going to go into all of this right now, but this is a Hebrew thought about a father and his son being of the same substance and yet different people.
In the Church
Anyway, in the church, there are saints. We are the saints. All of us are of the same substance: saved souls. Those who are saved and not wolves among us… BUT that does not mean we all serve the same purpose.
Just like God is not for one purpose, Jesus gave these workers who are also not for one function. When we looked at them a bit ago here, the apostles, prophets, evangelists and what-not did not all do the same things or serve in the same offices. Some over-lap but not uniform in tasks.
An application I see is that the saints have things to learn and grow in and be unified in but not necessarily uniform. In Ephesians 4:16, Paul says that when each part is working properly, it makes the body grow. Each part means that there is diversity in the parts and their functions.
In real life? My life? For me, an application I see is that when I run across someone who is not necessarily doing what I think she should be doing, I do not have to dialogue with her about it. I don’t need to fix her. I’m not a gift given by Christ to the church.
For Example
There are different functions in the body. Say I’m a nose. That doesn’t mean that I need to run around being nosey and conform everyone else to nose-ness.
When I run across this person who is different than me, I don’t need to change her. Maybe she is someone who naturally defaults to arguing and correcting other people. I will not necessarily place myself in a position to be corrected by her, but I can give her freedom to be the part God created her to be. I can let her learn and grow with the workers Christ has given the church to help her grow.
My specific application: I will let other saints be the parts of the body without trying to fix them or change them to be something else. I will let the Holy Spirit be the driving force in other people’s lives.
A Second Application
I’ve applied one part of the summary I derived from the passage. Paul wanted the recipients of the letter to walk, eager to maintain unity. The second part of the summary deals with the workers Jesus gifted to the church and that the saints should learn from them. I should learn from them.
Apostles
Considering the laborers that Jesus gave to me as a saint in the church, first I see the apostles. Do I learn from the apostles? Since the apostles are recorded in the pages of scripture, the position I place myself in to learn from them is reading the Word and studying it. Some seasons of my life I posit myself to learn better from guys like Matthew and Paul than others. But, hey! You are helping me to learn from them better right now by studying with me!
Prophets
Next I see the prophets. The ones who take what is difficult to comprehend of scripture and put it on the bottom shelf for the rest of us. How do I posit myself to learn from them? Invest in books that I read and use and invest time in listening to lectures (which are different from podcasts).
Evangelists
I’m not sure Paul had these in any particular order of importance, but more of an order of appearance, perhaps. Third, he listed those who proclaim truth, announcers of the good news. In my efforts to learn from this genre of news-conveyer, I’ve listened to Matt Chandler in particular.
When Jeremy and I went to that Acts29 BootCamp and I heard his rendition of the Bible in 45 minutes, going Genesis to Revelation and explaining how Jesus is throughout…my world was forever altered. Because grace was no longer theoretical, it was tangible. I could see it active in my life and allow it to be active in other people’s lives.
After that, I couldn’t hear enough of his preaching. In a time sans podcast. Jeremy had to help me find the sermons, they didn’t come to me like they could today if I subscribed. I don’t listen to his sermons as often as I used to due to the time I spend learning through other means, but he is one I count as an influence as an evangelist in my life.
Shepherds/Teachers
For me, this is the category where I have the most difficulty. With the experiences I’ve had within the church, I’ve been trained by trauma to find these folks untrustworthy. Which isn’t good. It isn’t right. And it isn’t fair. But it is my current mental reality. And in my humanness and the current circumstances, I’m not sure I see a valid reason to change my opinion. But I’m not here to consider what I think; I’m here to let God tell me what I should think.
So I’m talking to myself here: these workers have been given by Jesus to equip the saints for the work of ministry and for the building up of the body of Christ until we all reach unity of faith and knowledge of Christ.
Groan. Oh Lord God, seriously, you will have to work in my heart on this.
There have been so many men, pastors and elders at churches I’ve attended, who have had their own wacky ideas draped with Christian-speak, and spread those around their churches. Even an out-and-out wolf as one associate pastor! How am I supposed to trust? I’m called elsewhere in scripture to be wary but here in Ephesians I’m also urged to walk in learning from these shepherds.
