Ephesians 4 Part 3
Bible Study Time 10-2-05
Bible Study Time 10-2-05
In Ephesians 4, the Holy Spirit used the Apostle Paul to reveal the heart of God in regard to the walk of the believer. God has saved us by His grace because of His great love for us. Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by His mercy He saved us. God has taken us from the depths of sin and depravity and has given us a high and noble calling in Jesus Christ. It gives Him great pleasure to see us live a life that is worthy of such a position. He has given us the power through the Holy Spirit to walk worthy of the calling with which we have been called.
Paul says that to walk worthy of our new position, we should walk with all humility, putting aside our own selfish ambition. We should look not only on our own situation, but we should consider the circumstances of others.
Anyone is a position of authority realizes very quickly that you can’t please everyone. We all want what is best for us, but what is best for us may not be the best for someone else. When people consider only their own interests, the result is a common but very unpleasant social phenomenon known as bickering and fighting.
In Galatians 5, Paul says that hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, and dissensions are all works of the flesh. According to Ephesians 2, we once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, and it came naturally to us to fulfill all of the desires of the flesh.
Ephesians 2:4-5 (NKJ)
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 . . . made us alive together with Christ
Paul says in Ephesians 4 that our worthy walk involves not only walking with all humility, but it also involves walking with longsuffering as we bear with one another in love.
Our great example in longsuffering is God, Himself. In the book of Exodus we see that the children of Israel grew restless as Moses was with the Lord on Mt. Sinai. They suspected that something dreadful had happened to him and that he simply was not going to come down from the mountain.
They had witnessed the lightning and the thunder at the mountaintop. They had felt the seizures of the earth beneath their feet. They, themselves, had trembled with fear as they heard the voice of the Lord and agreed to do all that He commanded them to do.
As Moses climbed up the side of the mountain and disappeared into the cloud, they waited. As they waited, minutes turned into hours, and the hours into days. After forty days they began to wonder if Moses would ever return. Maybe the consuming fire had claimed its first victim. Just how long were they suppose to wait for Moses?
The elders of the people finally came to Aaron and said, “We think that we’ve waited long enough. It appears that something has happened to Moses, and we can’t wait here forever. Let’s make some gods like we had back in Egypt, and then we can tell the people that these are the gods that brought us up out of the land of Egypt.”
Obviously, this was not only human nature at its worst, but it was a scheme which smelled like smoke and came straight from the pit of hell. There is nothing the devil likes more than manipulating people with religion. However, religious leaders should realize that a lie is a lie and nothing good can come from a lie. The devil is a liar and the father of lies.
The children of Israel had witnessed the mighty miracles which the Lord had done through Moses. After all, Moses had done miracles at his first meeting with the elders, and the Bible says that when the elders saw the miracles, they believed that the Lord had visited them and that He had taken notice of their affliction.
The children of Israel had also seen the plaques which God had done through Moses. They had seen the water turn to blood. They had seen the frogs, the gnats, the flies, the dying cattle and the festering boils. They had seen the hail, the locusts, the darkness and the death of Egypt’s firstborn sons, including the death of Pharaoh’s son.
God had protected them through all of these plagues, and He had delivered them from the Egyptian army as they crossed the Red Sea. But still the faith of Israel was weak. After 40 days of waiting for Moses at the foot of Mt. Sinai, they decided they needed a new god. The God who had proven Himself to them time and time again just wasn’t worth waiting for any longer.
When the elders came to Aaron with their concerns, he told them to gather up all of their gold jewelry. He took the gold, melted it down in a blazing furnace, and cast it in the shape of a giant calf.
The elders of Israel must have been very pleased with themselves for they had successfully created a god for the people to worship, and they were confident that this god would never forsake them like the God who had lured Moses up into the fiery mountain peak.
They were so excited that they threw a big party. They ate and drank and sang and danced. But little did they know that the God who they thought had forsaken them was looking down from that mountain and was observing all of their activities. When God saw the golden calf, He was so angry that He wanted to destroy the entire nation of Israel. Moses stepped up and begged for mercy on Israel’s behalf, saying:
Exodus 32:12-14 (NKJ)
12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, and say, 'He brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth'? Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to Your people.
