The Foundation for Unity

It comes from hearts who have been acquainted with our own sin. Mm-hmm. who have been acquainted with your gospel. Um who live in this fallen world and need you. Uh for our daily bread.

for our spiritual sustenance, for our relational hope. And so we come to ask you to meet with us this morning. to meet with us in power and in majesty. to meet with us in clarity and purpose. To meet with us where we are, to take us where we can't go by ourselves.

And to that end, we appeal to you and we ask that you would strengthen us. Open your word to our hearts. Enlighten our minds. Give us clarity as we come to it. Uh Give us relief where we need it.

Give us a prod where we need it. Give us hope where we need it. Grace for all things, Lord. as a frail people We proclaim that you are strong. And as a sinful people, we proclaim that you are holy.

So bring us, Lord, a greater measure of holiness and a greater measure of strength today in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. You may be seated. If you are a guest, my name is Brian.

I'm the lead pastor here. We've been studying the book of Ephesians, so you can get out your Bibles and turn there. I want to thank Aaron Dodds, our pastor of Student Ministries, for doing a great job. Last week in Exodus, I was driving back from teaching all week up in Oregon, and Jennifer and I were in the car joining you. It's amazing where you can join from these days.

But I wasn't watching. I was watching the road. occasional glance down. contrary to what the Oregon Police Department would have liked. It was good to be with you by distance that way.

Before I get into our time together, I want to draw your attention to something in the back of the. I'm getting a little reverb, I think. In the back of the sanctuary back here.

So you can all look back and you can stare at Jeff Langworthy and just behind his head. is a cross. You see, that's a new thing in here that we have. I was inspired from something on my sabbatical where I was in a prayer chapel in California, beautiful prayer chapel. And they had a cross where people were sticking various prayer requests, and you could go and read them and pray over them.

And it was just a beautiful setting, it was a wonderful concept in a number of ways. And I came back and I thought, I thought, we gotta get us one of them. And so I was talking with Brad about it, and we thought, who could do that and do that well? And I'm going to embarrass him right now, but raise your hand. You got to do it.

Raise your hand. Glenn Miller, right there.

Okay, so Glenn. built that cross and did a wonderful job. And I looked at it. That's about as much work as I did. But I talked with Glenn through it a bit, but he did a fantastic job building that.

And I'm really thankful.

So thank you, Glenn, for doing that. That'll be back there. And what the intent of that is.

So, you know, there's a basket on the front on the little shelf that's there that he built on that. And there's a little card that says prayer and praise on one side. And the other side has Colossians 4:2. Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful. in it with thanksgiving.

Um Sometimes we need in our lives just a tactile reminder. of the faithfulness of God. And what that's there for is for you to write down prayer requests, fold them up, stuff. There's all kinds of slats on there. You can stuff them in.

That's what that's designed for. And then sometimes it takes some time. Grab them off, pray over them, and stuff them back in. And you carry the burdens of the saints, and you share your burdens with the saints. And come up, we're open Tuesday.

Our office is open Tuesday through Friday, 9 to 5. You're welcome to come in anytime back here and pray. We would love to have you do that. It made me think of something that I wanted to share with you. There was an old hymn written in 1872 by a woman in Scotland who, her and her sister, she died very young, her and her sister.

were quite poor. And what little they did have, they gave away. Yeah. kind of lived in poverty, given away a bunch of stuff. Her her nickname around town was the Sunbeam.

Her name was Elizabeth Cliffain, and she wrote a five stanza poem. That got turned into a hymn and popularized by the great hymn writer and song singer and choral leader Ira Sankey. But this hymn sort of summarizes Why I wanted that back here. All right?

So beneath the cross of Jesus. You ever heard that hymn? Beneath the cross of Jesus? Listen to these stanzas. There's only three.

If you open a hymn book somewhere, you'll only see three of them. But there were five stanzas when she originally wrote it, and I'm going to read you all five. Beneath the cross of Jesus, I fain, fain is an old word for I gladly or happily, would take my stand. The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary You feel weary? Like, get back there, write something down so people can bear your weariness.

