“Christian Unity” on Ephesians 4:1-16 by Joe Ellis — November 10, 2024

I care about how we live out this passage in Ephesians, yet I am fearful of getting burned by our failure to live out this passage. This is vulnerable to talk about. The vulnerable part for me really comes in at verse 11, when Paul talks about Christ giving the gift of leaders to the church (apostles prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers) to equip his people for works of service, so that “the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” 

It's that role of pastors in building up the body of Christ until we reach unity in the faith that has me feeling vulnerable. It was difficult having this charge to build unity, and seeing such disunity dismember the church during Covid. This was difficult for all of us. Going with Paul’s image of building up the body of Christ, it was like we were seeing limbs fall off left, right and centre. My heart still aches thinking about that time.

So, in preaching a message on unity, I’m aware of how fragile, even brittle, Christian unity is. Paul holds out such a powerful vision, and that’s hard to open my heart to it. I want to see us live this stuff out, and the legacy of that time is that part of me wants to protect my heart and not care too much. Living into this vision of Christian unity is inherently risky  — many of us have been burned and will likely get burned again. And the vision of the church is too beautiful to give up on.

Together we are intended to grow together, and “become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” It's only when we do life together in unity that we become Christ-like to our surrounding community. No other organization besides the church has that sort of Vision statement. So, more than my heart hurts, my heart thirsts for that sort of life together. And the Christ-embodied life together is predicated on unity. So, I want to keep trying, keep risking, keep striving to learn how to be Christ-like together.  

Paul begins chapter 4 with: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…” The calling gets at what Paul has been talking about in the first three chapters of his letter to the Ephesians. First Paul speaks of our having been chosen in Christ (which is our first calling), and then he speaks of our calling to join a new type of humanity — a people that is defined by unity over hostility. In chapters 2 and 3, Paul talks about God joining together two peoples who had previously been defined by their inability to come together. Paul has in mind two warring people groups who couldn’t even eat together or worship together— the Jews and Gentiles — people who, without Christ, had been divided by a wall of hostility. Yet throughout Ephesians, Paul declares that Christ has torn down this dividing wall of hostility, bringing unity and peace. The two who once were divided by hostility are now a people unified under the banner of  “one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism,  one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” The triune God, Father, Son and Spirit has brought these warring peoples together to demonstrate a new way of being human. This, too, is our calling, for all of us. We are called to demonstrate the wisdom of God by living in unity with those who we feel almost nothing in common.

Last week, we reflected on how often it is far easier to unite around a theological vision of unity than living it out. It is truly inspiring to declare that we are all welcomed into this expression of Christ’s body only on the basis of our having been washed clean by the blood of Christ. But underneath this grand theological vision are real tensions between real people. Despite our capacity to preach unity, divergent beliefs and behaviours get in the way. So we have church split after church split. 

Now the early church certainly lived with its own fair share of tensions around beliefs and behaviours. Yet we need to acknowledge that the fractious nature of churches has gotten much worse over the past 500 years. Although there were significant conflicts in the church before the year 1052, up until that year the majority of Christians would have considered themselves to be within the same church, the same body, the same head. After 1052, there emerged two churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. So it went until about 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door. This is seen as the birth of the Reformation when Protestants split from the Roman Catholic Church. Fast forward 500 years and we now have nearly 45,000 different denominations globally. Something has certainly gone wrong. The Reformation wasn’t all bad, but it has certainly introduced a sickness of division that has plagued the church ever since. 

Again, it's not that the early church didn’t have conflict and division. In verse 14,  Paul talks about the need for God’s people to “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.” The early Christian communities certainly wrestled with differing beliefs within the fold, and those beliefs and accompanying behaviours were incredibly problematic.

A group that Paul might have been thinking of in verse 14 was the Judaizers, who believed that converts to Christianity must follow Mosaic Law and consequently needed to be circumcised. The stakes were high — Paul says in Galatians 2:21 that if “righteousness can be found through observing the law, then Christ died for nothing!” 

Or in Eph 4:14, Paul may be thinking of another group of Christ followers who wanted to blend Christianity with a sort of Gnostic influence. These Christ followers were convinced they had a special knowledge and they arrived at the conclusion that what they did with their bodies just really doesn’t matter — rather, they thought it was the undefiled spirit that mattered — so these Christians would just as soon sleep with a prostitute as they would eat a sandwich to satisfy their body’s needs. It’s to them that Paul cries out in his first letter to the Corinthians in 6:19-20, “Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God with your body!” 

Unity matters. Beliefs matter. Behaviour matters. Like Christians today, the early Christians swung between the poles of legalism and permissiveness — shaped by surrounding cultural beliefs that resulted in a vastly different set of behaviours. All this made unity in Christ exceedingly difficult, then as now.

So, here is the tension — unity is central to the Christian faith. That is what Jesus prayed for before His death on the cross. Yet, unity for Christians is not as simple as is advocated by many in our own culture, whereby we water down differences by saying the differences just don’t matter.  Our surrounding culture strives for unity — but it does so by suggesting belief and behaviour ultimately don’t matter — just as long as you aren't negatively impacting anyone other than yourself. For Christians, unity in faith and in deeds matters —  Paul holds the standard of “one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism,  one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

Christians strive for this unity through working toward unity in belief and behaviour. This is unity empowered by the Spirit, who was sent from the Father through the Son. So, how do we move towards this vision of unity? What are the first steps toward not only avoiding the pitfalls of legalism or permissiveness but also moving toward actually resembling this new way of being human in Christ?

Well, the first step might obviously be to make really clear what is out of bounds! And to do so as colourfully as possible — like when we see in Paul’s response to those Jewish Christians who think that everyone must be circumcised. Paul just throws up his hands and says in Galatians 5:12, “I wish they would go all the way and castrate themselves!” Okay, that might not be good advice.

In Ephesians, Paul takes a different tack. Last week, we noted his first step towards seeking unity in Christ was to pray! My own sense is that Christians need to rediscover Paul’s way of praying, like we see throughout his letters (including Galatians), as our primary way of cultivating Christian unity — to this end, I am so proud of the contemplative prayer nights that Flora, Caitlin and Michelle have been hosting in our church. I believe they are introducing our congregation to Spirit-filled practices that shape character, and practices that position us to be shaped by the Spirit to make unity in Christ far more likely.  

So if unity comes through shared belief and action, where do we start after prayer? Paul names five ways of being that the Ephesians are to adopt in pursuit of unity. After praying for one another, this is where we start. Paul says: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called,  with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,  making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Notice that Paul says “maintain the unity of the Spirit.” He doesn’t say, “get the unity of the Spirit up and running.” We aren’t starting from scratch. Our unity with each other and with Christ is the precondition to being a Christian. Unity amongst believers was established by Christ when He died for my sins as He died for yours, and He poured out His Spirit on me as He poured out His Spirit on you. That is the foundation for our unity. When Paul says “maintain the unity of the Spirit,” he says it because our unity existed before we even met each other — perhaps even before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4). Our ability to get along is not a precondition for our unity. Our unity is a metaphysical reality. So Paul is calling us to live into this reality that existed before the foundation of the world, so he calls us to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

So, how do we maintain unity of the Spirit? Paul gives us five behaviours to cultivate. Earlier when I said “Christians strive for unity through working toward unity in belief and behaviour,” were these the behaviours that immediately came to mind: humility, gentleness, patience, love and peace? They weren’t for me, but it's pretty obvious that if we hope for unity in belief and behaviour, the behaviours we need to start with would be humility, gentleness, patience, love and peace.

Did you notice that four out of five of those qualities of behaviour are given in the fruit of the Spirit mentioned in Galatians 5? Remember the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control? These qualities aren’t ones we need to strain to achieve. Paul says they are outcomes of our relationship with the Spirit of God. They bloom in us through the Spirit. And here in Ephesians Paul notes how these qualities — which we have only because of the in-dwelling Spirit who lives in us — these qualities are essential to maintaining unity that God has created in Christ amongst believers. Unity is maintained through participating in the Spirit who cultivates in believers the qualities of acting humbly, gently, patiently, lovingly and peacefully.

Paul encourages the Ephesians to cultivate these qualities, even before any tensions were felt in the Christian community around belief and behaviour. As you know, significant tensions, were harboured in the early Christian Church as they have been in the church ever since. It is not difficult to imagine how the Spirit supplying us with the qualities of acting humbly, gently, patiently, lovingly and peacefully would impact a community mired in tension. It is hard to be ticked off at someone who is incredibly humble. It is hard to pick a fight with someone insufferably gentle. It is hard to yell at someone who has the patience of Job. Not so in a community that’s characterized by the opposites of these, where people are characterized with pride, harsh rebuke, impatience, aggression and hate. Have you ever seen someone maintain unity through pride, harsh rebuke and aggression? It's not pretty.

Now, I’m not going to ask each of us which of these qualities you or I need to cultivate in our life — I’m not going to ask which quality you or I need to grow in, whether it be humility, or gentleness, whether it be patience or love or peace. There is, of course, great value in reflecting on how those qualities are present or missing from your life. But I’m not going to ask you to think about that — instead, I’d like you to reflect on how you regularly you pray and invite the Spirit into your life to help you “maintain the unity of the Spirit.”  If these qualities are truly Spirit-derived, the royal road into this bond of unity amongst believers is certainly through deepening our fellowship with the Spirit through spiritual practices. Of course, we need to be mindful of whether we are humble, gentle, patient, loving and peaceful in our relationships — but far more important is that we are filled with the fullness of God so that these qualities of God will manifest in how we behave with each other. Which spiritual practise have you enfolded into your life so as to grow in intimacy with God, so as to cultivate the humility, gentleness, peace, patience and love through the Spirit? 

We are all called into this work together and the vision is beautiful. Paul says each of us has a role in fostering the unity of the church.  So that,”speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, 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.”

May it be so in the community in which we worship.