So when missionaries usually preach, we get a lot of leeway, partially because no matter what, it's kind of a one and done sermon. So we're not preaching through a book, and it's kind of a topical sermon. But we still want to be preaching the Word of God. So I hope that I see that many of you have your Bibles with you. I hope that we can we can practice the priesthood of all believers as we work through the sermon text this evening. This is a passage we're going to be looking at Ephesians 4 primarily.
It's a passage that's been in my heart. The pastor that I co-planted the church with in St. Petersburg is Paiviel Lazowski. So it's actually a good Polish last name if you like to think about last names. Lazowski is Polish, but he's actually, his great-grandfather was a Ukrainian Baptist minister. And now he is in St. Petersburg, and he's serving, and he's the lead teaching pastor in our church. So I'm thrilled.
I showed a picture of him and his wife there. But it's so important when you're doing ministry and tough soil like Russia to do things God's way and in God's timing because that allows you to plant and to grow your church on the foundation, on the rock, which is Christ, and not in your own timing. So Presbyterianism is, if you're doing it faithfully, is the long road to faithfulness for sure. So we've thought through some of the aspects that I'm going to bring up, but please stand for the reading of God's Word.
We're going to be reading from Ephesians chapter 4 verse 1 through 7, then I'm going to jump over to 11 through 16. I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gifts. Verse 11, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way and to him who is the head and to Christ from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped when each part is working properly makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. This is the word of the Lord. Amen.
You may be seated. So as I already mentioned, we've been planning a church for the last four and a half years in St. Petersburg, Russia. And we have certainly seen a need for every aspect that I'm going to hit on tonight in terms of this passage. In some ways, I would say that the message that your pastor shared this morning with us kind of overlaps with some of Ephesians chapter four here, and I'll touch on that here in a minute. He also alluded to Ephesians chapter two. So it's almost as if the Holy Spirit's at work and bringing a unified message here today. So some of the aspects he hit were that the people of God are unified, they're sanctified, and then the indwelling of God is actually the thing that gives us the power to have unity and to be sanctified. So this is my fourfold movement that I believe we see in Ephesians chapter four. And it for us has been how we see a grace-based, gospel-centered, church planting effort in Russia.
So here's where I see this. The gospel at first, it transforms us in our character and practices. It unites us to the bride of Christ, the universal church, in our confession, our creeds, our sacraments, this aspect of the global body.
That's the second thing. It submits us to a local body under the direction of leaders. That's church polity.
I know that that's probably something you all emphasize in your classes as you do new membership. It does all of this, this is the fourth point, it does all of this for a purpose. So it's not just all these things sort of happening randomly and let's hope they all land in the right place, but it happens for a purpose, a mission to grow up into the fullness of Christ, or as Paul puts it, to mature manhood. So let's start with the first point. For Paul, the first step of church formation is transformation. It's discerning certain spirit filled characteristics that make up the true nature of the body of believers.
And this is going to be my longest point, so I'm going to hang out here and I hope you hear this one. Shockingly, shockingly, it's not doctrine or polity that are at the core. Please note that I'm not saying these things aren't essential, but the indwelling of Christ through the spirit is at the core of Paul's message here, I think. You can have all the doctrine and polity in the world if the people that gather around those documents or those values aren't filled with the Holy Spirit, it will be to no avail.
We'll talk about that a little bit more soon. The reality of what a church is for Paul is a spirit filled people who are breathing out this new spirit filled reality on each other, displayed most prominently in the fruits of the spirit. So let's look at Ephesians chapter 4 verse 1 through 3, where Paul starts in this chapter. I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. Listen here, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.
You hear those key words? Humility, patience, gentleness, love. What passage in the scriptures could we think of? Galatians 5, the fruits of the spirit. He says there, he says in Galatians 5, he says, let us keep in step with the spirit. Here notice what Paul says. It's a little bit different phrasing. Notice what he says. He says, he urges us to walk in a manner worthy of the call.
Are you comfortable with that language? Paul urging us to walk in this manner. Does this match the message of grace? I think it does.
I wanted to bring this up in this section here. I've noticed as of late, again, missionaries get to come back. You're kind of like, you leave the field.