A home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way, from the burning of the noontide heat and the burden of the day. O safe and happy shelter, O refuge tried and sweet, O trysting place where heaven's love and heaven's justice meet. As to the holy patriarch, that wondrous dream was given, so is my Savior by the cross a ladder up to heaven. This is rich in biblical theology. In one stanza, she puts.

propitiation and Jacob's ladder together. It's beautiful. There lies beneath its shadow, but on the farther side, the darkness of an awful grave that gaps both deep and wide. And there between us stands the cross two arms outstretched to save like a watchman set to guard the way. from that eternal grave.

Upon that cross of Jesus, mine eye at times can see the very dying form of one. who suffered there for me and from my smitten heart with tears Two wonders I confess, the wonder of his glorious love, and my own worthlessness. I take, O cross, thy shadow from my abiding place. I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of his face. Content to let the world go by, to know no gain nor loss, my sinful self, my only shame, my glory, all the cross.

So Do you feel weighed down some week? Get up here and spend a few hours sitting back there. Just praying and laying your burdens before the Lord. That's the intent of that prayer cross. And so I'm excited to have that back there.

And thank you again, Glenn, for using your craftsmanship, the bezelile of lifeline. Basiliel was a craftsman who helped build the tabernacle.

Okay. All right, take your Bibles, turn to Ephesians 4. We're going to get back into Ephesians. And thanks again to Aaron for a great message last week. I really did appreciate that reflection on gospel in light of Exodus.

I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, one of my favorite movies, A River Runs Through It. It's a incredibly moving film. About Uh family relationships. Um about their complexity. About generations and what they learn from their father.

It's a big father-son kind of movie, but it's an emotional movie. And I've probably gone on YouTube somewhere between 200 and 2,000 times, I'll bet, and watched the last scene of that, where there's an old man, Tying flies, fly fishing out in a river. And there is a monologue with Robert Redford reading over it. And it is it's one of the most gripping monologues you'll ever hear read, especially if you watch the whole film and you see the characters evolve.

So there's two sons. They're the sons of a pastor. And the actor Tom Scarrett plays the pastor. And he's a hard-nosed guy. He's an academician.

He wants his boys to sort of fly right, and he holds the rules, and he has a kind of rigidity to him, and yet he invests in them. And the place he invests in them is in fly fishing. And he takes them out to the river from the time they're young boys. And the two boys, in some ways, couldn't be more different: Norman and Paul. Paul, played by my lookalike, Brad Pitt.

And um he He dresses up as me every Halloween. Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt becomes like this sort of uh He's a wild child, right? Norman is straight-laced and Norman is the one who sort of is narrating at different points parts of the movie. He's the old man at the end whose time flies. And his brother ends up dead, Paul, but they've gone different ways and so forth.

And at the end of the movie, After life has taken all its twists and turns, he's there because, and the narrator, as the narration goes, kind of exposes this. That in the disparate nature of their lives, in the different paths that they took, in the trouble, tumult, challenges, tribulations, and everything that they could have never as children predicted. The theme is a river runs through it, which is a way of saying there's this common place that they gather, this common thing that runs as a core through the experience of all their lives and forms this sort of grand sweeping metaphor that keeps them connected. When we look at this text this morning, this text is kind of like the river that runs through it for the church. It's sort of this thing that despite where you are and despite where life might take you, there's something that runs through it.

And that thing is common to you and it's common to me and it's common to all who claim the name of Christ. And not only is it common, but it's core, which is a way of saying it's not just shared, but it actually is foundational and that from which everything really in our lives kind of springs corporately and certainly individually. And so to that end, I want to look at the text with you, and we'll pick up in chapter 4, verse... One So we're going to look at 4-6, but I want to look in verses 1-3 to begin with, and then we'll get into 4-6. I, therefore, a prisoner.

For the Lord. Urge you. to walk in a manner worthy of the calling. to which you've been called. With all humility, gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.

Eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. And two weeks ago, we looked at this, and we saw, especially in verse 2, a kind of formula or recipe that dispositionally contributes collectively to unity. And I mentioned to you then. that the next section, 4-6, is the foundation from which that springs.

So let's read through verse 4 through 6, and you're gonna see a sevenfold repetition of the word one. That's obviously intentional. You're going to see this sevenfold attribution of one. It reads: There is one body. And one spirit, just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all. Through all and in all.

Now this is the easiest sheet you've ever filled out in your whole life. There's seven ones. We don't even have to make up words for points here, right?

So, what we're going to do is think about the seven aspects of the Foundation for Unity. You already know what they are, but I want to think about each of them individually for a bit. And see how they kind of contribute to this sort of galvanizing. Oneness, this galvanizing oneness.

So, and really, when I speak about that, I'm speaking about it in a couple of ways. The first, I already said. which is that these seven aspects here. form a kind of foundation from which My behavior and your behavior from which. How I do what I do, and how you do what you do, and why you do what you do, and why I do what I do spring out.

So there's this foundation. That's the first thing that we want to note about these seven aspects. But there's also something else we need to note. And that is that in a world where it's really easy Really easy. to lose your sense of self.

Where it's really tempting to lose your identity with the winds of anxiety and depression and sadness and relational tensions and global events and demands and expectations and disappointments and all the things that sort of. Cry out for not just our attention, but beyond even attention, like almost like a wholesale focus. Uh These seven are intended to say if you're going to keep your identity and not lose it, you're going to have to find it within the church. And then within Christ. Because the only way you have a church is just the collection of people in Christ.

So what what really these things give us is A uh a a way or almost a non-physical, if I can say it that way, non-spatial. place to go. And that is the community. It's a place for us to recenter ourselves and to gather ourselves together within what God is doing so that we can then reestablish our own sense of identity. Trying to tie ourselves off to something that's like a cattail in the wind that is not going to work as an anchor for the soul.

So, to that end, let's just begin, and we're going to think about each one of these and just work our way through it.

So, we begin, and I say here, one church. Your text is one body, right? But it's used metaphorically here for the idea of the church.

So, let's just think about something theologically for a second. When we use the word church in the Bible, we can use it in one of these four ways, and they're sort of interrelated in different ways.

So, we can talk about a local church. That's what lifelong community. is a local Church.

So we are, and by local it means that we're contained to a geography in one very real sense, which is an interesting thing in and of itself in a day of technology, and it begs a lot of questions about whether it is intended to be the nature of the church to be here and have a video campus in Barrow, Alaska, or in Honolulu, Hawaii, and then to have another video campus. There's a lot of questions that come about what it means actually for the church to be the church in contexts like that. But what we know very clearly from Scripture is that it was local, and it's by local, I mean fully incarnational. I mean local in the sense of we have life together as embodied souls.

So it's local, but it's also universal in a different way, and it's used that way differently.

So it's universal in the sense that it encompasses everyone everywhere who is a believer.

Now they have local expressions, but there are people worshiping today in Barrow, Alaska and in Honolulu, Hawaii, and they are part of the church. That doesn't mean they're part of this local church, but they're part of the church. And then we speak about the church visible and the church invisible.

Now the church visible is The church, as we look at it, so like right now, most of you in here, right? We have some guests as we do each week, but most of you in here come on some basis of regularity. If you were asked, what is your church or where is your church? you would likely say here at lifeline community. And so in that way, this.

entity acts as a kind of visible representation. Of the church in the community. If the if we're talking to government officials locally in West Jordan and Lifeline community comes up, they will point to this address and they'll identify it in some visible way with a visible expression of its ministries and so forth. And yet, there's an invisibility within the visibility. And here's the invisibility is.

How many people sitting right here? are authentic believers in Christ.

Well, the answer at one level is I don't know. I remember planting the church. And the home office for the Evangelical Free Church of America in Minneapolis would write to me and they would want me to give stats for them. And which is a funny thing. