Ephesians chapter 4, let's begin reading with verse 11 and read through verse 16. And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting. Speaking the truth in love may grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body joined and knit together by what every joint supplies according to the effective working by which every part does its share causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love. Amen. We'll end our reading there. And let's ask for God's help again. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, out of all the riches of your word today, that we know we cannot fully sound. We pray that you would bring forth by your guidance and direction, by the help of your spirit, those things that we need to hear and understand in order to live in a way that is pleasing in your sight. We ask you, Lord, for this wonderful gift of growing up into all things, into Christ our head. And we pray that our service today would be useful for that purpose. In Jesus' name, amen. You may remember at the beginning of the year that our first service took for a text for the sermon there, 1 Corinthians 14, 20, where Paul calls upon us to be children in malice, but in understanding, to be men. Well, in this passage in Ephesians, Paul brings up a similar concept, a similar idea, when he calls upon us not to be henceforth children. Clearly, what is assumed there is that, to some degree, we start out as children. And of course, you would expect that. One of the realities of the Christian life is that we are born again. We are regenerated. Well, we might be 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 when that happens, or later, but whenever that happens, spiritually, we are beginners. We might have a great degree of knowledge in terms of this world, we might have a good degree of maturity and character development in purely human functioning, but spiritually we are brand new. And so, for instance, the Apostle Peter will call upon us as newborn babies to desire the sincere milk of the Word. But just as is true with regard to our natural earthly life, we're not supposed to remain babies. We go from infants to toddlers, we go from toddlers to children, we go from childhood to adolescence, and then we reach maturity. And this is a consistent and recurring theme throughout scripture that we must grow to maturity. There are not to be, in other words, any Peter Pan Christians in an eternal childhood. Now, we can certainly understand the charms of that. If you had a happy childhood, odds are those were some of the best days of your life. You had no responsibilities or very few responsibilities. You could play. You could live in the moment. in a way that becomes difficult as you grow up. Certainly I would imagine all of us at one point or another have felt the charm of being Peter Pan, living on Never Never Land, where there's always a new adventure and mostly things really don't change all that much. One day you're dealing with pirates, another day you're dealing with something different, but it's all fun, it's all wonderful. Well, however much we like that dream, however much it draws us, however much our society has idolized extended adolescence, has given us these idiotic slogans of forever 21 and similar nonsense, the call of scripture is to go on to maturity. Scripture does not present us with a golden dream of an everlasting childhood. Scripture presents us with something ultimately better. Now, as I did in January, I would like to qualify. The Bible does not have a negative view of children or of childhood. In fact, I mentioned this at Bible study, I could have pointed out last week in Isaiah 11, when we're hearing about a perfect world, part of that perfect world is that children are playing. So please don't misunderstand, and I don't want the kids to misunderstand either. When we call on people to grow up, we're not saying that it's bad to be a kid, we're just saying that it's meant to be temporary. you're meant to move through this time in your life and come into a different time in your life. That's true in the natural world and that's true spiritually as well. So we don't criticize, we're not unkind to newborn babes, whether that's in physical reality or whether that's spiritually by regeneration, but we do expect and hope and try to provide the conditions wherein they will grow. Well here, Paul, when he says, don't be children any longer, he's taking for granted we have been children. To some extent, we are children, but we need to move on. And that's not because Paul is negative about children, but here specifically, the characteristics of spiritual childhood are instability and vulnerability or susceptibility to deceit. Children can be a little bit gullible. You understand why they don't have enough of a knowledge base if somebody says something to them to say, that doesn't sound right. Everything is new to them, so you can tell them any random thing and many of them will believe it, at least temporarily. That seems to be some people's parenting strategies is lie to your kids until they're old enough to not be taken in anymore, which I don't personally think is the best way to do things. But it works because in their necessarily limited knowledge base, they're vulnerable to deceit and they're unstable. This is part of the job of a parent, right, is to keep in mind the whole context that the child is not yet able to keep in mind. You provide them a secure frame of reference because they're not yet at the point developmentally where they can maintain their own frame of reference. So Paul calls upon us all not to be unstable. And with that instability then he introduces another metaphor. The metaphor is of a little boat at sea that is being pushed