Transcript

Go to Ephesians 4. Have you noticed how many of these rich songs that are God-centered and biblically sound have the name Keith Getty on them? So blessed and thankful for a brother like this who is going to be with us with his wife and all the people who accompany them on December 10.

Thank you for being what you are. I was thinking about you this afternoon and thinking about church history and all the stuff that comes down the pike and thinking about that 1,000 years before Martin Luther and the Reformers, they wanted to reform the Catholic Church and ended up being thrown out so they actually departed from it, but for those 1,000 years and even more, the Catholic Church used domineering, control, threats and intimidations to keep the people coming and faithful, and if you didn’t come and didn’t participate, then you could lose your salvation. So it was a controlling power play, so to speak, that the Catholic Church used. And then in other eras before and after and since, there is the other side of the coin, all of these silly, worldly gimmicks, fads, entertainments and amusements that are brought into the church to try to keep people happy and coming. And I thought, “I don’t have to do either one of them. I can preach to my people, you are fully free in Christ, your faithfulness should be out of love for him. I can’t tell you you’re going to lose anything if you don’t come and hear me preach. I can tell you God wants you to be faithful and I have a faithful church that I get to pastor because you love the truth of the word of God and you come for that and that makes you normal. It doesn’t make you exceptional, it makes you normal but normal has become exceptional in an abnormal age.

Ephesians 4. Paul is continuing to elaborate in this practical exhortation of how we are supposed to live out our Christianity, what it’s supposed to look like, how we function together, and might I say again for the 100,000 time, it’s absolutely completely and exclusively to the local church. Whatever other Christian ministries may come your way, I don’t mean to be discouraging and I certainly don’t want to demean you in any way, that’s not my tone, but Paul has nothing to say to you. This is not about how to have a better Thursday night Bible study with some guys you know in town. I’m not saying that’s necessarily wrong, I’m just saying that’s not what Paul is about. Paul is about, “Here’s the way we work together as local New Testament churches.” Paul knows no other structure. There was no such thing as anything other than that in the first century of Christianity, so it’s all about now. He’s giving us those rich doctrinal foundations of sovereign grace salvation, now he comes in, “If that has changed you, the Gospel has changed you and sovereign grace has changed you, now here is the way, let’s live it out.”

Now let’s pick up in verse 11 of chapter 4 and go through 13.

11 And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, 12 for [conjunctive word, verse 11 builds into verse 12] for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; 13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

So I might add again, now we are all the way down into verse 13, and Paul brings up the unity theme again. It’s almost like Paul is saying, “This unity thing is really really really really important to God. Not just learning to tolerate and get along, not just having a team spirit but this special God-wrought, God-enabled unity because God the Spirit has changed your heart. He has convicted you of sin. He has convinced you of Christ and all of us, therefore, no matter how diverse our backgrounds now come together with something that unites us that is greater than anything in the world that might separate us.” Now it doesn’t mean you lose your identity in the world, it just means you’ve gained a greater identity, a greater belonging with other believers in a local church.

So he builds on this same thing again and now he’s going to talk about some specific aspects and I’ve entitled this “The Purpose of the Victor’s Gifts.” We talked about the Victor’s gifts that he distributes, remember last time we talked about how he has won the battle, he has conquered and he has taken the spoils of his victory and distributed those spoils, those riches, those treasures, to all of us. It’s figurative language. It means he has distributed to us the treasures and the gifts that only he, our God, can distribute, and all of us have these spiritual gifts. Then we talked about how when he gets to verse 11 he says, “In addition to all of you, all of us in general, having spiritual gifts to use and serving and ministering in our local church together,” he gives the church the gifts of gifted men, men called to the office of apostle and profit and we believe those have passed away at the completion of the New Testament. Then he says evangelists, or I think that could say missionaries in the way we view things today, at least. And then pastor/teachers.

So but what is the end of him giving all of us these gifts and in the context of verse 11, what is the end of him giving us gifted men to be our leaders, overseers, teachers, preachers, instructors? Well, he tells us very clearly, verse 12, I. To build up the body of Christ. So again, Paul uses this symbolic or figurative language this time of a building, if you will, building up. He uses the same idea in Acts 20:32 where he says, “now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up.” So here we have this concept of Paul gave you as a local church in Ephesus, in any true biblical local church today, a pastor/teacher. A pastor whose primary work as pastoring or shepherding is preaching and teaching to the end that the church would be built up.