And let other sheep learn from these shepherds. Pastors and elders that a lot of the time don’t seem to know what in the world they are talking about. Or they are simply repeating what they heard once, or read on a bumper sticker somewhere. And yet, these are the gifts that Jesus has given the church. He will preserve his church even with the cracked pots within it. Again, God, you are going to have to do a work in my heart.
To Apply
I already spend a lot of my time in a posture of learning from many of the categories Paul laid out here as Jesus’ gifts to the church. To say, “I will learn from…” would be a pathetic cop-out for an application because it’s what I already want to do. Instead, I think the significance I need to put in my heart would be a prayer effort for heart change.
You see, I go to church, but I go largely because God said so. Folks who act all churchy, speak all churchy, and correct anyone who doesn’t fit in the box of churchiness at best give me the heeby-jeebies. At worst, they make me angry. Straight up angry.
The significance here in this text is that I am supposed to learn from the gift that is these folks. Now we all know that I have hang-ups about that. So what to do?
My specific application: Prayer. My application in this text is prayer. I need a healed heart. Possibly I also need growth in wisdom to know when to say, “Nope, that guy is a weasel.” And at least ask questions about potential wolves. What if I’d said something about that particular wolf, no matter how uncomfortable? Would there have been fewer victims mauled by the wolf? Oh my heart hurts.
As well as wisdom to say, “That guy has some stuff that is accurate in what he says.” To reiterate my specific application: I need to pray for a right heart with regard to shepherd teachers that are over me.
One More Application
Paul points out that everyone starts out as children who are tossed and carried about by various misleading situations. Winds of doctrine, sneaky people, bad plans. Everyone begins as a toddler. As a fellow toddler, I need to accept that other toddlers will do silly things. Since we have these gifts of people to share the Good News until we all attain to the unity of the faith…to mature manhood, it is possible that some of us children will remain children.
As a parent, that breaks my heart. Some of my children have not attained to adulthood as demonstrated by actual adulting. How much more must that be difficult for God as a Father? So Jesus gave these gifts of men to share the Good News until maturity is reached. Like I said, nothing like a little job security, eh?
The application here, though, is that while those children within the church muddle on, I, as a member of a congregation (and in some cases as a fellow toddler), do not need to parent them. There is no information in scripture that prescribes the congregation as parents for the congregation. The congregation isn’t parent to the congregation.
Distinction
God doesn’t not want sin swept under the rug, that isn’t what I’m saying. Sin should be addressed, BUT I need to allow for differences of opinion. Differences of opinion about how to live in my head are like when we used to have families with kids over. Our kids had manners and rules that Anderson’s needed to follow, but they were our preferences as a family. When the Scansen’s came over, their kids had different manners and rules and I should not be going around, correcting other people’s kids in their manners, right?
Is it sin to talk with your mouth full? No.
What about licking your own birthday cake? No.
See? I need to mind my own beeswax.
Same in the church. These children in the church that haven’t matured are God’s kids and they are doing the best they can. I don’t need to run around correcting opinions and manners of someone else’s kids. Namely, God’s kids. Specific application: I will allow other people to be at different maturity levels without harassing them with my opinion (which may be completely out of line!) and correction.
Wrap Up
Application and significance are such a challenge for me. They are all squishy and kind of emotional. I feel raw and exposed talking to you about it.
But this helps to illustrate why our Bible Study Bite for today is that application can not, can not be found for someone else. Scholarly reading and careful study of texts for yourself will yield a closer understanding of what the biblical author intended when he wrote. And then the Holy Spirit will use that understanding as an instrument to touch your heart in a way unlike having someone else tell you about the text.
Please don’t misunderstand this writer (me): I believe that Jesus gave us those workers to teach and proclaim the word. We grow and are built up in love as we learn from those gifts. But when we learn for ourselves, we hear that teaching from the Bible writer in a different way.
One interpretation, myriad applications. Those applications have opportunity to expose my heart to me in an acutely personal way.
I hope you are encouraged to study more for yourself as we study together. If you find anything useful in our time together, would you please share with fellow students of the Word? As always, thanks for studying with me today!
