Walk, Ephesians 4:25-32, Sermon by Peter Mead – Transcript

You can listen to this sermon on CrossPreach

So we are, we’re finishing up the series that we’ve called, the series has been called Walk, W-A-L-K, thinking about really what the church community is all about, what the Bible describes as the kind of community of God’s people transformed by God’s love. And I’m just thinking as we were taking communion there that for these three weeks, like Andy said, we’ve done communion first and then the message, to be able to have the space afterwards to reflect a little bit. But what it’s done, which is very much in line with this series, is it’s got our focus onto the cross first, and then we think about implications.

And that’s the way Ephesians 4 works, the chapter that we’re looking at. After three chapters describing God’s amazing love and what he’s done and how he sent his son and how he’s purchased us and made it possible for us to be in his family and all the transformation and all the wonder of his grace for three chapters, then you get to chapter 4 and verse 1 says, therefore, walk in a manner worthy of the calling that you’ve received. In light of everything that God’s done, live it out.

And that’s what we get to do as a church community. We get to live out God’s goodness to us. Sometimes I think people mishear that or maybe even preachers mispreach it. And we give the impression that we are a club of people that are trying to be good enough.

That we’re trying to achieve some kind of moral standard so that God will be pleased with us, so that all will be well. But that’s entirely wrong. The reality is we’re not good enough. None of us. Every one of us has different kind of sin profile, different things that we struggle with, different areas of life where we fall short of what God would want of us.

But the point is that we cannot make ourselves good enough. We cannot fix ourselves. But God’s done the work. God has done the job. He sent his son to die in our place to make it possible for us, even though we’re guilty, to be declared innocent, to be declared righteous, even better, and for God’s righteousness to be our righteousness. All of that is God’s grace. And for the three chapters at the start of Ephesians, Paul talks about that. He writes about that in glowing terms.

Then he says, right now, we get to live that out, and we get to live it out together. And so the messages that we’ve had the last couple of weeks, we’ve been thinking about walking together. The first week, we thought about walking together to grow up together. About how as we are involved in each other’s lives, we are able to grow or we get grown spiritually as God grows us. You have a baby Christian becomes a toddler Christian, a child Christian, a teenage Christian, and a kind of a grown-up Christian. And there’s more maturing always ahead of us. None of us have arrived. None of us have got to a place where we can say, right, that’s me sorted.

If you think you’ve arrived there, you can autograph everybody’s Bibles afterwards. But the reality is we’ve all got more growing to do, right? And we need each other for that. So we looked at that the first week. We’re walking together in order to grow up together. Then last week we thought about how we’re walking differently. We’re called to walk in our lives differently from the world around us. And the reason the world functions the way it does, the reason we function the way we do, is because of the way we think and even deeper because of what we love.

And so as much as the world tries to learn and understand and grow and get educated and kind of, you know, solve problems and read the books and get the answers, unless the heart is changed, there’s always going to be a problem. And God is the one that changes hearts. And so having encountered Christ, our hearts can be changed. And then we have this ongoing kind of process where we’ve put off the old self, we’ve put on the new self, but we are being renewed. It’s an ongoing process of being renewed in the spirit of our minds, the way we think God is working on that. And so we thought about walking differently together. The fact that we need one another even to learn to think God’s way, even to be able to process life God’s way.

And then we come to this final paragraph of Ephesians 4. And in this final paragraph, Paul kind of says, right, you want some practical, tangible, real for instances? Here they come. And he just blasts us with a whole set of, okay, so that means this and it means this and it means this. And he’s going to get very, very practical for us because, you know, we’re all okay with theory, but we kind of need some specifics. And so what we’re going to see today is kind of the specifics of what it is to be a church being transformed by God’s glorious love.

So here we go. Let’s look at it. End of chapter four. Starting at verse 25, let me read it to you. We’ll just read the whole paragraph.

Paul writes this,

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

That’s quite the list of things, isn’t it? You just maybe feel it as I’m reading over.

It’s a lot of instructions. Let’s remember a couple of things here. First of all, remember Ephesians 1 to 3 is the context. Even the paragraph before is context. We’ve learned Christ. We’ve met Christ. We’ve heard Christ. We’ve been taught in Christ. We’re recipients of God’s grace. Therefore, we get to do these things.

