Walk Worthy
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S.I. McMillen was a medical missionary in Africa for many years in the early part of the 20th century.
When he left the mission field, he returned to the United States to start a medical practice in New York and wrote a book called None of These Diseases, which takes a look at how medical science is coming to many of the same conclusions about healthy living that God revealed to His people in biblical times.
The book is filled with personal anecdotes from his medical practice, and in one of those anecdotes, he related the story of a young woman he knew who had desperately wanted to attend college, but whose hopes were dashed when she reached a certain question on the college application.
"Are you a leader?”
It was a simple and straightforward question, and after wrestling with her conscience, she finally gave a simple and straightforward answer: “No.” And then she finished the application and returned it to the school, expecting the worst.
Some time later, she received a surprising letter from the college: “Dear Applicant: A study of the application forms reveals that this year our college will have 1,452 new leaders. We are accepting you because we feel it is imperative that they have at least one follower.”
Everything in American society is geared toward producing leaders. From our kindergarten games — remember Follow the Leader? — to our favorite national sports — I’ll bet everyone here could name at least one football quarterback — we are geared toward elevating leaders.
I read one blog this week whose author had found more than 57,000 books on Amazon with the word “leadership” in their titles. According to that author, books on leadership were released at a rate of more than four per day during 2015.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with good leadership. In fact, without it we would have chaos and anarchy.
But today, I want to talk about followers.
Now I could go into some detail as to why this metaphor of sheep and shepherds is so prevalent in Scripture and what it should mean for the church — and perhaps we will cover that sometime down the road — but today I want to go back to this idea of leadership.
More to the point, I want to talk about followers.
In a nation where books on leadership are published at a rate of four per day, perhaps it is no wonder there is such little emphasis on how to be a good follower.
But even in that kindergarten game of Follow the Leader, most children spend far more of their time as followers than as leaders.
The Bible has a lot to say about good leadership — and there is a lot there, as well, about bad leadership: Think of any of the kings of Israel after David, for instance.
But the interesting thing is how much Scripture has to tell us about following.
Today, as we prepare to install new church officers, it’s the characteristics of good followers that I want us to concentrate on, because every one of us here today is a follower. We follow either Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd who gave His life to save us from our sins, or we follow Satan, the ruler of this world, who will one day be vanquished by Christ and sent into eternal Hell.
Recognizing that most of us here today are professing Christians, I think it would be useful for us to take a few minutes to look at how we are to walk as sheep following the Good Shepherd.
The Apostle Paul talks about this in Ephesians, Chapter 4, and we’re going to bounce through this passage today. As you’re turning there in your Bibles, let me give you the context of the passage.
Paul has spent the first three chapters of this letter talking about what God has been doing in history and His eternal purpose for this work.
He sent His only Son, Jesus, to suffer and die on a cross so that those who believe in Him and follow Him in faith could be saved from the penalty for their sins.
That’s a wonderful thing, of course, and the salvation we have through faith in this risen Savior is the reason we who have put our faith in Him can have hope.
But God’s purpose was bigger than just our salvation.
God has been working since Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden to reconcile mankind to Himself and to redeem His creation from the curse that was brought on it by our sins.
We who have placed our faith in Jesus Christ as payment of our sin-debt have been made into new creatures, and we have become part of the new creation that will come through Him and is coming even now.
But if we are new creatures working toward a new society in Christ, then there must be some new standards we are to follow. We cannot expect to continue to operate as we did when we were lost. We cannot expect to live as the lost world lives.
Considering the sacrifice our Lord made, we must expect to live in a way that is worthy of Him.
And that’s where we’ll pick up in verse 1 of chapter 4.
Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called,
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with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
If we are going to walk in a manner worthy of our calling in Jesus Christ, we must do so with humility and gentleness, with patience and tolerance, and with love.
If we are going to walk in a manner worthy of our calling in Jesus Christ, we must do so with humility and gentleness, with patience and tolerance, and with love.
