And thus ends this reading of God's holy, inspired, and inerrant word. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”Īmen. And so we pray that by Your word and Spirit we would not simply leave today with more facts in our heads about the church, but that our hearts would be instructed and would joyfully embrace the teaching of Your word, so that we believe it and live it to Jesus’ glory. Lord, we thank You for Your word, and we thank You that Your word is able to equip us for the living of the Christian life, and that it is inerrant and it is authoritative, and that it is profitable. Understanding the visible and invisible distinction is important practically for the way we live the Christian life, and so we’ll pause to think about that today and then we’ll continue on in our exposition next week and perhaps we’ll be able to make it through the whole of this short section, rich as it is.īefore we study God's word together, let's look to Him in prayer and ask His help and blessing. And that's why, for those of you who have outlines, on the bottom of the outline I have put the appropriate sections of The Westminster Confession on the doctrine of the church, and we’ll look through some of that together today. And so this week as we look again at the fourth verse, “…there is one body and one Spirit”, we're going to see why that verse requires us to understand the distinction between the invisible and the visible church. I threw out the importance of the distinction between the invisible and visible church, but I didn't explain that. And so that's what we're going to study today, but just like last week, we're not going to get out of the first point, because I threw out something “by the way” last week that we weren't able to explore. And he says we are one because God is one, and therefore we should express and experience that kind of oneness and unity in our community together. In other words, he argues from our doctrine of the one true God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - to our unity. We are one because there is one Spirit, there is one Lord, there is one Father. Why is it that we can be considered one? Well, he gives three arguments. If you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you have been given a spiritual unity with every other believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and that spiritual unity is especially expressed in the local body of believers, in the local congregation.Īnd then in Ephesians 4:4-6, Paul spells out the basis for this unity. He says you have a unity that has been given you by the Spirit. And we noted the last time we were together that Paul didn't say strive to attain a unity that you do not yet have, or he didn't say strive to fulfill the latent potential for unity that exists in you, or strive to be unified like you will be one day in glory but, rather, express in peace the unity that you already have.Īnd it's an amazing statement. Now, when we looked at Ephesians 4:1-3, we said that Paul concluded that with this exhortation: that we were to preserve the unity that the Spirit has given us in peace, so that the Apostle is calling on us in the life of the church to preserve and to cultivate a unity, a communion with one another, that the Spirit has already given us. And that's the concentration of Ephesians 4-6. So Ephesians 4 moves from a discussion of the new, redeemed humanity, this new society, this new family that God has created in Jesus Christ, to the study of how we are to live or behave as God's new family or new society, or new community. …For several months now, and starting in Ephesians 4 just a few weeks ago, we emphasized on a number of occasions that whereas in Ephesians 1-3 the Apostle Paul has described what God has done in bringing believing Jew and Gentile into one body in Jesus Christ, and that in chapters 4-6 he's now going to tell us how we ought to live in that one body so that the first three chapters of Ephesians are about the indicative (what God has done and what we in fact are in Jesus Christ) and the second three chapters, chapters 4-6, are about the imperative (or what we ought to do because we are God's people in Jesus Christ). “One Body, Spirit, Hope, Lord, Faith, Baptism, God and Father” (Pt.
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