It’s not, “Come on, do these things, and then maybe you’ll get to have a relationship with God.” No, that’s not the way it works. We have the relationship with God offered to us if we’re willing to accept that we are not good enough and that he has done it all for us. If we’re willing to accept that offer, then we get to live for him. It’s a privilege, not just a pressure.

And also, don’t be overwhelmed as we look at this paragraph by all this information. I’m going to really simplify it down to two things. He’s basically going to talk about our mouths and our hearts. Okay, so that’s a little bit more, you know, get your arm around it rather than a whole list of things. There’s an American guy called Eugene O’Neill who said, “It is not possible to build a marble temple out of a mixture of mud and manure.”

It’s not possible. If you’re going to build a marble temple, a beautiful, ornate, breathtakingly attractive marble temple, you need to use the best, finest marble you can find. You don’t get to build it out of bricks that have been kind of squished together with a bit of mud and a bit of manure. It doesn’t work.

But that’s kind of a weird way of putting it, but that’s what Paul’s saying God’s doing.

Paul’s looking at the church and he’s saying, here we are as flawed people. We know that. We look around, maybe you look around and you go, yep, that person’s a little bit muddy and that one’s a little bit muddy. Then you look in the mirror and you go, oh my word, that’s manure. And you kind of, we’ve all got a fairly realistic view of each other and hopefully of ourselves, right? We’re not spectacular. We’re not impressive. We are absolutely works in progress. And yet the miracle is that God is doing something by bringing us together and knitting us together or building us together as Trinity Chippenham to be a marble temple, something that is profoundly special.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, the week before we started the series, Andy was in chapter three of Ephesians. And he talked about the fact that the church, it’s like this demonstration of the manifold wisdom of God in the heavenly places. The spiritual realms are watching this and they’re amazed. We watch this and go, mud, manure, right? We’re not impressed. But spiritually, there’s something very special about this.

So let’s think about that. How is God doing that? What is the change that is taking place gradually and that we need to lean into and kind of take on board for ourselves in order to be the in process to become marble kind of people? Okay, so he starts off talking about speech, talking about the mouth. He says, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor. And now I suppose we could take that very kind of superficially and just say, yeah, right, look, if we’re going to have a community, let’s not be lying.

I know people are lying constantly. You know, you have a conversation with a salesperson and you’re like, hmm, not convinced. You have a conversation with someone else. Yeah, I’m not sure if they’re telling the truth. It’s the way the world functions, right? Everybody puts a spin on things.

And he’s saying, no, you’re members of one another. You’re a community. If you’re not telling the truth, if there isn’t truth as the kind of currency of speech, then when there’s distrust, there’s division, right? Right? If you don’t tell the truth, then it’s going to pull you apart. The truth is going to push you together, but lies are going to pull you apart. That’s true. It’s true in a family. We have that with our children. We have a really serious talk when, okay, what you did was wrong, but the fact that you lied, that’s even more serious. That’s created a bit of a breakdown between us. There’s no trust now. We’ve got a real issue because of telling lies.

And so that’s true in a family. It’s true in a church.

I think Paul is actually saying something even more kind of more basic almost than that. He’s not saying, you know, in the course of a community of people, you know, 50 people hanging out, sometimes people won’t quite tell the truth. Actually, what he says here is not falsehood, generic kind of lies. He says, having put away the lie. It’s got the article on it, the way he wrote it. We can’t translate that into English because there’s no kind of concept of the lie in English. But the way Paul wrote it, he’s saying, having put away the lie, speak the truth.

What’s the lie? Remember Genesis 3? Adam and Eve, when Eve was having a conversation with the serpent, which was not a good idea, the serpent said to her, God knows that in the day you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will be like God, knowing good and evil. She took the fruit. She gave some to Adam. And in that moment, having bitten on that lie, that idea that we can be like God, there was an immediate recognition at some level that they weren’t. They were offered God-likeness, and they discovered nakedness.

We’re told in the passage that one moment they’re naked, they’re not ashamed. Next thing you know, they’re naked and they’re covering up. They’re sewing fig leaves to cover themselves because there’s this profound sense of inadequacy, this sense that I’m not God, but I really want to be. And actually, every one of us, from when we’re born, we kind of feel on the one hand like we are the center of the universe. Everything should revolve around me. Everybody should be excited about me. Everyone should serve me. Every child is very much inclined in that direction. Every one of us knows that we have that tendency to orient everything to ourselves. And yet, at the same time, most of us have a profound awareness that we’re not God. We look in the mirror and we go, well, that’s not a God. And so our tendency, praise the Lord, is to wear clothes. We affirm that and appreciate that. But it’s a tendency that we have beyond clothing, isn’t it? To kind of say, I’m okay. I’ve got it together. And we kind of live a fig leaf to life, pretending that we know more than we know, that we can do more than we can do, that we’re coping when we’re not.

Do you see what I mean? And so you can have a terrible week. Maybe you have. You’ve been struggling with all sorts of things. You’ve been frustrated with yourself, with others. You’ve been struggling with temptation or sin. You’ve been all over the shop, just doubts and fears and lying awake at night and just absolute wreck of a week. And then you come to church. How are you doing? Oh, I’m very well, thanks.

And I think Paul’s saying, hey, we can drop that now. We don’t need to kind of keep the fig leaf thing going. We can drop that. Let’s put that away. The lie is done. We don’t have to pretend we’ve got it all together. We don’t have to pretend we’re God. Because we’re not. We can speak the truth to one another. We can be real with each other. Why? Because we’re members of one another. We’re one body.

And this should be the place where we feel the safest, to be the realist. You know, the safest to say, I’m struggling. I’m not sure what to do or I’ve got this situation or I don’t know where I’m at with this or that or the other. We can be real with each other and hopefully we can find that there’s grace because we’re people gripped by God’s grace.

Paul’s saying, come on guys, let’s stop the charade that the world is playing, that we’ve got it all together. Let’s put away that lie that we’re like God and we know what we’re doing and let’s just be vulnerable. Let’s just be real. Let’s speak the truth to one another. And then he goes on to something else.

Then he says, okay, be angry and do not sin. Why would he say be angry? Well, keep it in context. If you’ve got a whole group of people who are being real with each other, chances are there’s going to be some tensions, right?

Maybe you’ve never encountered tensions in a church, praise the Lord, but the reality is if you’ve been around church for more than a couple of weeks, you probably recognize that there’s an awful lot of potential for tension. He said, she said, she didn’t say, he should have said, why didn’t she smile? Why did he look at me like that? Why didn’t she offer this? Why did he offer that? Does he think I’m not capable? And there’s all this kind of, you know, potential angst between us.

And then there’s actual things to be angry about, like actual sin, actual things that are damaging and wrong. That’s why he’s saying, okay, sometimes be angry. That’s okay. Sometimes it’s legitimate. Some of the things that are going on, be angry about it. But he says, hey, don’t sin.

Just because you’re angry about something, it’s not an excuse to then go and do some damage. Don’t sin. In fact, he gives some specific instruction. He says, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.”

Now that means either that you’ve got to get things dealt with kind of short account, right? Get it dealt with before tomorrow. Don’t leave things to linger. Or you have to move to Greenland or Finland or somewhere where the sun doesn’t go down for half a year and you can just swim around in bitterness for months on end. I don’t think it’s that. So I think what he means is when there’s anger, deal with it.

Let’s say that somebody in the church has bothered you. There’s something that’s kind of planted inside you for whatever reason. Only you know the story. Maybe they don’t even know what they’ve done, but there’s something in you that’s like, I’m angry with that person. Paul’s saying deal with it. Whatever it takes, deal with it.

If possible, deal with it with them. You know, that’s the ideal. But sometimes you do what you can and you apologize and you communicate and you do everything possible and there’s still an issue. That’s okay. You do what you can and as much as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. But what you don’t want to do is let some anger just lodge itself inside and then you cover it over with a smile and carry on as if what could possibly go wrong?