We have talked quite a lot about unity in the church, and I would suggest to you that true unity in Christ — the bond of peace — cannot be had without these five traits.
And there is a reason Paul puts humility first in this list: Pride is at the bottom of all discord. Pride is all about lifting ourselves up, and we can scarce lift ourselves up without pushing someone else down.
Pride says I deserve to be on top, and it doesn’t care who it hurts on the way to putting me there. Pride wants you to see how valuable you are. Humility wants you to see the value in others. Pride says, “Look at me!” Humility says, “Look at Jesus!”
This word, “gentleness,” here is translated as “meekness” in the KJV. Now, some of you have been studying the Beatitudes in Sunday school, so for you this will be a review.
Meekness is not weakness. One author called it “the quality of a strong personality who is nevertheless master of himself and the servant of others.” (John R. W. Stott, God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 149.)
Aristotle described it as “the mean between being too angry and never being angry at all.”
the quality of a strong personality who is nevertheless master of himself and the servant of others.
John R. W. Stott, God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 149.
Jesus was certainly meek, but in His meekness, He confronted the false teachers of His time and even flipped tables in the temple out of His zeal for God’s house.
Meekness goes along with humility here, because a meek person is slow to assert his personal rights, longing instead for the ultimate benefit of others.
The second pair in verse 2 is patience and tolerance, and the truth is that walking in these characteristics may be even harder for many of us than walking in humility and gentleness.
But each of us is at a different point in our spiritual maturity, and the only way we can ever have true unity — a true bond of peace — is to be patient and tolerant toward one another.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we should tolerate false teaching or ungodly behavior or destructiveness within the church. Indeed, Paul describes in other places the need to confront such problems in the church, and he points later in this passage to spiritual maturity as one of the goals for which we should all be striving.
But without a healthy dose of patience and tolerance, we cannot reach that goal.
Finally, love is the characteristic that embraces each of the other four. It is the crowning virtue of the Christian life.
Christian love “seek(s) the welfare of others and the good of the community,” setting aside pride, moving ahead in meekness, working with patience, and demonstrating tolerance for one another. (John R. W. Stott, God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 149.)
We are united in Jesus Christ by one Spirit, but to whatever extent we fail to demonstrate these five characteristics — humility, meekness, patience, tolerance, and love — we do violence to the outward expression of that unity.
seek the welfare of others and the good of the community
Scripture calls the church the body of Christ, and just as your physical body suffers when one or more of its parts isn’t working well, the body of the church suffers when all of its parts are not acting in unity.
John R. W. Stott, God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 149.
This is an apt metaphor, because we are all so different in what we bring to this body and in the roles we play in it.
Paul talks about some of those roles beginning in verse 11.
Indeed, take a look at verse 11
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers,
for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ;
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The point here is that the apostles and the prophets and the evangelists and pastors and teachers have been given to the church to equip each Christian to do ministry by building them up in their faith and understanding.
The point is that the apostles and the prophets and the evangelists and pastors and teachers have been given to the church to equip each Christian to do ministry by building them up in their faith and understanding.
The work of service in verse 12 is not simply the pastor’s job, “but rather the work of so-called laity, that is, of all God’s people without exception. Here is incontrovertible evidence that the New Testament [sees] ministry not as the prerogative of a clerical élite but as the privileged calling of all the people of God.” (John R. W. Stott, God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 167.)
You see, followers within the church MUST be doers, not simply hearers or sitters or sleepers in the back of bus that the pastor is driving.
but rather the work of so-called laity, that is, of all God’s people without exception. Here is incontrovertible evidence that the New Testament envisages ministry not as the prerogative of a clerical élite but as the privileged calling of all the people of God.
John R. W. Stott, God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 167.