You see, a properly built building is strong. The foundation is sound. The walls are straight and solid. The brick is laid and mortared into place and the windows are tight and sealed. But not only strong, a properly built building is functional. The roof protects from the rain and the elements. The windows seal out the cold and the heat. The floor plan is well thought out and organized for function. So a well built building is strong and a well built building is functional but also a properly built building is attractive. The lines are straight. The angles are dimensional and the colors are pleasing. And that’s what he says, “I want you to be built up spiritually and according to God’s word so that you are strong and you are functional and you are attractive to the occupant of the house,” and the occupant is Jesus Christ. Did you hear that, church? You are not and I am not to lead you to build a church that people are happy in, that the community might be happy with, that people are necessarily drawn to. You and I must make sure we are God’s instruments to build a local church that Christ is happy in and that he always draws the right ones to that.

There is a foolish bunch of nonsense that’s been floating around in so-called “church growth ideas” that we’ve got to build a church for the unchurched. I know what they mean and I appreciate what they mean by it. They say we want to be evangelistic but to design the body of Christ so that unregenerate unchurched people like it is absolute foolhardy blasphemy. This church is not to be liked by an unsaved world. Now they may respect us, they may appreciate some of the good works we do but we are not to build the church that is palatable or is attractive to the unregenerate of the world. We don’t try to be obstinate or difficult or unwelcoming. We want to be all of those things but we are what we are, we are followers of Christ who have been changed by his Spirit and we strive to make sure we are built up so that the occupant, Jesus Christ, likes what it is. And the pastor sometimes says, “Oh man, we’re doing this and we’re doing that and this is successful and that is successful,” and I want to say, “How do we know it’s successful? Does Christlike those things? Is Christ pleased with it?”

So Ephesians 4:12 begins to tell us that these pastor/teachers function to the end of building up the body of Christ. There are two subpoints he gives here about this building up of the body. The first one is equipping the saints. These certainly are not fully separated from each other, they are intertwined, but it is a different aspect. The pastor/teacher’s job is equipping. That’s the idea of to make complete or to make perfect. The same original Greek word would be used if you were mending a bone and putting it together so that the whole skeletal system could work again properly as one whole unit. I mean, you snap your femur bone and the rest of your skeletal system will suffer but if you get it mended back together right, then the whole skeletal system can function as a unity and as a whole again. This same Greek word for equipping is the idea also of mending nets. So it’s the idea of a net has a tear in it and the different strands are unconnected but when you put them all back together again, then the whole net functions together properly, but just a few strands being broken can ruin the effect of the entire net.

Now when he says here “equipping the saints” notice it’s plural. Not equipping a saint. Again, it’s in the context of the family of the local church. Paul knows no other type of outworking of Christianity other than organizing into local churches. So the pastor/teacher’s job in his ministry is mending all of you individually but at the same time mending us together as a whole unit. If you are out of line with God and you’re out of line with God and you’re out of line with God and you’re not repentant like you ought to, then you’re leaving some gaping holes in the net of God which is Grace Life Church of the Shoals. Do you see what I’m saying? But as the word of God is preached, the pastor/teacher is faithfully preaching the word of God, you are humbled and you are humbled and I’m humbled and you’re humbled and you’re humbled, we get right about some things, we humble ourselves before God, we get back on the team, we get back on course and the net, the skeletal structure which is Grace Life Church is strong and whole and united again.

So as we mend individuals – listen to me – it is always to the end that the collective body is strong and mended. You see, listen, in Christianity it’s impossible to think rightly and not be thinking about your brothers and sisters in your local church. Everything you are and everything you do is inseparably connected in some way to your church family. If you’re not a good husband, in some way you are affecting the church family with that because you are reproducing a bad model of a Christian husband or whatever it might be. Everything goes back to what we are together. That’s why he says to mend the saints. So this is not just an individual mending, it’s both individual and corporate.

So this speaks, again, of a unity which Paul so exhaustively has talked about in verses 1 through 6 and really all the way down here now to verse 13. He mentions the word “unity” specifically again in verse 13. So a church is united. That means it’s complete and it’s strong through the sound doctrinal spiritually anointed preaching of God’s pastor/teacher. So equipping the saints is a part of us being built up the way God wants us built up.