13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven; and all this land that I have spoken of I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
14 So the LORD relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people.
When I think of this event, I can not help but think of the number of people who think that the God of the Bible has gone away and left us here to follow our own devices. They have forgotten all of the things that God has done in the past to prove that He is alive and well. They have forgotten all of the mighty works of God which are recorded in the scriptures, and they have forgotten that God is the source of the freedom and prosperity which we enjoy and so often take for granted.
We live in a time when people scoff at the word of God and openly deride the name of Jesus. They think that the religion of the Bible is a thing of the past and that the God of the Bible is no longer a viable force.
The truth of the matter is, however, that the God of the Bible is very much alive, and He is paying close attention to all of the events that take place upon this earth. Today, we live in an age of grace, but there is coming a time when God will no longer remain silent in the heavens. Someday He will speak and all of the world will become aware of His mighty power.
There are those who think that we are doing a great job of solving the world’s problems without God. There are those who think that we can just replace God with a god of our own choosing. But God will someday set the record straight just like He did when He saw the golden calf.
As angry as God was when He saw the calf, He heeded Moses’ plea and agreed not to destroy the children of Israel. At first He told Moses to go on to the promised land with the children of Israel. He said that He would send His Angel before them, but that He would not be going with them.
When the people heard this bad news, they mourned and stripped themselves of their jewelry. After Moses went before the Lord again to plead their case, God agreed to go with them and lead them to the promised land. Then God revealed Himself to Moses in a way that revealed all of the goodness of the Lord. As the Lord passed before Moses, the Lord said:
Exodus 34:6-8 (NKJ)
6 . . . "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth,
7 "keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation."
8 So Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped.
The Lord God is gracious and longsuffering, and as the sons of God, we should be gracious and longsuffering too. In Luke, Chapter 6, Jesus said:
Luke 6:35-36 (NKJ)
35 " . . . love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil.
36 "Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.
If this is true, that we should love our enemies, then certainly we should be longsuffering with one another as well. We should bear with one another in love.
Have you ever thought about the fact that we are so much more vulnerable to being hurt by those we love than we are to being hurt by a stranger? Someone we don’t know can hardly hurt us. Oh, a stranger may attack us and leave us with physical wounds, but physical wounds heal so much faster and so much better than the emotional wounds which are caused by the personal betrayal of someone we love.
Emotional wounds take a long time to heal and often leave permanent scars. We become vulnerable to this kind of pain whenever we chose to love. This deep, heartfelt pain is the kind of pain that God suffered when He looked down from Mt. Sinai and saw His chosen people worshipping a god which they had fashioned with their own hands. Not only had they failed to love and honor Him as they had promised to do, but they had rejected Him. They did not want Him as their god.
God knows the pain of rejection, and He can empathize with us when our pain is deep and personal. He knows our pain, and He also knows what is best for us. He does not tell us to strike back or hold a grudge. He does not say that there are some circumstances in which hatred is justified. No, He says just the opposite. He told the Apostle Paul to tell us that we should be longsuffering with one another, and we should bear with one another in love.
Isn’t it good that the children of Israel had a mediator who could plead their case before God when they messed up. When Moses finally did come down from that mountain, can you just imagine the look on their faces. All of a sudden, they knew not only that Moses was alive, but they knew that God too was alive, and that judgment was coming. But Exodus 32 says that Moses went before the Lord again to plead for the children of Israel.
Moses was called to represent God to the children of Israel, but because Moses loved the children of Israel, he ended up representing the children of Israel before God. Jesus Christ was called to represent God to us, and He did that very well. The Apostle John said that no one has seen God at any time, but that Jesus Christ has declared Him.
However, Jesus Christ not only represents the Father to us, but because of His love for us, He represents us to the Father. Again, it was the Apostle John who said that if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, even Jesus Christ the righteous. Today, there is one mediator between God and man, and that mediator is the Man Christ Jesus.
If you do not know the Lord today, you can call upon the Lord Jesus Christ. If you believe that He died for your sins, He will represent you before the Father. He will plead your case, and God will accept you as one of his children. You will become a member of the household of God.
We have this confidence because we know that Jesus Christ will make His plea not on the basis of our good deeds, but on the basis of His shed blood. God’s word declares that God is satisfied with the shed blood of Jesus Christ as the full payment for our sins.
If you already know the Lord, then you share with all believers the obligation and privilege of walking with longsuffering toward others and bearing one another in love. Later in Ephesians 4, Paul says:
Ephesians 4:32 (KJV)
32 And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.
I see our time is gone for this morning. Thank for listening to Bible Study Time. I’ll look forward to being with you again next week at this same time.