around by the wind. Now, that obviously is a thing that can happen. If you're in a small sloop and a hurricane comes along, there may be a way for you to ride out the storm, but it is a dangerous situation and you might wind up in waters that you were not expecting. This happened to my brother one time. He was pushed into Cuban waters unknowingly by a storm at sea. Well, the wind in this case though is not a hurricane or a gale, it's teaching, doctrine. And so what Paul is saying is that we will run into many different varieties of teaching and we need not to be pushed off course by them. That is one of the values of the ministry. You remember in this whole context Paul is talking about how Christ has given officers to the church, and he particularly highlights those officers who engage with the ministry of the word, and part of what they're doing is bringing us to maturity. Part of the way that they do that is attempting to secure us, attempting to stabilize us so that we're not pushed about by every wind of doctrine. However, there's an additional wrinkle. There are people who get into the ministry or who pass themselves off as having this calling, and yet they are false teachers. They are lying in wait to deceive. When Paul talks about the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, the illusion, the vocabulary he uses is from people who cheat at dice, from people who load up the die so that they can control how it's gonna land instead of it actually being random. And the point of this comparison then is to say that there are people who will try to trick you. They will try to make you think that they are teaching you God's word, that they're teaching you in line with what you've learned before, but that's not actually the case. So that then leaves us with a little bit of a dilemma. The Lord Jesus has given the ministry, the ministry of the word, to help us to grow up into maturity, to stabilize us, but then there are people sneaking into that ministry who have quite an opposite goal. So now what are we going to do? Well, there's one very important lesson that we should take away from that, and that is you cannot outsource your spiritual stability and your spiritual maturity to me. or to any other minister. Now, I'm not absolving myself of all responsibility. It is my job, week by week, to at least give you the opportunity to learn the truth of God's word in a way that will anchor and secure your soul, in a way that will help you to grow up into Christ. And if I'm not doing that, that is my fault. That is my problem. You're not to blame for that. But because you have to be discerning, because of the possibility of false teachers coming in, you can't just say, well, I'll believe whatever Ruben says. You can't do that. You have to examine the scriptures yourself. You have to contribute on your part to growth and stability in grace. So let me take just a moment using this illustration of the winds to briefly talk about what that ought to look like. Well imagine. that you were going to go up to the top of a lighthouse and you were going to stand there while a strong storm blew in. Well, first of all, you'd wanna make sure that you had pretty solid footing, right? You wanna make sure the lighthouse is not gonna get blown away, but then you also wanna make sure that your feet have a secure grip on the lighthouse. That we could compare to the scriptures. You need to be grounded on the Bible. You need to be clear that the Bible is the supreme authority. You need to be willing to read and reread the Bible so that you can Bring everything that you are taught, every wind of doctrine, every particular teaching to the light of God's word. You want your feet securely planted and the word of God is a secure, a firm foundation for your feet. Now, if you're going to be standing on the top of a tower, a lighthouse, with the wind blowing around you, you're also going to want to be securely anchored. You're gonna wanna have a low center of gravity. In other words, you need to not just have your feet on something firm, but you need to be settled and centered. That's Christ. We're supposed to grow up in all things into Christ. quickest ways to evaluate any wind of doctrine is, does it direct my attention to Christ, or does it distract my attention from Christ? Because a lot of false teachers will be happy to talk about the Bible for hours on end, and they'll bring up all kinds of interesting details, and they'll point out all sorts of things you've never heard before. But if the effect of that is that you're distracted from Christ, that is not a good sign. They might not even be false teachers, they might just be somewhat immature teachers who haven't realized that our greatest need is always Christ. So with your feet firmly planted on God's word, with Christ at the center, Now you're in pretty good shape to withstand the winds of doctrine. But we can add, you might also want to hang on to something. You know, it would be handy if there's a handrail on the top of the lighthouse so you can grip. Well, we do have something similar to that. We have our confessional standards. We have the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort. Those documents do not pretend to be exhaustive. Nobody here thinks that in those documents you have everything the Bible says about every subject imaginable. but you have a faithful summary of what scripture says about the most important subjects. So if somebody says something that's not contained word for word in the Belgic Confession, that's fine. But if somebody says something that contradicts the Belgic Confession or the Heidelberg Catechism or the Canons of Dort, okay, now that is a big red flag. So we have equipment here. The ministry of the word in times past has left us with a legacy that can help us not to be pushed about by every wind of teaching, not even when it's coming from people who have secretly invaded the ministry of the church in order to lead us astray. I hope you won't take this for granted. This is very important. The false teachers are very, very subtle in how they go about introducing falsehood. They don't come to you with horns on their heads and visibly forked tongues. They come disguised as preachers of righteousness. Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light. And so they come preaching wonderful things like love and joy and peace and grace. And of course, every true preacher of God's word has to preach about those things. But as they say, literally, the devil is in the details. You set that out incorrectly and you turn the grace of God into lasciviousness and now you're completely off base. Now you're leading people astray. So we need to use, to take advantage of the helps that God has given us so that we will be spiritually stable. Now spiritually stable doesn't mean we never learn, it doesn't mean we never grow, it doesn't mean we never change anything. But it does mean that we remain consistent with our core commitments. It means we remain faithful to the new life that was given to us in regeneration. You see why I had my doubts about whether we could make it through all three verses this morning or not. Okay, if there's questions, if there's follow-up, I'm happy to return to this passage or I'm happy to discuss it some other time. Paul has given us the negative. Don't be children anymore. Be stable and don't be gullible. Be hard to deceive or impossible to deceive is ideal because you're grounded on God's word, centered in Christ, and because you take advantage of the faithful ministry of the word to help you be stable and discerning. There's also a positive side to this. withstand false teaching, withstand the current fad in doctrine, but also there's something more than that. Speaking the truth in love grow up in all things into the head, into Christ. Now, I think most of the time when we hear speaking the truth in love, we think about this as sort of a general principle that should govern our interactions with others, Or we might make application of it to, say, counseling people, helping them with their problems, etc. And it is a general principle and it is valid in those ways. But that's not really the subject that Paul has in mind. He's going to talk about speaking the truth. He's going to talk about our communications with one another. in a general way a little bit later on. But here when he says, speaking the truth in love, it's in this context. It's in this context of good doctrine, of sound teaching. In other words, we are to be building one another up because we remind one another of the doctrinal truth of God's Word. We remind one another that God is good all the time. We remind one another that God's ways are not our ways. We remind one another that Christ has died for our sins according to the Scripture, and etc. Speaking the truth here is mostly, primarily emphasizing that element of truth. We encourage one another with a verse from God's word. We stand on scripture and we speak scripture and summaries of scripture to one another. And we do that in love. There is a way to do that that is not in love, and that's not very good. The solution to that is not to start telling loving lies, quote-unquote, which are not a genuine category, which do not in fact exist, but the solution to that is to begin to love one another so that our speaking of the truth really arises from love. That's the opposite of being unstable children pushed about by the winds. That's how we grow up into Christ. Well, that should also then emphasize to us that we need the ministry, we need the function of those who are set apart to do that, so to speak, professionally, vocationally, but it also tells us that we need one another. you have something to contribute to your fellow church members. You can speak the truth in love to them. You can remind them, and it doesn't have to be officious, it doesn't have to be insolent, it doesn't have to be one superior speaking down to another person. It can be very simple. It can be, God encouraged me with this verse this week. That's a wonderful way to speak the truth in love to one another. And that's a wonderful way that we all contribute to the growth of the body. Now, remember again, Paul will not let us lose sight of this. What is the goal? The goal is conformity to Christ. The goal is growing up into Christ. That's one reason I said we have to be centered on Christ. You can't read this passage without seeing how Paul keeps returning and returning and returning to Christ. It was Christ who gave these officers to the church. And he gave them for the edifying of the body of Christ. We're supposed to come in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, another word for Christ. And we're supposed to attain the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ instead of being vulnerable and variable children, we are supposed to grow up in all things into Christ. As though it weren't enough to tell us that we're the body, he emphasizes again that Christ is the head. So the centrality of Christ is not some nice theory that theologians thought up. It's a textural fact. It's just there on the surface of the New Testament. And so it needs to be there on the surface, easily visible, but also in the depths of our hearts, not lightly something we're taken away from. What is the goal of the ministry that we grow up into Christ? What is the goal of our interactions with one another that we grow up into Christ? How often do we lose sight of this? How