Echoes from Ephesians: Walk Worthy

Quick Glance: For Your Heart Today
To “walk worthy” is to lead a life worthy of the calling we have in Jesus Christ. It is a calling that remembers our identity as citizens with God’s holy people and belonging in God’s family. It begins with Jesus and God’s love for us. Because of love, we have the more specific call: be humble, be gentle, be patient, make allowances for each other’s faults, be united in the spirit together with peace. There is one body, one Spirit and one Lord. We walk worthy because we are called to one glorious hope for the future in Jesus Christ.

3 Takeaways

• To walk worthy practically, be humble, gentle, patient and make allowances for each other’s faults in the community of faith.
• Walk worthy because there is one body, one Spirit and one Lord. We are on the same team.
• Walk worthy because we are called to one glorious hope for the future through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We’ll see each other in Heaven for all eternity!

If You Only Have a Moment
Take a breath and receive this truth today:
Inhale: Jesus, teach me to love.
Exhale: Make me more like You.

Estimated Reading Time: 20-25 minutes

Message

Thank you to Pastor Tammy for the opportunity to be a guest preacher at South Bay Community Church. And thank you for the warm welcome and greeting that we have received this morning. 
Today we are going to talk about what it means to “walk worthy.” They say that to be healthy, we are supposed to take 10,000 steps a day. I am far from that. I only take about 3,000 steps a day. But of all the steps we take each day, in how many of those steps are we “walking worthy” of Jesus Christ? May this message be an encouragement to “walk worthy” in some practical ways, in our everyday lives as we follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Our Scripture is from Ephesians 4:1-6 (NLT) which reads:

4 Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. 2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all.

Walk Worthy
The Apostle Paul calls the Ephesians to “lead a life worthy” of our calling, our calling by God. 
Ephesians 4:1 says, “Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God.” “To lead a life worthy” in the New Living Translation is literally to walk around in a worthy manner or to “walk worthy.” In the original Greek language, we have  peripateo axios = walk around worthily (peri = around, pateo = walk / foot and axios in a worthy manner).

#1 - Walk Worthy = Lead a life worthy of our calling in Christ
Paul calls us to “walk worthy” of our calling in Jesus Christ. How might we understand this calling in Jesus?
Ephesians 4 (our passage for today) is a pivot in the book of Ephesians. Ephesians 4 is about how we are to live, but it’s based on what Paul establishes in the earlier chapters. The first three chapters of Ephesians (Eph 1-3) lay out our calling which can be summarized as follows. We are called to an identity and belonging in Christ. For a brief look back at the earlier chapters of Ephesians, listen to the language around identity and belonging. Ephesians 1:4 - God loves you and chooses you to be holy in Christ. 1:9 - A Mystery: God will bring everything together under the authority of Christ. 2:8 - By grace you have been saved. 2:13 - You (who were once far off) are now united with Christ. 2:16 - Putting to death hostility between gentiles and Jews. 2:20 - You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family. 
This is a calling to an unexpected new identity and belonging, an identity and belonging that forms one community and one family across ethnicity, religious practice and politics.
(Illustration) There are three different ways to be Jewish. Someone can be Jewish by ethnicity, by religious practice and/or by politics. Ethnically, someone is Jewish when they are born if their mother is Jewish. By religious practice, someone could be Jewish if they followed the Torah and observed the Sabbath / Shabbat. By politics, they could be Jewish if they became a citizen of Israel.
Paul is calling the believers in Ephesus to walk worthy of their calling in Christ, a calling that invites them into a new identity and belonging in Christ, a calling that creates a radical new community that reaches across the dividing walls of ethnicity, religious practices and politics, to be one body. Much could be said further about our life today. How deeply is our own country divided across ethnicity, practices and politics. How much we need this calling to walk worthy, across division, to live a life worthy of the calling of Jesus Christ to a new identity as God’s Holy people and a new belonging as members in God’s family.

Paul continues on (Eph. 4:2-4) writing:

Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future.

#2 - Walk Worthy (in practice) = Be humble – Be gentle – Be patient – Make allowances for each other’s faults - Because of love
Here we have some very practical ways to “walk worthy.” To be humble or gentle, to be patient or to make allowances for each other. These seem simple. And yet, isn’t it that sometimes, some of the most simple teaching in Scripture is the hardest to live out? It can be very difficult to be humble, gentle or patient. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is prompting you to pay attention to one of these in particular. For you, to walk worthy this week may be to simply focus on and practice one of these.
In all honesty, do you have people in your family, or maybe your church family who just get on your nerves? I do, certainly, and think that in our families and churches, we simply have people that bug us or irritate us. But this is not to make anyone feel bad or be ashamed. Rather, we can take encouragement that this is a human challenge. Paul is writing these words to the church in Ephesus because humility, gentleness and patience are issues for them as a community. If we struggle with being humble, gentle or patient, then we are just like the Ephesians and other followers of Jesus as well.

