The Kingdom and the Church is HOT-Ephesians 4:15a

Ephesians, New Testament, Sermons

Ephesians 4:15a

“Instead, we will speak the truth in love…”

Theme: The kingdom of God and the church must be HOT: happy, honest, humble, open and transparent. To be HOT, let us speak the truth in love…which is always easier said than done.

The central and single major theme of the entire Bible is the Kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is also the very centerpiece and a predominant theme of Jesus’ teachings and parables.

Experience the kingdom of God through the church. First and foremost I would like to thank Pastor Joshua Hong for giving me this privilege of preaching to you at Hyde Park UBF on the topic of “Kingdom (βασιλεία – Basileia) and Church (ἐκκλησία – Ekklēsia).” Ever since he asked me a few weeks ago, I have been quite seriously confounded by it and have been scratching my head as to how and what to say and share, since this theme is so very broad. I thought of many random Bible verses (mainly from the NT) with no single coherent thought or pattern or theme. Furthermore, the theme of the Kingdom of God is the central and the major single theme of the entire Bible—from Genesis to Revelation and from creation to redemption to consummation. So with this theme, I realize that I can basically preach and share on anything I want from anywhere in the entire Bible! My first attempt was to share how I personally experienced the kingdom of God.

I’m sharing “whatever I want” based on “however I feel.” In addition to the theme of the Kingdom which already covers the entire Bible, I still have the theme of the Church, which is also a prominent and significant theme of the Bible. Even if I preach for an entire day, I would have only barely skimmed the surface. In preparation, I read John Frame’s Systematic Theology and did multiple Google searches on the kingdom of God and the church and read numerous blogs. Finally, feeling overwhelmed, I decided that I am simply going to share “whatever I want” based on “however I feel,” which is conditioned by my subjective experiences of the church and the kingdom, as well as by my prior knowledge and understanding. So here goes!

Live out the gospel in life and community is the catch phrase of West Loop church. For the last few months, our sermon series is entitled Practical Christian Living–the ABCs. Our prayer is to live out the gospel of the kingdom through the themes covered so far: A is for Accountability, B is for Beauty, C is for Community, D is for Delight, E is for Experience, F is for Father, F is for Freedom, F is for Friendship, and F is for Forgetfulness. Each of these key words, properly understood and lived out, would help and serve us as the church to express the life of people belonging to the kingdom of God.

What is the definition of kingdom and church? A kingdom (βασιλεία – Basileia) is where a king reigns. The church (ἐκκλησία – Ekklēsia) is an assembly, a gathering, and a congregation of the people of God.

This is by no means comprehensive, but let us consider the kingdom and the chruch as being HHHOT:

  1. Happy.
  2. Honest.
  3. Humble.
  4. Open and Transparent.

I. Happy

Because God Loves Me, Woo Hoo! Do people feel a sense of unspoken and subjective happiness, joy and peace when they come to church? Last week I read this on facebook from a pastor facebook friend whom I have not met. “He would have been called a special needs person, had he been born within the past 20 years. However, he was born the same year as I (1951); such terms were not used…way back then. I was blessed to be his pastor for 20 years. Today I reflected on our relationship; grieving his passing. Many people give long speeches, with numerous points, when explaining the gospel. My deceased friend explained the gospel to me every Sunday morning for 20 years. ‘God loves me. Woo Hoo!’ I get it, finally.” This special needs person was happy. Despite his handicap, he is a living example of the kingdom of God and the church. He reminds me of the Negro Spiritual:

  • I sing because I’m happy.
  • I sing because I’m free.
  • The eye is on the sparrow.
  • And I know he watches me.

No one likes to see grumpy, crabby, annoyed and irritated people. No one will ever be attracted to a church where people look annoyed and irritated, judgmental and critical, because of the sins–real and perceived–of other people. The kingdom of God and the church must exude with overflowing happiness—whatever our circumstances and troubles and the sins of others—because God is love (Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 1:4, 8). Jesus loves the church and people, both individually and collectively, in spite of all our sins, and at great cost to himself. Because Jesus loves us our joy and happiness is boundless. Because Jesus first love us, we love (1 Jn 4:19). Beyond happiness and joy, can there be any greater message that the kingdom and the church can convey and communicate to the world?