I’m just going to avoid that person. I’m just going to, you know, I won’t be rude. I just won’t be friendly. And we can lodge something inside and it grows within us. It can splinter us on the inside. It can do real damage. And Paul’s saying, don’t do that. Deal with it. Don’t let anger reside inside of you because it’s okay. There’s legitimate reasons to be angry, but there’s not legitimate reasons to stay angry. You got to let things get dealt with you’ve got to proactively deal with stuff it’s true in a marriage isn’t it I know from Melanie and I sometimes we kind of felt like we’ve got to deal with this before the sun goes down okay too late let’s deal with it before the sun comes up and you know there’s been times where we’ve had tension that’s kind of you know this is awkward the sun’s coming up you know and I don’t think it’s strict in the sense of you know timing

I think it’s strict in the sense of take it seriously and deal with it. Don’t let something linger longer than necessary because it’s going to cause damage. And then to really reinforce that point, Paul says the strongest thing I think he could possibly say. He says, and do not give the devil a foothold.

75 years ago, Operation Overlord took place, right? D-Day, the D-Day landings. It’s amazing, isn’t it? When you look at that history, we were there a couple of years ago, standing on the cliff at Pointe du Hoc and on the beach at Omaha and all of those places. And you think, wow, that was amazing what those guys did.

Just the incredible planning and the sacrifice that was made on the day when the invasions took place. Officially, almost 5,000 Allied troops were killed. Unofficially, 10,000. And then there were Germans that were killed. There were French civilians that were killed. By the time the Normandy battle had finished, over 200,000 Allies had died. You stand there and you think… This is astonishing. What an incredible thing. And then you think about it and you think, well, okay, there’s five beaches. There’s about 50, 60 miles of coast. And they poured all of that resource and all of those people and lost all of those lives in order to gain some sand and a cliff.

And in fact, that day, they only had two of the beaches even connecting with each other. They were just kind of little bits. And within a few days, they’d managed to connect about 50 miles and come inland by just a couple of miles. And so really, when you think of the vast German empire, shall we call it, the vast land that the Germans held, it was just a tiny percentage. Was it worth it? Well, yes, it was.

If it wasn’t for what happened on D-Day, if it weren’t for the taking of Normandy, we would not have been able to finish that war. With that foothold, the Allies were able to then press forward and go all the way to Berlin and deal with the Nazi problem. Just a small thing. On a map, it looks so insignificant. But they knew how significant it was and so for years they were planning, they were practicing, they were doing everything they could to make sure they could take that foothold. Because if they got that, they were confident they could press on and win the war. Don’t you think Satan’s planning and plotting and scheming how he can get a foothold into a community like this?

And it doesn’t need to be a big thing. It’s not like he needs to come with a tank and just blast us out of this building. If he can just get some anger that’s unresolved, if he can just find one of us that’s clinging on to something, Paul says that gives him a foothold. Give him a foothold, he’s going to take a whole lot more than that. We don’t want to do that.

That’s why the thing that maybe you’re thinking about right now, the thing that I haven’t mentioned, I don’t know, but maybe God is putting his finger on in your heart, that tension with that person, whatever it is, it’s that important that it gets dealt with because otherwise we’re giving the devil a foothold.

And so instead of that kind of lingering anger within. He then goes on to say, look, instead of stealing, you know, now work hard and be generous. Give, share with one another. It’s a complete change of attitude. Go from this kind of, hey, what’s mine is yours.

And so there you have it, the mouth and the heart.

He’s saying, look, when Jesus has so gripped your life and the Spirit is at work in you, what you’re going to find is that you have the privilege of speaking the truth, of being real with one another, instead of telling lots of little lies and kind of hiding behind a fake mask.

And instead of having this anger buried inside you and having tensions with people, you can get that sorted and instead become generous and kind to one another. It’s already sounding like a good community to be around, isn’t it?

But then I love the fact that Paul doesn’t leave it there. It’s like he then says… But there’s more. It’s almost like he’s saying, you know how we walk together to grow up together and there’s lessons for us when we’re toddlers and then when we’re teenagers and then when we’re older. Hey, there’s more that could be said about the mouth and the heart.

So he goes deeper.

And maybe for some of us, what we’ve heard already would be way too much. That’s plenty. I’ll, you know, with God’s help, I’ll work on that. Great. You go with that. Apply God’s word. It’s a life changer. But maybe you say, well, yeah, okay, fair enough. I’m not great. I’m not perfect at that. But yeah, I get that. Okay, well, let’s drive this deeper then.

Look what he says in verse 29. It comes back to speaking. All right, speak the truth. Great. Now, he says, let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.

It’s one thing to speak the truth and to be real with another. But it’s a whole new level to say, let every word you speak build up.

It’s quite easy, isn’t it, to speak the truth and tear down. It’s quite easy to speak the truth and burden people unhelpfully. It’s quite easy to speak the truth about other people. That’s called gossip, right? And so speaking the truth is not the hardest, highest bar you’ve ever met. It’s a challenge for us all. But to actually speak non-corrupting, up-building, grace-giving words, now that’s serious maturity.

The word corrupting that he uses there is the word for rottenness. I wonder if you can imagine a hot summer’s day and a bowl of juicy, sweet, perfect looking fruit. I know you can imagine the fruit. Can you imagine a warm summer’s day? No. I don’t know. Remember weeks ago when that used to happen. So imagine it’s a warm day. You’re at your friend’s house and you’re sitting around the table in the back garden and there’s this bowl of fruit on the table. I don’t know what you’d want there. Red apples or yellow apples or green apples or peaches or apricots. Whatever you think is like the dream tasty, juicy, sweet, summery fruit.

And so you do the British thing of not focusing on the food and just pretend it’s not there for a little bit. But after a while, you go, actually, I really want one. So you reach out and you take your fruit of choice. And then as you lift it up to your mouth, sink your teeth into it, you manage to notice, thankfully, that actually the underside is completely rotten.

Well, let’s look on the positive side. It’s more juicy, right? It’s maybe technically more sweet. I’m not sure about that. Ask a scientist. But it’s definitely more juicy. So you just go for it, right? Just sink your teeth in. Of course not. Especially when you see little things moving on it. It’s gross. It can look amazing that way, but when it’s rotting and there’s maggots on it, you’re not going to stick it into your mouth, are you? It’s an absolutely disgusting thing. Paul’s saying, let no rotten words come out of your mouth.

You know, that’s quite an image, isn’t it? But I’m going to give it to us anyway. Any one of us in this room is capable of doing an awful lot of damage. And it’s not just certain people. It’s easy to say, well, yeah, Pete, you better be careful. You’re an elder or something. No, all of us. If I had a bucket full of rotting apples or rotting strawberries or rotting whatever, if I had a bucket and I gave it to any person in this room,

If you start throwing that fruit, you’re going to make a mess of this room. We’re all going to be bothered by it. It’s going to affect us all one way or another. So it’s not like, well, I’m not an elder, I’m not a preacher, it doesn’t affect me. Or I’m not too involved, it’s not about me. Or I’m older, so I can’t possibly throw rotten fruit. Actually, yeah, you can. It’s very easy to open your mouth and just jet out rotting fruit at one another.

Little criticism here, a little moan, little complaint, a little bit of gossip, juicy gossip, just sharing for prayer. You know, I didn’t appreciate this, or I don’t like that, or hey, by the way. And before you know it, you can just be like one of those tennis ball machines, just firing rotting apples at everybody that’s around. What a mess. What a mess that makes. Paul says, don’t do that.

But what it looks like to be so gripped and transformed by the love of God is that the words that come out of your mouth build people up. You encourage. You cheer people on. You look for ways to thank them instead of to tear them down. You look for every opportunity to build up because we’re in a world that’s trying to tear us down. We need one another to encourage.

J.R.R. Tolkien, J.R.R., what’s his name? I forget all his initials. J.R.R. Tolkien, right? He had this manuscript that sat in his office for years, complete, ready to go. It just sat there. Eventually, he got it published, Lord of the Rings. And he was asked, what was it that made you publish the Lord of the Rings? And he said, I tell you what, it would never have been published. In fact, it would never have been written if it were not for the simple encouragement of my good friend, C.S. Lewis.

Isn’t that amazing? You think, wow, what a work of art, what a masterpiece. But he said, it was the simple encouragement of a friend that kept me going. That’s what we can be to one another, to keep one another going, to build one another up, just simple encouragement. But the alternative is so much easier, and that’s to throw the rotten apples. Let’s not do that.

Paul then adds a comment in the next verse just to reinforce how significant that is. He says, verse 30, and do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. What’s that got to do with it?

Well, you think about it. If you read through the New Testament and you see what it says about the Holy Spirit, there’s a lot of information. But right up there, right at the top, is the fact that the Holy Spirit is uniquely concerned with communication that unifies.