Our first term was about four years or three and a half years. And then you come back and you see kind of where the denomination is going. I've noticed that some PCA churches have gotten so hooked on just preaching sort of a condensed version of justification that they leave out sanctification, or as we might call it, progressive sanctification in our reformed theology.
Progressive sanctification being the ongoing incomplete lifelong maturing process in which a Christian gradually becomes more holy. I actually don't think that your church is missing that. I heard the sermon this morning.
I heard the songs that you're singing. I'm thrilled about that. And so that's a good thing. But an unbalanced dose of one aspect of just preaching sort of a narrow justification that doesn't have sanctification or progressive sanctification in its purview undermines the meaning of both. In a word, it offers you cheap grace, a watered-down cross, and a Christians that can't make sense of a holy God's calling on their lives. If we give in to this temptation, we will cease to be set apart. And no, this isn't a message, or I'm not preaching the law here, but a Spirit-filled transformation that's offered to us, even expected, as Paul puts it, he urges us to do this because of his presence in our midst.
So it's a little bit of a soapbox that I'm on, but I'm going to come back to our passage here. The breathing out of the Spirit is where Paul expects continued transformation, or we might say progressive sanctification, to begin and continue in our walk with Christ. If the Spirit is quenched, if we don't discuss this, if we're not preaching this, if we don't hear this, if we don't study the Word in its fullness, the flame will go out.
You won't be a church. You might have all the trappings and the externals in place, but it starts with the Spirit, God's indwelling, manifested most poignantly. We can see it most in each other when in the fruits of the Spirit. And you don't have a true body without the Spirit. That's a paradox. That's a gospel paradox. You're not truly alive without the Spirit. You can have a body, a human body, you'd be an image-bearer, but without the Spirit of God, you're not fully human. You're not becoming like Christ. The church can have its structure, its sacraments, even some public declarations of the gospel.
The Russian Orthodox Church has those things. Yet for Paul, the first reality of a Christ-exalting church is recognizing that the gospel brings transformation by inviting the living and true God into her midst. It keeps us grounded and reminded that we need to rely on God at the beginning of our life when he justifies us as new believers, but also as we continue to walk with God in our daily lives, in our weekly lives, in our habits, in our relationships, in every facet of church, ministry, God's Spirit at the center of that. This passage also reminds us that faith is not just head knowledge, but actual relational transformation. I heard your pastor mention several times this covenantal aspect of God and his dealing with us, with dealing with his covenant people, and this is at the heart of the church, too.
Growth and dynamism. You should never expect to be in the midst of a holy, all-powerful, all-knowing, covenantal God and not be transformed by that reality. This needs to be at the core of your and my belief, our faith, and our identity. And it's kind of like, I think, one of your elders just prayed up here. He prayed about that we would mortify our sin and that we become continually more and more like Christ and his likeness.
Fundamentally, I think we get this. We get this in life, but sometimes an over emphasis on some aspects of our doctrine gets in the way. Finally, I want to say this part about missing out on this sanctification aspect we see here, and Paul emphasizing the fruits of the Spirit here, is we undermine one of God's creational patterns when he created Adam and Eve. That he gave them, even prior to the fall, he gave Adam and Eve a mission, right? They had something to do. They had to subdue the earth. They had to work at subduing the earth, and that calling only became more complicated. Only more need for the Spirit of God to be with us when the fall happened, and so it's heightened. But when we de-emphasize that, we lose, we start kind of, we kind of are like a hot air balloon that floats away from reality, and we preach a message that seems to have power because it seems like, hey, if you preach the death and resurrection of Christ, that's all we need to hear.
But I think the scriptures actually call us to something deeper and more true, and we know it. Let me give you some examples of this. We should desire that our children don't just learn things in some sort of, you know, I don't know what the term would be, but sort of a lighthearted way. We want our children to excel.
I mean, the Olympics are going on. We see top athletes in every field pursuing their sport, and that takes so much work. But it's the same way whether we're thinking about music. I see this family that does this music ministry in the church. We want our children, if they're a musician, to be the best musician they can be to glorify God. And the same if they're an engineer or a math student or a mom.