II. Honesty

Nothing damages the kingdom and the church (relationships, trust, friendships) more than not being honest with one another. Just how important is honesty? Jesus is full of truth (Jn 1:14) and he is the truth (Jn 14:6). Paul says that we are to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15) and that our conversation should be full of grace, seasoned with salt (Col 4:6). Here are some quotes regarding honesty:

  • “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” William Shakespeare.
  • “To be honest … is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” Shakespeare.
  • “A half truth is a whole lie.” Yiddish Proverb.
  • “Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” Mahatma Gandhi.
  • “Our lives improve only when we take chances – and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.” Walter Anderson.
  • “One of the most basic core values is honesty.” Catherine Pulsifer (inspiration author), Honesty A Core Value.

III. Humility

“God opposes (resists) the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (Jas 4:6). Happy are the humble, for to them belong the kingdom of heaven (Mt 5:3). Paul says that our attitude or mindset should be like that of Christ Jesus who condescended himself through his incarnation (Phil 2:5-8). Some quotes:

The Great Sin. To understand humility it may be prudent to examine its very opposite. In Mere Christianity, The Great Sin, C. S. Lewis is spot on:

No one is exempt from this sin. “There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else…There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.

The chief cause of misery. “…if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?’ The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride. The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together… But Pride always means enmity—it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

Are you looking down or up? “In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

How does your Christian life make you feel? “That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound’s worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all, that we are better than someone else—I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

Pride does not exempt Christians. “It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity—that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride—just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains (painful inflammation of small blood vessels in your skin that occur in response to sudden warming from cold) cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

How do you know you are meeting a humble person? “Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble”… Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

What is the first step in acquiring humility? “If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. …nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.”

IV. Openness and Transparency

A lack of openness and transparency always causes problems. When people are not forthright and truthful with one another, misunderstandings, misgivings and mistrust arises. In contrast, our God discloses himself fully to us. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…” (Rom 1:20). Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:15).

Are you open and transparent in loving others? A missionary and Bible teacher served his Bible student in countless ways for several years. Then one day he decided to leave the church. His reason was that he did not feel loved. This shocked his Bible teacher. He wondered, “How could he feel that he was not loved, when I taught him the Bible and served him in so many ways.”

Are you open and transparent (and aware) about spiritual selfishness? Thomas Merton gives us some clues as to why this Bible student felt unloved even though his Bible teacher served him in so many ways for many years. In No Man Is An Island he wrote, “Now there is a spiritual selfishness which even poisons the good act of giving to another. Spiritual goods are greater than the material, and it is possible for me to love selfishly in the very act of depriving myself of material things for the benefit of another. If my gift is intended to bind him to me, to put him under an obligation, to exercise a kind of hidden moral tyranny over his soul, then in loving him I am really loving myself. And this is a greater and more insidious selfishness, since it traffics not in flesh and blood but in other persons’ souls.”

Open and transparent love has no agendas. Merton also wrote, “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

Speaking the truth in love promotes unity. The one sentence summary of Ephesians from the NIV Proclamation Bible is “You are one in Christ now, so be united and stand firm in him.” The first three chapters reveal what the gospel is (what God has done for the church [God’s people] and the world God in Christ), and the last three chapters applies the gospel to our lives. In Eph 4:1-16, Paul’s emphasis is unity in the church among the people of God (Eph 4:3, 4-6, 12-13). At the risk of oversimplication, we Christians promote unity in the church when we “speak the truth in love” (Eph 4:15).

How do you speak the truth in love? Pope Fransis explains: “…we succumb to attitudes that do not permit us to dialogue: domination, not knowing how to listen, annoyance in our speech, preconceived judgments and so many others. Dialogue is born from a respectful attitude toward the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It supposes that we can make room in our heart for their point of view, their opinion and their proposals. Dialogue entails a warm reception and not a preemptive condemnation. To dialogue, one must know how to lower the defenses, to open the doors of one’s home, and to offer warmth.”

Speak the truth in LOVE (Eph 4:15). Even when we strongly disagree with others, we can and should still express and exude warmth and love, grace and kindness, charity and meekness, toward others, for this is precisely what Christ extended to us sinners.

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