Then the second subpoint is the work of service in verse 12. He says God gave us pastor/teachers, now verse 12, “for the equipping of the saints for the work of service.” Now, pastor/teachers function unto the work of service, members altogether do the work of service. One might could argue in the flow of the context here, the pastor/teacher’s work of service is preaching and teaching which provides the mending that we all need to be united and strong, and then when we are mended and united and strong, we faithfully equip one another. These all go together.

The pastor/teacher and the associate ministers serve chiefly, Paul says, through their preaching and teaching ministry. Once again, the pastor of your church, the pastors of your church, Paul says are God’s gift to the church and the members, therefore, under pastor/teachers are to be actively involved in serving each other and that’s why the New Testament and the Old Testament, for that matter, gives us the clear biblical structure for how every member can be involved in some ministry; never in a ministry you’re uncomfortable with, never something you’re not ready to do, but every single church member, every single true Christian in a true local church can serve one another if we organize into biblically functional small groups. Now if we just throw 800 to 1,000 of you together and say, “Now y’all take care of each other,” that’s not going to work. It’s going to fall apart. Whether you’re dealing with ancient Israel or the New Testament church, the Old Testament/New Testament teaches God has structured his people into smaller units with elders and leaders overseeing those smaller units or small groups so that every single person could have some role in ministering to others. That’s the end of a faithful pastor/teacher and that’s why as I preach I try to bring out continually the practical side of living out your Christianity in the local church so that you continually are mending your thinking and your behavior to get back in line with the word of God.

A couple of three cross-references, actually four cross-references here. 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable,” here it is, “always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.” Now he’s writing that to the whole Corinthian church, not just to the leadership. Now there may be 1,001 good things you can do in life and you have to do, you have to work, you have to take care of your families, that’s blessed of God and sacred in God’s eyes. Certainly it is, but you know when you add on and commit to the labor of working and building up and equipping the saints in God’s local church, God promises that labor is never in vain. There will be a wonderful eternal reward for that labor.

Galatians 6:5, writing to the church at Galatia or the Galatia region, the Apostle Paul writes, “For each one will bear his own load.” The work of equipping is spread out among all of us. Women, Paul says in 1 Timothy 3:11 must “be dignified, not malicious gossips, but temperate, faithful in all things.” The idea of equipping in the work of the ministry.

1 Peter 4:10, “As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” What a beautiful picture. God’s manifold grace. In grace he gifted you, and in grace he gifted you, and in grace he gifted you and you and you and you and you, and I think I left you out. In grace he gave you something. Now grace means you didn’t earn it, you don’t deserve it, it’s God’s gift. And that grace gifting was an equipping so that you could do things for your local church family, and the Bible says make sure you employ that in equipping and building up the family of God. And all of this, back to the context, all of this can only happen under the oversight and the faithful preaching of God’s pastor/teacher.

Well, this goes on to another main point here, not only to build up the body of Christ but another aspect he brings out in verse 13 is to mature the body of Christ, verse 13. So really in verse 12, he’s talking about fixing all. You see, you get converted and you come into church and you are genuinely God’s but you are a mess. Did you hear that? You get converted and you genuinely love Christ but you have a 1,001 ideas, you have 1,001 viewpoints, you have 1,001 concepts of what you want to do as this brand new Christian, and they all need some mending and you’ve got to stay under the strong and clear preaching of the Bible to start getting all this stuff fixed in your thinking.

Oh, my goodness, Jeff Noblit is such an example of somebody who got gloriously saved when I was 19, but what a mess. I had so many notions and conclusions about, “Now, here’s what I’m going to do for Christ,” and they were all wrong. I had no concept of being centered in a local church. Totally wrong. I mean, I was going to be the Lone Ranger out there for Jesus and it’s almost like God looked at me and said, “Oh, you’re smarter than me? You’re going to build my kingdom through a means I didn’t ordain nor prescribe?” And I just constantly had to repent, mend that, get that fixed, that was a broken way of thinking, and get biblical thinking back in. You know, that’s Christianity. You are constantly kicking out unbiblical thinking and putting in new biblical thinking, and you’ll be doing that discipleship, that mental discipleship until you get to heaven. If not, you’re backsliding. I mean, the mental discipleship is the biggest part. Getting your hands and your body to go along, that flows not so badly once you are in the process of getting your brain thinking right again.

Well, to a mature man. So he goes from mending everything to how can the body be mature, and that just has the idea of being full-grown versus being an infant. Now when Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, both 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians, he was dealing with an infant church; a baby, carnal, messed up, messy church and the goal is never to stay there. We all start there, trying to help our church plants and mentoring and encouraging these most of them young pastors who are trying to build these church plants, it’s just mess after mess after division after division after frustration after frustration after abandonment after abandonment because they’re trying to get some things mended so they can start becoming mature instead of acting like babies. The idea of maturity means one who has reached the end. They have reached perfection in the sense of maturity, not necessarily sinless perfection. The goal is to reach the end of your development as a Christian and as a Christian church.

Hebrews 12:23 says, “to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect.” The same idea. So Paul is saying, “I want you to come to a mature place individually and corporately as a local church,” but he says, “The reality is you can get to a better place in your maturity but you’re only going to be perfect in maturity when you get to glorification.” But that’s no excuse for not doing better down here. We should be progressing in our sanctification, aware that full glorification, sanctification is yet to come.

Then he has the idea here of fullness, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” Fullness here means to fill up. To fill it all the way up. When we mature or we are to mature, I should say, until we are mature as Christ is mature. Christ gives maturity its full definition. When each of us is fully like him, then only then have we arrived. Now, what would you say is the hallmark trait that illustrated Jesus’ maturity? Just think about it for a moment. Of all the things that we can see in the earthly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, what one thing sticks out that shows he was spiritually mature, and of course he was? Here’s what I’m convinced it is: an ever- abiding, all-consuming passion for his Father’s will. Did you hear that? He never let intellectualism of the day, he never let the philosophies of the day, he never let his emotions get in the way of him saying, “What’s my Father’s will? That’s my passion. I treasure my Father and I treasure my Father’s will.” Now, we are one step down from that. How do you know you’re mature? It’s when you passionately treasure and love Jesus and treasure and love what Jesus loves.

Do you know what I struggled with and I’m not saying I’m 100% home on this, but what I struggled with for so many years as a newly converted Christian and a young minister, instead of loving Christ and loving what Christ loved, I loved my idea of serving Christ. I loved my concept of doing work for Christ because, you see, that gave me credit. And God said, “I wrote that whole Bible and I didn’t know you were going to come along and know better than me of how to do my ministry.” So once again, you have to do the repenting, the mending, if you will, of getting your thinking in line with God’s wisdom and abandoning your own supposed wisdom.

So Jesus Christ in his maturity so fully treasured and so fully rejoiced in his Father’s will and we have to say to ourselves is that where we are? When we think about, “I want to serve Christ and I want to honor the Lord and I want to be faithful to him,” then how do you do that? You go to the Bible and find out what his will is and you treasure that and honor that and then you are coming into maturity. So we want to be completely conformed to Jesus Christ, perfect like he is perfect. This striving after his perfection is what we were redeemed to do. It should be the passion of this life and it will be the reward of heaven.

Do you know what one aspect of heaven? I’ve told you so many times that heaven is going to be that infinite season of having perfect minded emotions to take in the infinite beauties and wonders of God and be filled with immense pleasure for all eternity because God is so fun, God is so pleasure producing, and so our pleasures will just increase in heaven. But one of the aspects of heaven will be that we will finally fully with all of our will want to please our heavenly Father. We will finally serve Jesus perfectly. That’s the way Jesus did, his heavenly Father, and that’s the maturity we are striving to get to. We’ll get to it in heaven one day, but we ought to be increasing down here.

Philippians 2:12. I just want to talk about this verse for just a moment as we talk about working out to maturity and working on our maturity in Christ. He says in Philippines 2:12, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” He did not say work for your salvation. That’s settled. But once you’re saved, you are to work it out. That’s going to take a lot of repenting and a lot of mending and a lot of straightening out stuff that you brought in that was broken and crooked, wrong thinking and upside down thinking, and wrong patterns of behavior.

And he says to do it in some fear and trembling. One Greek scholar says this means a wholesome and serious caution. Lightfoot, for example, says a nervous and trembling anxiety to do right. Unfortunately you and I live in a Christian era where it is considered taboo to tell your church they ought to fear God and tremble before him sometimes. No one today seems to tremble before God. No pastor wants to tell their church you ought to have this. Yes, you know you are fully and unconditionally welcomed by him but yet the awesomeness of who he is should at the same time put a holy reverence of trembling in our souls from time to time. We live in a culture where God has been dumbed down in the teaching and preaching of the established church so that everyone is very comfortable with him and very unmoved by his presence. There should be a sense of when we get into the preaching of the word that reveals the true God of Scripture, there is a part of our being that says, “Oh my, this is awesome!”

This new God of modern Christianity is not the God of Scripture. He is the idol of Aaron when Aaron made the people a golden calf and then he called it, “Now worship Jehovah as you worship this golden Baal-calf.” He gave it the name Jehovah but it was just a worthless idol. He was the god of human sentimentality and the god of human pleasures. This God-lite theology today where there is no call to honor, no call to humble yourself, no call to tremble before him, no call to strive to grow and to know him better, is unbiblical. This striving we are to be about is to reach the maturity of the Son of God as Paul tells us in the consistent context here is the production, is the purpose for the role of pastor/teacher in the local church and he says this is to keep on keeping on. That’s why when Paul writes to Timothy he said, “Keep preaching the word. Be instant in season and out of season.” You don’t quit this until all of us individually and corporately as a church are mature. That means you don’t quit this until God gets done with you, you die or get too sick to keep on going.

Now he talks about also here the unity of the faith. It’s another phrase here in verse 13, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith.” This is a powerful thing. It takes a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of preaching and teaching before a congregation as a whole begins to understand a good and broad balance of the great truths of Christianity. Think about how many of you have heard almost nothing, if not nothing, of divine calling for many many years. How many of you have heard almost nothing, if not nothing, of divine election? Of divine foreknowledge? Of divine predestination? I mean, and on and on. How many of you have heard nothing, if almost nothing, about the importance of meaningful membership in the local church and church discipline? All these thoroughly established biblical truths and all of them have dozens and dozens of precepts and subpoints that need to be learned. So the point is – now listen to me – as you continue and continue and continue to be faithful in your pastor/teaching, then the individual saints of God begin to stand on and embrace and, yes, even treasure all of these glorious truths of the Christian faith, the doctrines we hold; and when we all hold to those and we all agree on those and all of those have meant something to us, it has gone into our minds and it has pierced our hearts, then we have a unity that all hell can’t break.

It just bonds us together but it doesn’t happen just like that. It takes weeks, months, years, and indeed decades. That’s why I’ve often told you that Grace Life Church is a great place to raise your children because your children come to God, it’s not having a slick guy that gets them to jump through a hoop when they are eight years old in vacation Bible school, it’s getting your children under the week-in and week-out of faithful, Bible-centered, glory of God focused, small group ministries and then the preaching in the pulpit so that week after week, month after month, year after year, the Christian faith becomes real to them.

There is a lot to it, by the way. We are not saved, by the way, to be independent. As Paul says over and over here, we are saved to be a part of a whole, a part of the local church, the body of Christ. We are incomplete, woefully incomplete, without healthy involvement in a local church. That’s why he says the unity brings us together, the unity of the faith. In addition, not only are we woefully incomplete without the church, the church is woefully incomplete without you. If God has saved you, he has gifted you and he has placed you in the body. You’re needed and if you don’t show up and if you’re not faithful, you’re hurting the rest of us because we didn’t design this thing, God did. We didn’t put you here, God did, and we need you. The mature believer begins to understand this. He grasps and rejoices in the interdependency of the body. He knows there is no true Christianity apart from the family of the local church. As I said before, if you are involved in another ministry, Paul has nothing to say to you. I’m not saying it’s wrong or evil, I’m just saying that’s not in Paul’s thinking. It’s all about the local church.

And can I say this to you? I believe practically 100% of all ministry that’s not a part of a local church would be unnecessary if local churches were what they ought to be. Did you hear that? When I talk to people, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Gideons or the old Navigators that I was a part of many years ago, or Campus Crusade for Christ, good organizations, we support many of them, but without exception if you’ll listen to their founders and leaders they will say if the church was doing this, we would not be doing it. So my quest from early in my ministry has been, well, let’s be that kind of church. Let’s prove to the world God’s wisdom is better than man’s wisdom and his wisdom just all comes out of the church. Why wouldn’t you want to get in on that, to prove the wisdom of God to the whole world?

So we are to obtain the unity of the faith. Once again, let’s outline it this way grasping these great doctrines with our minds under decades of pastor/teaching, increasingly grasping with our minds, increasing adoring and treasuring these doctrines from our hearts and increasingly living out these doctrines in our lives. That’s the unity of the faith. When you’ve got a bunch of people that are doing those three things increasingly, you’ve got unity that no other group on earth has. The only way the body can understand our oneness and come together as one is through each individual grasping and honoring the doctrines of the faith. There can never be unity in a church or in the church apart from doctrinal integrity. So when we live in this present age where a lot of our Baptist and evangelical churches are very doctrinal-lite, “Don’t deal with that. Don’t preach that. Move around that. Just preach stuff that people feel like they need.” I don’t care what people feel like they need, I’m to proclaim to them the word of God because it is what they need. God forbid I tamper and peddle the precious human souls of men and women with what I think they need. What do these pastors think they are? They need God’s truth whether they think they need it or not.

So the faith, the doctrines, we are all increasingly grasping with our minds, that we are all increasingly adoring with our hearts, that we all are increasingly living out in our lives, this faith properly preached, humbly received and faithfully lived out through service, is the unity that Paul talks about and Paul says the key to this happening is faithful preaching. Faithful preaching. Doesn’t this go along strong with what we were talking about this morning? You can say amen. It does goes strong with what we were talking about this morning.

John Calvin, one of the early Reformers, said this and he is talking about this text, “Paul expressly states that according to the command of Christ no real union or perfection is attained but by outward preaching. Those who neglect or despise this order choose to be wiser than Christ.” Therefore we must repent. If you are ignorant and didn’t get it that it all centers in the local church and around faithful preaching, or if you are arrogant and think, “I can do my own thing. I’ve got to go to church, that’s part of God’s plan. Got to listen to preaching. We do that, but my real ministry is over here.” Then you are arrogant. Whether you are ignorant or arrogant, repent and get your heart centered where God’s heart is centered, on the church and under the preaching of the word.

Now I’ll go fast. The knowledge of the Son of God, the last thing he mentions here and it’s the last thing. He says, “I have given you pastor/teachers for all of these things to be growing and happening so that you are all unified and you are all one in this glorious wondrous way that only the wisdom of God could have thought up.” Then he says, “to the knowledge, until all attain to the unity of faith, and of the knowledge,” verse 13, “of the Son of God.” Now what does this mean? Well, the preached word fills the head with knowledge, the full knowledge of Christ. I’m not talking about some simplistic dumbed down version of Christ and the good news, this means a full knowledge. Few, unfortunately, few professing Christians have a full knowledge of Christ. Do you know why? Because to have a full knowledge of Christ takes time, energy, studying, humbling, repenting and listening to faithful preaching. It’s an intellectual discipline to gain the full knowledge of Christ.

One commentary writer said Christians are not to be informed merely on different sections of truth and erring through defective information on other points, but they are to be characterized by the completeness and harmony of their ideas of the power, work, history and glory of the Son of God.

C. S. Lewis said, “God is no fodder of intellectual slackers.” Are you an intellectual slacker when you come to church? “Oh, pastor, and just about half asleep. Just about half dead. I hope this is as good as the ball game last night.” What you need to do is repent of your vile idolatry. Don’t you come in here hung over on the world. If I’m studying hard to give you the truth, you work hard to receive it. Get your brain involved. “Well, you know, pastor, you’ve got to get it down there simple.” These guys say, “You’ve got to put the cookies on the bottom shelf.” Are you kidding me? Our kids go to high school and its Algebra I, II and II, Geometry and Trigonometry and they can’t engage their minds to understand the glorious truths of the Gospel and the truth of Jesus Christ? The full counsel of God, as Paul said he was faithful to deliver to the Ephesians?