We want to glorify God by doing it to the best of our abilities. With our kids, kind of going back to this point, a child, my son who's nearly three, he can identify the makeup of a family. He's got brothers and sisters. He's got a mom and a dad. But he can't really provide any of those things. We can also say that other aspects of being a family would be things like, well, there's love, there's patience, there's sacrifice involved. But kids, my three-year-old, he just totally takes advantage of all those things.
He thinks he's owed all of that, and your kids probably do too. But this is part of what we're doing. We're teaching them not only how to survive, yes, we want him to be potty trained, right? We want him to get dressed.
We want him to eat right. But even more, we want our children to mature. This is Paul's point here. He's going to be talking about this. Remember the end of the passage? To grow into the full maturity, into the fullness of Christ? So when we think about it with our kids, this is just a powerful one.
That's why I'm speaking to it. Think about it. We want to teach them how to share, but that's not really it because that's still kind of a mechanical thing. Hey, this is what you do.
You put your money in the offering. We want them to have a generous heart. Isn't that true?
Isn't that true? We want to teach them not just to be cordial, to say please and thank you. We want them to have gratitude.
That's tough. That's a spirit filled thing. We want them to know how to say no and yes to the right things. Not just no, yes also.
That's self-control, right? How to serve. We don't want to just teach them, look, we go over here and we do this. I know so many churches.
I was driving past the Presbyterian Church by the cemetery here and they had, I think, the YMCA or maybe Habitat for Humanity. That's wonderful, but without a transformation that happens through the Spirit of God indwelling at the deepest level where you have a desire to serve out of your joy for what the Lord has done for you, that's not the deepest reality of that. How to love.
This one's the deepest or the most important, I would say. We would love, it's not just that we say, oh, I love you and we pat each other on the back. This one really goes to all of us. We want to exude Christ's love in our lives and the way that we treat each other and the way that we go about doing things in our churches and in our families, right? In short, what do we want?
We want our kids to grow up and actually we want to grow up. We look at our own lives, we see, man, even when you are 40 like me, you still could see, man, I still need to grow up in Jesus. We talked about the athletes. Recently, we watched maybe two or three nights ago, there was the 200 meter, the 200 meter sprint, men's sprint, and the Americans were favored, but a Botswanian athlete from Africa won that event. And what was so powerful to me in this was he lost his mom, who was really critical in his life, maybe eight months ago, but when they interviewed him afterwards, that trial actually gave him more focus and more drive to pursue this dream.
Obviously, he'd been training, he had all these, you know, he'd been running these sprints for a while, but that just gave him that edge. And I think that we see that in these types of passages, too, that actually it's in our suffering that when we are maturing in Christ, Christ brings trials in our lives and we can become, as James says, we can become completed in that. There's something powerful to that. The same with soldiers.
This is my last analogy in this, but I really want to hit it. You can give a soldier a uniform, you can give them a rank, but that doesn't make them a soldier. It's through training, it's through discipline, and most importantly, I would say it's through experience that someone becomes a seasoned asset for the unit, right? So, too, in the church, let's think about this. As you practice these spirit-filled habits of Christ indwelling in you together as a community, you become transformed by them. So that when the trials come, and trials will come, as Christ promises, you are prepared as a well-trained athlete.
By the way, you also want coaches and family around you and life cheerleaders by your side. I'll talk more on this later. What about in Russia? What's this like for us in Russia? Well, we're not just playing church over there. We're not going over there to just say, look, here's the book of church order.
Now we're going to implement this and this will all work out. Church doesn't work that way. It's messy. It's complicated.
People have to grow up. Cultures have different aspects to them and where they really need the gospel. And then as you do that, you can look at the scriptures behind it, which by the way, are the word of God incarnate. And so they're tied to the spiritual aspect.
But I meet so many Russians that just want to immediately say, well, hey, I'm a man and I've been in the church. Just make me an elder. Make me a ruling elder, a teaching elder, whatever.
And then we're like, no, it doesn't work that way. It's going to take work. We need to understand who you are. We need relationship. We need community.
We need to look at your character. Things like Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3. So this is the first thing that I wanted to emphasize is that Paul says this first step is recognizing God's indwelling as the primary thing, this transformation that we want to see by the Spirit of God in our church. The second thing is the confession, our doctrine and creed. Look with me at Ephesians 4, 4 through 6.