often do we come to church out of habit and not to grow up into Christ? How often do we talk with one another and it's just general friendliness? We could have had the same conversation with an absolute unbeliever because we're not really thinking about edifying one another. We're not really focused on speaking the truth in love so that me and whoever I'm speaking to will both be growing up into Christ. We can be guilty of this in our ordinary interactions. Now, I don't mean to say that you can't ask somebody how they're doing at work or how their kids are doing or whatever. Obviously, those are all things that we're involved with. Those are all parts of our lives. We ought to talk about those things with one another. But what is our focus? What is our desire? What is our aim? Is this even in the back of our minds most times when we're talking to somebody at a fellowship meal or at a consistory breakfast or whatever it may happen to be? Speaking the truth in love is how we contribute to one another's growth into Christ. And then Paul emphasizes Christ again, from whom the whole body joined and knit together by what every joint supplies. Notice that from whom, from Christ. Where does the ability to speak the truth and love come from? From Christ. Where does everything that you might contribute to other believers or to the church as a whole come from? It comes from Christ. And when other people are a blessing to you, when they encourage you or whatever it may be, where does that come from? It comes from Christ. You see, the life of the church is the life of Christ carried out by us, his joints, his members, his body. So it's not insignificant. It's a proof of Christ at work in you, living in you, working through you. It's a blessing. It's a privilege. It's a wonder. And Christ has chosen to work through means. There's an example of this, the book of Acts chapter 10, Cornelius has a dream and an angel tells him to go and find Peter to preach the gospel to him. Why didn't the angel just save time, cut out the middleman, preach the gospel to Cornelius directly? Because that is not how God characteristically chooses to work. God characteristically chooses to work through us. And so as every part does its share, the body grows. Or changing the metaphor, the body as a building is built up in love. Are you troubled by the lack of love that you sometimes see in the church? Are you concerned about the slow growth of other people in the church? Are you concerned about your own slow growth? Well, Here we have a solution. Look to Christ, receive from Christ, but then do your share. When every part does its share, there's a principle that you find a lot of times in the world that 20% of the people in an organization do 80% of the work. I'm sure Eric could go a little deeper on that particular topic if need be. And we see that, and sometimes it works the other way around, right? 20% of the people cause 80% of the problems also. Not the same 20% usually. That's not our vision for the church. Our vision for the church is not that a few people carry all the weight and everybody else kind of just coasts. That's not what Scripture says. It says every part does its share. Now, not every part has the exact same share. That is absolutely true, and in different seasons of life, what you're able to contribute, what your share is, will absolutely change. That's okay. Nobody should be frustrated or upset if as seasons of life change, how you contribute, what you contribute to the church or to other believers changes. That is an absolutely normal part of growth and development. It's what we expect. That's not a bad thing. I don't want to challenge anybody based on stage of life. That's not my point at all. But I would like to challenge everybody. Is every part doing its share? Now, what your share is, again, that's a great question and that's something I'm happy to discuss with anybody at any time. Are you doing it? Are you engaged in it? We all have a part to play. Our part is not just for the gathering of the church. Our part is for other believers as well as we run into them throughout the week. I don't want you to think that this is a recruitment campaign for VBS, okay? If I can just be blunt for a moment. I'm not trying to guilt people into volunteering for VBS. I want you to think about the church and what its needs are. I want you to think about the believers you come into contact with or should maybe come into contact with throughout the week. And I want you to say, is the body growing? Does the body have the opportunity to grow? Because my part, What I can contribute, I am doing. I am doing consistently. I'm doing faithfully. I am doing cheerfully. I'm doing diligently. People have different limitations with health, with energy, with whatever else it may be. I get that. I do understand. But we still need to raise the question. We need to be open to the answer. And I don't want this to be as a matter of guilt. I want this to be as a matter of glory. Because what could be better than contributing into all of us together growing up into Christ? We're receiving so much from Him. Don't you want to reciprocate by growth? He's shining upon you, He's watering you, He's nurturing you, He's feeding you. He's using the people around you to accomplish all of that. Do you want to be the dead end? Do you want to be the place where that stops? Or do you want to be part of that circulation of gifts within the body? That's glory. That's such a gift that we can contribute to the edification of the church, to the building up of the church in this way. Oh, may God work in all of our hearts so that with the goal, the desire of growing up into Christ, we all do what we can to nurture and build up the church. Amen.