He’s passionate about it within the Trinity. The Father and the Son loving by the communication of the Spirit, bonding them together. If you look, you’ll find that he’s the one that is the communicator. He’s got a passion for that, to complete and to unite together. And that then becomes his passion in this world as he works in people who don’t know Jesus to discover that God loves them through Jesus. The Spirit is at work drawing people to a love, to invite them into the love of the Trinity.

Our vision is for all to be transformed by the glorious love of the Trinity. That’s a statement about the Holy Spirit. Everything we’re doing here is a statement about the Holy Spirit because he is passionate that people know God’s love and that they experience God’s love and that they be brought into God’s love. And then once they’re brought into it, once we’re brought into God’s love, into God’s community, the Spirit is particularly concerned with how we’re communicating with one another.

Nothing bothers Him more than for somebody to say, I’m a Christian and then to start throwing rotten fruit at other people and to criticize and to tear down and to malign. And that just grieves him because his passion is that we be united, experiencing among us what we’re going to experience for eternity face to face with God’s son. That love that is reached out and embraced us. That’s the spirit’s passion and concern. And so Paul really kind of underlines, doesn’t he? In the first part of the paragraph, he said, look, lodging anger and hanging onto it, that’s super serious. Don’t give the devil a foothold. And now he’s saying the way you speak to one another is super serious. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? You could so easily look at this and go, well, he’s talking about such mundane practical things as speaking the truth and don’t cling on to anger and be kind in your words. Actually, he’s saying, no, there’s something profoundly spiritual about this level of practical stuff.

We’re living in a context where there is a spiritual realm, where the enemy, our enemy, the devil, is at work wanting to trip us up and to mess us up and to divide us and to turn us against one another. We’re in a realm where the Holy Spirit is at work even though we can’t see him. We’re in a realm where the spiritual realm is watching this and saying, wow, look at the manifold wisdom of God, Ephesians 3.

We’re playing out a life on a stage and we can’t even see the audience, but there’s a huge audience and they’re actively involved in what we’re doing as we interact with each other over these ridiculously tasty pies that we’re eating today. Sorry, ladies, but they just are so good. We’re just doing something so normal. But the devil and the Holy Spirit and the forces of good and evil are concerned and involved in this. That’s what Paul’s saying.

And so then he finishes off the chapter by saying, okay, so not only, you know, let’s take the speech thing to a different level. Let’s talk about the heart as well. We talked about anger and not letting that linger long in the heart. But look at verse 31. He says, That’s a list. That’s a whole load of things that if those things are in our hearts, he knows there’s going to be problems. Bitterness, that settled sense of the anger that’s lodged and is staying, it becomes bitterness within us. Wrath, that… fierce anger that kind of explodes out from us. Anger, that kind of settled, I’m looking for a chance to get my own back kind of anger. Clamor, that’s the very loud, vocal, kind of stir up trouble and shout a lot kind of anger. And slander, that’s the nasty, behind the back, stab in the back kind of comment that can be spoken with a smile and can leave people bleeding behind us. He’s saying, you’ve got to get rid of all of that stuff. Stuff that so easily can be a feature of our insides. It needs to be outside of the church community. It’s got to be put away with.

I don’t know what that looks like for you. I know what it’s like for me. I know where I struggle. I know the things I can so easily cling on to, but only you know you. But Paul is saying, and the Spirit of God is saying, put it away. Make sure that that stuff isn’t allowed to be there. Anything that’s malicious, anything in us that says, I kind of hope he fails. I kind of hope she trips up. I kind of hope that, you know, anything negative toward anybody else, Paul’s saying, that’s got to be, that’s got to go. You can’t leave that in there.

I suppose it’s like trying to contain some kind of live rat in the pocket of your coat. And you say, well, it’s okay. No one knows there’s a rat in my coat. They’ve got a habit of kind of moving and getting out. And before you know it, people are screaming and damage is done. We cannot cling on to issues and think that they’re never going to make any difference. As long as no one else knows, it’s going to be fine. No, Paul says, put it away. Get rid of anything like that that’s going to divide God’s people. And instead, verse 32, be kind, tender-hearted, compassionate, caring for one another, forgiving one another, not just being willing to give money for the sake of others, but also being willing to give forgiveness to those that don’t deserve it, being willing to bear with one another and forgive one another. That’s what generosity looks like.

In real terms. And Paul is really going for it here, isn’t he? He’s really saying, look, the community of God’s people is a community that is being transformed. And it’s going to affect the way we speak in terms of speaking the truth and in terms of speaking up building words. It’s going to affect us at the level of our hearts, not clinging on to things, in fact, dealing with things so that we’re generous, not only in externals, but generous in attitude, generous in forgiveness, remembering that God loved us and gave his son to die for us. That’s the level, that’s the bar with which God is asking us to forgive and care for one another, whatever it takes.

If there’s a problem, if there’s sin, if there’s an issue, committed. Committed to doing the God-like, Christ-like thing. Which is why I think he then says in chapter 5, verse 1, be imitators of God. He’s put the bar at a God level and none of us are fully there, are we? None of us have arrived. We’re all so capable of falling so far short in what we say and in the attitudes of our hearts to one another. But Paul’s saying, no, really, maturity, if we’re going to walk together so that we grow up together, this is what maturity is going to look like.

If we’re going to walk differently together so that the community that we’re a part of is compellingly different from the world around us, from what’s offered in a pub or in the social club. If there’s going to be something so different about us, then we’re going to have to get this kind of God imitation going on, where rubber meets the road, where the reality of the theologies that we’re enjoying makes a difference in the attitudes that we carry and in the words that we speak. It’s got to affect us at that level.

So notice what he says at the start of chapter five. He adds another walk. He says, walk in love.

That’s kind of what he’s been saying. That’s definitely what he’s going to go on to say. Walk in love. Let love be the new garment that you’re wearing, the old garment, the old self with the rats in the pockets. That stuff’s been put off. Now put on love and be loving toward one another. As Christ loved us and gave himself for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.

It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? When you think about Jesus dying, that hideous death on the cross, people around jeering him and mocking him and just the horror of that, so uncomfortable even in a dramatic presentation. You can’t even begin to imagine really what it was like in that first instant. And yet, from God’s perspective and from ours, once we’ve trusted him, there’s a beauty about that, isn’t there? It’s the ultimate manifestation of selfless love.

That when Jesus died on that cross, it was like a sacrifice before God and the aroma went up. Just like in the temple where you’d have the sacrifices and the smoke, the incense, the aroma would rise up before God. That’s what Christ’s death was like. So that in that spiritual way, God was receiving the ultimate selfless act of sacrifice and seeing the beauty of it, even though it was such a heartbreaking thing.

Now, that sounds like marble temple kind of stuff, doesn’t it? An aroma rising before God. And that’s the thing about this section that we’ve looked at. In some ways, it could feel so heavy, but I just want to finish with this thought. When we come to church, when we interact with one another, I think often we come face to face with the mud and the manure. We can sort of sense the stench, can’t we, of his weakness and her weakness and definitely my own.

And maybe someone comes to church, you know, three weeks’ time or whatever, and they get to kind of interact with the church community. Maybe they’re a friend of yours, and they say, it’s like there’s an aroma in here, and you’re tempted to go, yeah, I know, sorry, it’s kind of stenchy in here. It’s mostly me, you know, and inside you’re thinking, yeah, but also it’s, you know, and you know the issues, and it’s so easy to think on that level. And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no. You misunderstood what I’m saying. There’s something different about this. I don’t even know what that is. And maybe what they’re smelling, maybe what they’re sensing among God’s people is the aroma of Christ-like sacrificial love, which is an absolutely amazing thing.

Because God is the only one who’s able to build a marble temple out of materials like us. Mixtures of mud and manure. Absolutely works in progress. With so far to go and so much to learn. And yet even in the process, he’s able to make something beautiful happen.

He has already. He is and he will continue to do that. And so the invitation for us is to look to the cross, get our gaze fixed on Christ and remember what he’s done and then to live in light of that, walking together, to grow up together, to be united as a church, walking differently together, to experience what it is to be transformed from what we were to what he wants us to be and walking in love. So that as we care for one another, as we’re careful with the words we speak and with the attitudes in our hearts, God is able to do something profoundly attractive amongst us.

May that be our prayer going forward. Just thinking of next weekend, a lot of people coming as a part of this. Yes, there’s a drama. Yes, there’s words. Yes, there’s all of that. But there’s a community here. And it’s something very, very precious.