Minister: Kirsten Barlow

Operation Ephesians:  Advanced Training                           June 13 & 14, 2009

Ephesians 4:  20-24 and 31-32(The Message)  ^20-24But that's no life for you. You learned Christ! My assumption is that you have paid careful attention to him, been well instructed in the truth precisely as we have it in Jesus. Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. It's rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.
 ^31-32Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.

We are in the middle of our sermon series on Paul’s letters to the Ephesians.  We have been talking about how God’s love was made available to all, both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) through the sacrifice of Jesus.  That’s what Paul is writing to Ephesus.  In today’s passage, he is talking about how we are to live our lives once we know about the love of Jesus.  Remember last week, Marv said, “God loves you, and there is nothing you can do about it!”

That’s right, no matter what we do, God still loves us.  But, if we truly understand how much God loves us and all that he has done for us, then we have to live our lives differently.  That’s what we are going to talk about today.

There is a difference between knowing that we should be doing something, though, and actually doing it, isn’t there.

Reminds me of the story where:

Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was
better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly
God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

Finally fed up, God said, 'THAT'S IT! I have had enough. I am
going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those
results, I will judge who does the better job.'

So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.
They moused.
They faxed.
They e-mailed.
They e-mailed with attachments.
They downloaded.
They did spreadsheets!
They wrote reports.
They created labels and cards.
They created charts and graphs.
They did some genealogy reports
They did every job known to man.

Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell.

Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off.

Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.  Jesus just sighed.

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted
their computers. Satan started searching frantically, screaming:
'It's gone! It's all GONE! 'I lost everything when the power went out!'

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files
from the past two hours of work.

Satan observed this and became irate. 'Wait!' he screamed. 'That's not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don't have any?'

God just shrugged and said, JESUS SAVES

Well, He does doesn’t He?  But, you get the point…at least one of them. 

If you’ve ever had that happen (that you worked for a long time on something on the computer and then you lost it) you become very wary of that ever happening again.  I’m always afraid that’s going to happen with the sermon, so I save it every couple of minutes and I e-mail it from one e-mail account to the other, so that I have a record of it while it is in process.  Because I’ve lost my work before, I now do it differently and save regularly.  I learned to do something different.

That’s what Paul was trying to tell the Ephesians…that they needed to do something differently than they had before.  They now knew about Christ Jesus.  They knew what Jesus had done for them on the cross.  They knew that they now had access to God.  As Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8 (TNIV) For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—

But Paul, in our passage today says, “OK, now you know about this gift of God.  So now, you have to live your lives differently.”  You aren’t ignorant, you know the whole story.  So act like it makes a difference in your lives.

Paul tells the Ephesians that they need to get rid of their old, self-centered life.  Instead of focusing on themselves and doing what makes them feel good regardless of how it affects others, they need to live a “God-fashioned life”:  a life with God at the center.

That’s a different way of life.  No more cutting each other down.  No more stabbing each other in the back.  No more foul talk.  They need to be gentle, sensitive, forgiving…because that’s how Jesus lived.  Now that you know, Ephesians, how Jesus lived…you have to change your lives…live differently.

That’s what the new cadets at the Air Force Academy will be doing starting in about 10 days, right?  They will be learning to live differently as they attempt to survive the Basic Cadet Training (boot camp) and become a cadet.  I remember the first time that I ever visited the Air Force Academy.  I stood outside the beautiful cadet chapel and saw men and women walking across campus following the lines or the cracks in the sidewalk, while other students walked in a straight line from one place to another.

Well, later I learned that was all about training the new cadets to follow orders and to do things differently. 

Some of you have had similar experiences in your military careers.  You’ve gone to training, maybe even advanced training, to learn something new.  Once your learned that new thing, that was the way you needed to do it.  Right?

Well, that’s kind of what Paul was telling the Ephesians.  Now that they understood how they were to live, they needed to live that way.

But, Paul also knew that it wasn’t quite that easy.  Paul knew that what the Ephesians were dealing with was tough stuff.

Paul was talking about rooting out bitterness:  that long standing resentment that people can hold towards another.  It’s a spirit that refuses to be reconciled.  It’s harboring bad feelings towards another, keeping those bad feelings alive, just not letting them go.  It’s brooding over insults and injuries which we have received.

You know I have an aunt who is still alive and cousins, my aunt’s children, that I don’t really know.  I guess my mom and this particular sister never really got along well as kids, but they made an attempt at having a relationship.  Something happened when I was about a year old, the straw that broke the camel’s back, when we were visiting that aunt.  My mom and dad packed the four of us kids up in the car, we went home, and I never saw that aunt and those cousins again, until they showed up at a family gathering when I was 16.  The bare minimum pleasantries were exchanged then and I haven’t seen her since.  When my mom died, my dad specifically asked that we not call and notify my aunt as my mom wouldn’t have wanted that.

I don’t know what happened.  I don’t think my dad does either.  But, talk about a deep sense of resentment and bitterness.  There was some kind of hurt there that my mom just couldn’t let go of.  Apparently my aunt can’t either. Sad really…

But that is the kind of stuff that Paul was telling the Ephesians that they just needed to let go of.  He said they needed to make a clean break of it. To get rid of that kind of life.

But, how does one do that.   Well, I don’t think that Paul proposed that it was easy, but did you catch what he said, “take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.”

In other words, you have to work on it.  Paul says start by letting God renew you from the inside.  Let God change your heart and then watch how your actions change.  Change the inside and the outside will follow.

A prayer in The United Methodist Hymnal puts it this way:

Lord, I want to be more holy in my heart.
Here is the citadel of all my desiring,
Where my hopes are born
And all the deep resolutions of my spirit take wings.
In this center, my fears are nourished,
And all my hates are nurture.
Here my loves are cherished,
And all the deep hungers of my spirit are honored
Without quivering and without shock.
In my heart, above all else,
Let love and integrity envelop me
Until my love is perfected and the last vestige
of my desiring is no longer in conflict with thy Spirit.
Lord, I want to be more holy in my heart.  Amen.
United Methodist Hymnal #401 (Howard Thurman)

That’s what the apostle Paul was talking about.  To let God renew us from within, to restore that God image (that image that we were all created in) to us, and then to see how our lives change when our hearts are changed.

That’s the point of the “advanced training” that Paul was giving to the Ephesians:  to help each person to learn to be more like Christ; to be gentle and sensitive; to forgive each other, just as Christ has forgiven each one of us; to love each other just as Christ loves us.

Then, if we can do that, putting behind the resentment and the hurt and the anger: we can all live together as the Christian community, using all the gifts that God has given us to work together for the glory of God’s kingdom as Paul wrote in this same chapter in Ephesians:
 4: 11-13 (The Message) He (Christ) handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christ's followers in skilled servant work, working within Christ's body, the church, until we're all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God's Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.

We can choose how we want to live our lives.  Do we want to live them and ignore what we know about Jesus and how he taught us to live or do we want to live our lives filled with God’s Spirit working together as Paul described, rhythmically and easily…in response to the son of God?

The place to start is within.  Accept the training that God in Christ offers to us.  Invite God to dwell in your heart.  Invite God to renew your heart.  Invite God to renew your actions.

Then pay attention.  Look for signs that God is at work within you.  Be encouraged each day.  Know that God forgives you as you struggle.  Know that even in the midst of your struggle that God loves and that there is nothing you can do to lose that love.

Accept the love that God has to offer you.  Let it fill you to overflowing that you might be renewed…that you might let go of the bitterness, of the heartaches of the past…that you might become fully alive as Christ intended.

May it be so.

Let us pray.