Well, it's actually 4 and 5. There is one body and one spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one God and Father of all who is over all through all and in all. So I think this is Paul actually kind of pointing out that this is, I'm going to tie this to this aspect of the universal church. So this aspect of confession, doctrine and creeds, it's not juxtaposed to transformation. These things come hand in hand.
But one has to come first. So anyone can write a creed. The Soviets had a creed. The French Revolution had a creed.
For a while they could be powerful, but over time their unifying power wanes. Only mature, Spirit-filled people can be truly free, as Paul says. And an attempt to live out a creed with integrity, especially across generations, can only be a work of God. And that's what we see in the church.
That's the amazing aspect of the universal church, which is not a man-made institution, but creeds on their own have little power to maintain unity. We see this happening all across the West. As we undermine our heritage and cultural values, imperfect though they might have been, any and all institutions or founding documents of any Western nation simply will not hold. Human rights and constitutional rights, how is it, enshrined in the Constitution, they won't hold. Benjamin Franklin said this, let me add that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
We see that in Russia, and I could speak more to that. Praise God, this isn't our ultimate hope, but the same is true of Presbyterians. I mean the PCUSA has all of the same creeds as we do, and many of the same confessions, some of them even unaltered. The difference is, do we allow God to be in our midst, to be at the center by the Spirit, and therefore our attentiveness to hear the Word of God and be transformed by it, and respond with faithfulness, just like a covenant, right? The call and the response, we do it in worship every Sunday. Yet, creeds and confessions' right doctrine is still essential.
Paul makes it clear right here, in its right place. Again, we aren't Quakers or humanists, it's not just about being image bearers, as I mentioned about the church up the street, right? But it's embodied, it's practiced, it's lived out by a God in our midst. So notice here from Ephesians 4, 4, and 5, there's a few things that I want to emphasize. It helps you focus on basic orthodoxy, right? One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is overall, through all, and in all. So it opposes false doctrines in faith. You're going to see Paul tie that in as we get to the bottom part of Ephesians 4.
He says it opposes these schemes, these crafty schemes, right? But it also gives you unity. Paul's message here is one of unity. And then the last thing is, look, if you don't have orthodoxy, you're not going to have orthopraxy, right? Your mission is going to get off.
It's like you have mission drift. This is why it's like you have to continually be reforming and following God and listening. But the last thing I want to emphasize is I think Paul is also doing something here very powerful, because just like the Corinthian church, where he has to deal with, look, this is not what the rest of the churches are practicing. You don't sleep with your mother or whatever he says in Ephesians, you know, chapter six, right?
Or chapter five. But here he's emphasizing the universal church. This is really powerful. I've heard several prayers about this already today, but you're a part of a presbytery, the North Carolina presbytery, is that right?
What's it called? What? Catawba Valley presbytery.
Okay. You are also a part of a general assembly. So all these presbyteries that gather together, and then across the globe, look at us, we're in Russia. And when we worship, somehow the Lord by his spirit unites us. And we're presbyterians over there. But unlike the Russian Orthodox, as I shared in my message, who are very sectarian, pravaslavny, right, worshipers, to be saved in the Russian Orthodox Church, you need to be Russian Orthodox.
And guess what? They really like it if you're ethnically Russian. It's really important for them. Yes, as presbyterians, we hope that our doctrine is the most pure, and we have the best form of church polity. But we aren't sectarian, are we?
We try not to be. So let's move to point number three, polity. So Paul's emphasized one, transformation. What makes a church the spirit of God in their midst? Two, he emphasizes the aspect of the creeds or the confession. One Lord, one faith, one Lord, one faith, blah, blah, blah. One baptism. And finally, I think he actually moves to polity here.
So again, this has been helping us on the field as we think, what does it mean to be a reformed presbyterian church worshiping in St. Petersburg, Russia? Right? So polity. A healthy organism needs structure. Families need moms and dads, right? Sports teams need various position players and a coach. Airlines to operate need pilots, stewardesses, right?