(Illustration) There was this weekend retreat, a gathering of other Christians and we did this group activity. We were about 40 people and we were all seated on chairs in a circle. The activity was that we were to choose three people who were the most irritating to us. We were then supposed to get up and go to one of them and become partners. If your first person gets chosen, you are to go to your next irritating person until everyone has a partner. The facilitator said “go” and we all got up to find a partner. My first irritating person got chosen, so I quickly moved to locate my next irritating person. On my way to my next choice, someone else caught me by the arm and chose me! Yes, I was on someone else’s list of most irritating people in that room! The activity continued in that we were to pray with our partner. All throughout the weekend in fact, we prayed with our partners. Something interesting and transformative happened. Out of a relationship that started in irritation, we became united through prayer. It was a gift of the Holy Spirit. In these times of prayer, we practiced humility, gentleness, and patience with each other, sensing the love and grace of Jesus Christ and recognizing our common humanity. Prayer is an amazing vehicle to practice and foster humility, gentleness, and patience.

Moving on through Ephesians 4, Paul further writes (Eph. 4:4-6): 

“4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all.”

#3 - Walk Worthy because there is one body, one Spirit, one Lord.
We are all on the same team. Sometimes there’s competition between churches and there’s division between churches. Sometimes we forget that there’s one body, one Spirit and one Lord. It can feel like it’s us against them with other churches and we may even feel badly when people leave our church to go somewhere else. 
Pastor Steve Wong, fellow Covenant pastor, has a saying, “We bless people when they come and bless people when they go.” We recognize that people come and go for all kinds of different reasons and for all kinds of different seasons in their life. (The 40th Anniversary video for SBCC was a reminder that there are people who know and love South Bay, yet who now live in Napa, CA or Texas.) We bless people when they come and bless them when they go.
The enemy, Satan, the devil, the evil one, the accuser, if he was going to try to tear down the church, I would think one of his schemes would be to get believers fighting against each other. Satan would look to divide people.
Paul reminds us to walk worthy because we are one body, One Spirit, called to the same one Lord and hope in Jesus Christ.
If there’s a possibility of conflict, something that I share with people at Great Exchange (GrX) Covenant Church is the phrase, “We’ll see these folks in Heaven.” We are not in competition with any other church. We are all on the same team. We’ll see these folks in Heaven. There is one Spirit and one Lord.
Which brings us to the final point of this message. And we return to Ephesians 4:3-4 where Paul writes, “3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future.”

#4 - Walk Worthy because we are called to one glorious hope for the future.
Walk worthy because we are called to one glorious hope, a promised future in Heaven with Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.
(Illustration) The rope. Imagine this rope is your life. You are born at the beginning of the rope. We mark this with a small knot. As we live our life from childhood, to being a youth to adulthood, more of our life unfolds. Our life continues along the rope. At some point, each of us will die (and we tie off the rope to make a small knot, about 18 inches or so). But then what happens to us? Notice we don’t cut the rope when we die. Actually, at the point of our death, at this second knot, that’s when eternal life begins. And the rope goes on and on and on and on. This is what our eternal life will look like. We are called to this one glorious hope for the future.

The book of Revelation gives us a glimpse into what this future looks like in Revelation 7:9-12, which reads,

9 After this, I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands. 10 And they were shouting with a great roar,
“Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne and from the Lamb!”
11 And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living beings. And they fell before the throne with their faces to the ground and worshiped God. 12
They sang,
“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
    and thanksgiving and honor
and power and strength belong to our God
    forever and ever! Amen.”

Walk worthy because we are called into this glorious hope for the future. It is a good future and a sure future, because it is secured in Jesus Christ. But for now … because we are still here … and walking around here together on earth … for now … for today … for tomorrow … Walk Worthy!

Here’s a brief summary of the teaching points from Ephesians 4:1-6:

Summary:

#1 - Walk Worthy = Lead a life worthy of our calling in Christ

• Our calling of identity &belonging to God as citizens along with all of God’s holy people and members in the family of God is seen in Ephesians 1-3.

#2 - Walk Worthy (in practice) = Be humble – Be gentle – Be patient

• Make allowances for each other’s faults - Because of love
• In prayer & emerging from prayer, we practice these qualities

#3 - Walk Worthy because there is one body, one Spirit, one Lord.

• We are all on the same team, and we’ll see these folks in Heaven.

#4 - Walk Worthy because we are called to one glorious hope for the future.

• Eternal life through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.