There is simply no excuse for a Christian not to be involved in some type of Christian service. There is simply no excuse for a Christian not to invite a neighbor or friend or family member to church. There is simply no excuse for a Christian to sit under solid biblical teaching and not be DOING something for thee Kingdom of God.
We live in a lost world, one ruled by the Father of Lies. But we are ambassadors of Truth.
Each of us who follows Jesus Christ — who called Himself the Way, the Truth and the Life — has been given an ambassadorship of truth within this kingdom of lies.
The enemy says we can be good enough to stand before a holy and perfect God. But Truth says that all our righteousness is but filthy rags. Truth says that only the precious blood of Jesus Christ can wash away our sins. Truth says that unless we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, we are lost in our transgressions.
This is the message your lost sons and daughters need to hear. This is the message your lost neighbors are desperate to receive.
But how will they know if you do not tell them?
Nobody will come to Christ simply because they see you pulling out of your driveway at 9 or 10 o’clock on Sunday mornings. You will not lead your lost loved ones to Christ if they cannot see you following Him.
If you want to be a leader in the church, then start by leading people to the cross. Start by letting them see that you have crucified yourself with Christ. Start by, as Paul puts it in verses 22-24 of this passage, laying aside the old self and being putting on the new self...
and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.
You can always tell the true leaders of the church, whether they’re pastors or teachers or simply faithful people doing ministry. They’re the ones who are following Jesus up that hill, carrying the cross to which they will nail their pride and their unrighteous anger and their impatience and intolerance.
The true leaders in the church are the ones who follow Jesus most closely, and they stand out as starkly as our Savior did when He hung on that cross on Golgotha.
Now, in a few minutes, we will remember our Savior’s sacrifice on that hill as we partake in the Lord’s Supper.
But first, our church constitution calls for us to install church officers before this month runs out.
I’ve given a lot of thought and prayer about how to do this, and what I keep coming back to is this: Whether pastor or teacher or committee or board chairman or simply church member, we are all given the same basic charge as followers of Christ.
So what I’d like to ask is that all members of this church please stand.
Whether you have been elected to some office in this church or not, you have the same obligations as Christians.
If you HAVE been elected to some office, then your obligation goes even deeper: You should recognize that you have been given a responsibility to the administration of Christ’s church, and you should strive to carry out that responsibility in a manner that honors Him and that will not bring the church into disrepute.
So I now charge you all, in the words of Paul to the church in Rome:
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Thank you. You may be seated.
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
There is no better example of the fundamental truth that good will overcome evil than the picture of the sinless Jesus Christ taking the sins of the world upon Himself at the cross so that we who follow Him could be saved from the punishment that we deserve.
His good sacrifice on what we call Good Friday overcame evil. We still see evil in the world, of course, and all of us do evil things, even as His followers — we still sin every day.
But His death and resurrection mean that we who have put our faith in Him are no longer under the penalty of death. We are no longer separated from God. We have life eternal through the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus Christ.
Today, as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we remember His sacrifice. We remember His victory over sin at the cross. We remember His victory over death at the tomb that He left empty in His resurrection. And we remember the promise of His return as He ascended to Heaven to be with His Father.
Now, as we prepare to distribute the bread for today’s communion observance, please remain seated and turn to No. 460 in your hymnals, and we will sing the first verse of Let Us Break Bread Together. When we have finished, the deacons will join me at the front and distribute the bread, and then one of them will come up here for prayer and a Scripture reading. Then we will all join together in eating the bread that represents the body of Christ, torn for our transgressions.
SONG/BREAD
Now, as we prepare to distribute the juice that represents Christ’s blood, shed for our sins, remain seated, and we will sing the second verse of Let Us Break Bread Together, No. 460 in your hymnals. When we’re done, the deacons will distribute the juice. One will then join me on the dais and read a Scripture and pray. Then we will all drink together.
SONG/CUPS
Maranatha! Lord, come!
Now, join me on the floor here, and let’s join together to sing Bless’d Be the Tie that Binds.