C. S. Lewis, “God is no fodder of intellectual slackers and of any other slackers.” If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you that you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. No more dumb Christians. “Well, I walked an aisle when I was 7 and I asked Jesus to save me.” Is that all you’ve got?

Based on the Bible that tells me nothing. There is not one verse in the Bible that says walk any aisle and do anything like that. It’s just not there. I’m sorry, it’s just not there, and any time you add something to the Gospel to help the Gospel, you pervert the Gospel. We are not Catholics, this is not a magic spot. Catholics teach that and they have sent millions to hell trusting they came to the spot and did what the priest said. I don’t mind you coming to the spot but I’m going to tell you something: those things right there are steps. It’s not an altar. Now it might can become an altar but no more than your pew can become an altar, no more than the seat in your car can become an altar, no more than the kitchen table at your house can become an altar, in a figure of speech. In reality there is only one altar and always has only been one altar and that altar is a little hill outside the gate of Jerusalem called Golgotha. That’s the altar of God where your sin was dealt with.

So we don’t have to go and perform some thing at some altar, it’s been done. As a matter of fact, in modern days and I know good brothers use the word “altar” and they don’t mean anything by it, but I wish we wouldn’t use it because in church history, I guarantee you, I could take you back 200 years back to some of the great men of God that we all venerate and respect, and they would not let you use the word “altar.” They’d say, “Do you know how many of our brethren have been martyred, have been burned at the stake because they wouldn’t honor the altar? The false altar of Catholicism?” Our salvation is built on faith from the heart. The altar is in your heart more than anywhere else other than Calvary. I don’t know how I got off on all that. What am I talking about here?

C. S. Lewis is talking about coming to the knowledge of the Son of God, the truth. So C. S. Lewis says it’s going to take all of you to become a Christian, brains and all, but unfortunately it works the other way around. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened. One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. C. S. Lewis was one of the most brilliant men of the last century. He taught at Oxford. He was gloriously converted while he taught there and was an atheist before he was converted.

So to come to the knowledge of the Son of God means we must know, understand and feel the truth of Christ. We must know something, understand something and feel something about the truth of his being manifest in the flesh or his Incarnation. We must know, understand and feel the truth about his love and death for us, the atonement, propitiation and redemption. We must know, understand and feel something about the truth of his ascension to heaven and his high priestly intercession at the right hand of God. We must know, understand and feel something about the truth of his apprehension or his glorification. We must know and understand and feel the truth of our election, our predestination, our calling, our justification, our repentance, our faith, our ongoing sanctification. Then of course in the end time, our ultimate glorification. I’m not asking you can you quote this back but I’m asking you intellectually are you grasping these things with your mind, treasuring them with your heart and purposing to live out the truth of them in your lives?

So he talks about coming to the full knowledge of the Son of God as one of the purposes for God giving you a pastor/teacher. Now one thing I’m certainly not talking about here tonight and, goodness, it’s just a never-ending challenge to stay away from extra-biblical excess. Let me say that again: it’s a never ending challenge, especially for a pastor, to try to shepherd his people to stay out of extra-biblical excess. You teach something about having the full knowledge of God, then you get people over here that want to study theology for four hours on Thursday night. That’s not necessarily wrong but often that leads to pride and arrogance and intellectualism and it is cold and it is dead. Then you’ve got people on the other extreme and Baptist and charismatics have been in this camp pretty heavily, that is just a shallow, carnal sentimentality. “Isn’t it wonderful Jesus died for everybody? It’s so loving and wonderful.” Yeah, that’s true but that’s not all that’s true. The Bible is full of precept upon precept, truth upon truth. We are to gain the full knowledge of God.

So I’m talking about loving God with our whole mind and learning of him so that it changes the heart and then it is lived out in the life of humble godliness and holiness. That’s Paul’s point and a church full of people striving to live like this and understand like this, is unified and it is indivisible and we have been tasting of that kind of unity. It hasn’t arrived but we have been tasting of that kind of unity in this church for a long time now and it is sweet and precious beyond compare. And I think one of the things is when you begin to grasp these things in your mind and treasure them in your heart, you just don’t worry about 1,001 things that most churches have fights about. It’s almost like, “Are you kidding me? You’re worried about bing bing bing bing and we have these glorious truths to think about?” Get over it. Let it go. It just doesn’t matter anymore.