Write me at: jimjoan77@juno.com
Church links:
http://www.peacechurch_ok.org/
http://www.eleventhavenuechurch.com/
http://gracebiblechurch_fw.com/
Paul says that to walk worthy of our new position, we should walk with all humility, putting aside our own selfish ambition. We should look not only on our own situation, but we should consider the circumstances of others.
Anyone is a position of authority realizes very quickly that you can’t please everyone. We all want what is best for us, but what is best for us may not be the best for someone else. When people consider only their own interests, the result is a common but very unpleasant social phenomenon known as bickering and fighting.
In Galatians 5, Paul says that hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, and dissensions are all works of the flesh. According to Ephesians 2, we once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, and it came naturally to us to fulfill all of the desires of the flesh.
Ephesians 2:4-5 (NKJ)
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 . . . made us alive together with Christ
Paul says in Ephesians 4 that our worthy walk involves not only walking with all humility, but it also involves walking with longsuffering as we bear with one another in love.
Our great example in longsuffering is God, Himself. In the book of Exodus we see that the children of Israel grew restless as Moses was with the Lord on Mt. Sinai. They suspected that something dreadful had happened to him and that he simply was not going to come down from the mountain.
They had witnessed the lightning and the thunder at the mountaintop. They had felt the seizures of the earth beneath their feet. They, themselves, had trembled with fear as they heard the voice of the Lord and agreed to do all that He commanded them to do.
As Moses climbed up the side of the mountain and disappeared into the cloud, they waited. As they waited, minutes turned into hours, and the hours into days. After forty days they began to wonder if Moses would ever return. Maybe the consuming fire had claimed its first victim. Just how long were they suppose to wait for Moses?
The elders of the people finally came to Aaron and said, “We think that we’ve waited long enough. It appears that something has happened to Moses, and we can’t wait here forever. Let’s make some gods like we had back in Egypt, and then we can tell the people that these are the gods that brought us up out of the land of Egypt.”
Obviously, this was not only human nature at its worst, but it was a scheme which smelled like smoke and came straight from the pit of hell. There is nothing the devil likes more than manipulating people with religion. However, religious leaders should realize that a lie is a lie and nothing good can come from a lie. The devil is a liar and the father of lies.
The children of Israel had witnessed the mighty miracles which the Lord had done through Moses. After all, Moses had done miracles at his first meeting with the elders, and the Bible says that when the elders saw the miracles, they believed that the Lord had visited them and that He had taken notice of their affliction.
The children of Israel had also seen the plaques which God had done through Moses. They had seen the water turn to blood. They had seen the frogs, the gnats, the flies, the dying cattle and the festering boils. They had seen the hail, the locusts, the darkness and the death of Egypt’s firstborn sons, including the death of Pharaoh’s son.
God had protected them through all of these plagues, and He had delivered them from the Egyptian army as they crossed the Red Sea. But still the faith of Israel was weak. After 40 days of waiting for Moses at the foot of Mt. Sinai, they decided they needed a new god. The God who had proven Himself to them time and time again just wasn’t worth waiting for any longer.
When the elders came to Aaron with their concerns, he told them to gather up all of their gold jewelry. He took the gold, melted it down in a blazing furnace, and cast it in the shape of a giant calf.
The elders of Israel must have been very pleased with themselves for they had successfully created a god for the people to worship, and they were confident that this god would never forsake them like the God who had lured Moses up into the fiery mountain peak.
They were so excited that they threw a big party. They ate and drank and sang and danced. But little did they know that the God who they thought had forsaken them was looking down from that mountain and was observing all of their activities. When God saw the golden calf, He was so angry that He wanted to destroy the entire nation of Israel. Moses stepped up and begged for mercy on Israel’s behalf, saying:
Exodus 32:12-14 (NKJ)
12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, and say, 'He brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth'? Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to Your people.
13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven; and all this land that I have spoken of I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
14 So the LORD relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people.
When I think of this event, I can not help but think of the number of people who think that the God of the Bible has gone away and left us here to follow our own devices. They have forgotten all of the things that God has done in the past to prove that He is alive and well. They have forgotten all of the mighty works of God which are recorded in the scriptures, and they have forgotten that God is the source of the freedom and prosperity which we enjoy and so often take for granted.