Baggage loaders. Without these key people in these different groups, the whole operation falls apart. So two in the church, a healthy local church needs form. Here in Ephesians 4, look with me at verse 7 and 11. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. So grace, gift, again, it's not ethereal. This gift is Christ Jesus, but also the Holy Spirit that once Christ was resurrected and ascended, he gives us the spirit. And then the gifts are given to the church. And there's specific roles, apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers. We go elsewhere as Presbyterians for our Presbyterian plurality of elders, but here it emphasizes these roles.
There's a hierarchy based on these gifts as well. This is why, and I do need to say this in America, this is a big problem. I meet people all the time, even some Presbyterians after COVID. I do church on TV. Again, there's circumstances where there's needs for that.
So don't hear me here being unmerciful to that. But doing church on TV as your primary mode for not because you don't have that need is not the same thing as the gathered body of Christ. Or I meet for Bible study. We don't need a local church. I have my men's Bible study. Eh, doesn't work.
Doesn't quite hit the mark. You're cutting yourself off from the body of Christ and therefore all the means of grace, the word, the sacraments, corporate prayer, fellowship, community, all these things. More importantly though, look at this passage. It says, Paul urges us to what?
You remember? To walk in a manner worthy of your call. Everything that flows out of that is part of walking in that manner. Does that make sense? So as we see in the next portion, which is going to be my fourth point, these are God-ordained roles and they're there precisely for helping us walk in that manner.
He's going to actually hit on that here in a second. So we've looked at how God transforms us by the Spirit, unites us to the bride of Christ, to the universal church, through our creed, our confession, and the sacraments. He says one baptism there. And then he submits us to a local body under the direction of the church. So you see those roles there and you can go elsewhere in Scripture to find how elders are supposed to work like Titus 1, 1 Timothy 3. So fourth and finally, it does, he does all of this for a purpose. Paul has a purpose.
The epistles are not just floating out there. They have a purpose and that purpose is a mission. What's the mission? Well, the Scriptures tell us to grow up into the fullness of Christ. It's something that we should personally be doing, but it's also something that we do communally as a church, into mature manhood, as Paul puts it. So let's look at the last section of the passage that I'm preaching.
And I'll close us out here in a little bit in a different passage in Ephesians. But Ephesians 4, 12b through 16, to equip the saints, actually it's all of 12, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry for building up the body of Christ. So these are apostles, they're giving gifts by the Spirit, right?
There's that middle passage I cut out is Christ's ascension and he gives gifts to men. There's these roles that are given with those gifts so that you have a local church to equip the saints for the work of the ministry for the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain the unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, first notice all saints, all saints are equipped for the work of the ministry, right? All believers in the local church are to be equipped to build up the body of Christ. So this is, I mentioned it earlier in passing, the priesthood of all believers.
That's a reformed doctrine. We all participate in the mission and the work of Christ. We can't just come to church and just say, well this is my, this is the only thing I do.
I sit in the pew and I hear a sermon and then I go home. No, we all participate in the work and this is part of a minister's job. Pastors, elders, deacons, this is the role that we play. We equip the saints for the work of the ministry.
Our aim is to equip the saints to build up the body of Christ until we attain unity of the faith. So think about it in your family. If you only, if you didn't see each other at all and you only came together for dinner, right, you really wouldn't have a lot of unity. You'd be doing a lot of solo things and you could still be a family.
You'd have the trappings of family. But to have real relationship where you sharpen each other, a husband and wife, children, brothers and sisters, you have to be together in different types of settings. That's really important. It's the same in the body of Christ. So gathering and doing life together is not optional.
And this is a lifelong endeavor, right? Again, maturity, we talked about it, that growth aspect. It's to the end of your days. You should never say, well, I've arrived to the full measure and stature of the fullness of Christ.
That shouldn't come out of your mouth, no matter what your age is or what your status is or what your role is. So that's part of why pastors, if they call you, if they're working with you, this is what we see in Russia is we want to be ministering to people where they're really at. So that's church visitations for us.
That's knowing what's really going on in people's lives. Sometimes it is church discipline, but still the desire, the purpose of discipline, church discipline is actually restoration. It's God wants you to follow him and he's a holy God and he loves you and he gave his life for you and it was a costly life. So let me keep going so I can bring us to a close. He says here, he ends it up in verses 14 through 16.
I'll read just a little bit of it. So that you're not tossed to and fro by waves, carried away by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness or deceitful schemes. And then he says, rather speaking the truth in love. So how do we do this?
How do we do this equipping? We speak the truth. We don't leave the truth out, but we do it in love. Well, if you don't embody, if you don't practice showing that you care, it's like telling your wife you love her, but you never actually with her or around her or do anything for her. That doesn't count.
That's not love. So you got to live these things out and then you can speak the truth and then that becomes powerful. So that's a tool in the toolbox for those that are called to minister, to equip the church. So additionally, this section reminds us that every local believer has a part to play. So in our church in Russia, we try to make sure that we have opportunities for everybody to grow. So we get a lot of new believers that come from no backgrounds. And when they become, they come to faith and in Christ, they're like, hey, I want to serve, but they're still not grown up in faith.
They could be an adult, but they're not grown. And they'll say, hey, in Russia, you have to take off your big fur coats or your coats when you come in and you got these muddy boots. So you take off your boots before you come into the worship center because we don't want dirt everywhere. And so we take all those things off and for people that are new believers, we say, hey, can you help greet people and hang the coats up? And they'll come and they'll do that for a matter of time. And they'll be so pumped up that they're serving the Lord in some small way. And even though they're an adult, they've just come to faith. And this is a huge way for them to see, yeah, God's given me some gifts. And then now over time, over a series of years, we might start exploring how do you use other gifts or how do we see other gifts in you and how can you use those to serve the body of Christ? So there should be reverberations all throughout a lively body of Christ where people are serving each other. And you want your leadership to be thinking about what are those elements we see in people and how can we ask them and call them into some local ministry? It could be people in the pew. It could be children. It could be something. And so that's something we're trying to practice in Russia.
Let me see. So let me end where Paul begins. So it could sound like I'm calling you to do a lot of things. But he says build the ending part of that whole scripture passages so that the whole body is built up in love and built up in love. And that's really Paul's message throughout. So he begins in Ephesians chapter 1 and he says that God predestined and adopted us to himself according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved.
Again, I mean it's so powerful. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace. And then he goes into chapter 3. So again, Paul doesn't have any chapters here. Remember the chapters breaks are not inspired.
They're helpful sometimes but not inspired. This is just one message. So when we read it, we've got to understand it in its wholeness. He says right before a passage, for this reason I bow my knees before the father from whom every family in heaven and earth is named that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit.
See that pesky spirit there? In your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith that you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the Saints. What is the breath and the length and the height and the depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with the fullness of God. See that the power and transformation that I'm talking about here comes from being strengthened with the Holy Spirit in your inner being, Christ dwelling in your hearts through faith, rooted and grounded in love so that you might comprehend the fullness of Christ's life giving on your behalf. And when you do that, suddenly you're opened up to just continue to avail yourself or to endure hardship as we see so many of the faithful Russian people in Russia that are under even more trying circumstances than we sometimes feel. The oppressive nature there, the inability to make any money if you choose not to be corrupt, the cost of following Jesus and that's so powerful for Sarah and I as we minister there.
And this is a knockout kind of love, right? It's the only kind of love that comes from outside of you that can indwell you and as you dwell on by faith that can allow you to grow up into maturity. And that allows us to be freed and transformed as a new kind of people in Harrisburg, right?
In St. Petersburg. Allows us to lay down our divisive kingdoms and unify around creeds, not just taking vows that are meaningless to us but real vows in which we act on those vows and allows us to be free from being loners and actually join a local church. Yes, Bible studies are great but being a part of a local body of Christ and therefore allows you to have local ministers that are equipped by God or called by God through the Holy Spirit to actually minister to you and that is a grace. It's a grace and even your pastors and elders have people, they do it with each other but they also have people in their lives that do it with them. So praise be to the living God our Lord Jesus Christ for his love to us and that he gave us his word.
So let me close with that. Y'all pray at the end? Okay I'll pray.
I got the nod. Father God we come before you. We thank you where two or three gather in your name. You're here in the midst of us but we pray that your word would transform our hearts now. I thank you for this church, for their heart for you, their passion for you, their vibrancy Lord and Lord I just pray you'd bless them abundantly. We pray all these things in Christ's name. Amen.