We live in a time when people scoff at the word of God and openly deride the name of Jesus. They think that the religion of the Bible is a thing of the past and that the God of the Bible is no longer a viable force.
The truth of the matter is, however, that the God of the Bible is very much alive, and He is paying close attention to all of the events that take place upon this earth. Today, we live in an age of grace, but there is coming a time when God will no longer remain silent in the heavens. Someday He will speak and all of the world will become aware of His mighty power.
There are those who think that we are doing a great job of solving the world’s problems without God. There are those who think that we can just replace God with a god of our own choosing. But God will someday set the record straight just like He did when He saw the golden calf.
As angry as God was when He saw the calf, He heeded Moses’ plea and agreed not to destroy the children of Israel. At first He told Moses to go on to the promised land with the children of Israel. He said that He would send His Angel before them, but that He would not be going with them.
When the people heard this bad news, they mourned and stripped themselves of their jewelry. After Moses went before the Lord again to plead their case, God agreed to go with them and lead them to the promised land. Then God revealed Himself to Moses in a way that revealed all of the goodness of the Lord. As the Lord passed before Moses, the Lord said:
Exodus 34:6-8 (NKJ)
6 . . . "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth,
7 "keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation."
8 So Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped.
The Lord God is gracious and longsuffering, and as the sons of God, we should be gracious and longsuffering too. In Luke, Chapter 6, Jesus said:
Luke 6:35-36 (NKJ)
35 " . . . love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil.
36 "Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.
If this is true, that we should love our enemies, then certainly we should be longsuffering with one another as well. We should bear with one another in love.
Have you ever thought about the fact that we are so much more vulnerable to being hurt by those we love than we are to being hurt by a stranger? Someone we don’t know can hardly hurt us. Oh, a stranger may attack us and leave us with physical wounds, but physical wounds heal so much faster and so much better than the emotional wounds which are caused by the personal betrayal of someone we love.
Emotional wounds take a long time to heal and often leave permanent scars. We become vulnerable to this kind of pain whenever we chose to love. This deep, heartfelt pain is the kind of pain that God suffered when He looked down from Mt. Sinai and saw His chosen people worshipping a god which they had fashioned with their own hands. Not only had they failed to love and honor Him as they had promised to do, but they had rejected Him. They did not want Him as their god.
God knows the pain of rejection, and He can empathize with us when our pain is deep and personal. He knows our pain, and He also knows what is best for us. He does not tell us to strike back or hold a grudge. He does not say that there are some circumstances in which hatred is justified. No, He says just the opposite. He told the Apostle Paul to tell us that we should be longsuffering with one another, and we should bear with one another in love.
Isn’t it good that the children of Israel had a mediator who could plead their case before God when they messed up. When Moses finally did come down from that mountain, can you just imagine the look on their faces. All of a sudden, they knew not only that Moses was alive, but they knew that God too was alive, and that judgment was coming. But Exodus 32 says that Moses went before the Lord again to plead for the children of Israel.
Moses was called to represent God to the children of Israel, but because Moses loved the children of Israel, he ended up representing the children of Israel before God. Jesus Christ was called to represent God to us, and He did that very well. The Apostle John said that no one has seen God at any time, but that Jesus Christ has declared Him.
However, Jesus Christ not only represents the Father to us, but because of His love for us, He represents us to the Father. Again, it was the Apostle John who said that if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, even Jesus Christ the righteous. Today, there is one mediator between God and man, and that mediator is the Man Christ Jesus.
If you do not know the Lord today, you can call upon the Lord Jesus Christ. If you believe that He died for your sins, He will represent you before the Father. He will plead your case, and God will accept you as one of his children. You will become a member of the household of God.
We have this confidence because we know that Jesus Christ will make His plea not on the basis of our good deeds, but on the basis of His shed blood. God’s word declares that God is satisfied with the shed blood of Jesus Christ as the full payment for our sins.
If you already know the Lord, then you share with all believers the obligation and privilege of walking with longsuffering toward others and bearing one another in love. Later in Ephesians 4, Paul says:
Ephesians 4:32 (KJV)
32 And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.
I see our time is gone for this morning. Thank for listening to Bible Study Time. I’ll look forward to being with you again next week at this same time.
Write me at: jimjoan77@juno.com
Church links:
http://www.peacechurch_ok.org/
http://www.eleventhavenuechurch.com/
http://gracebiblechurch_fw.com/
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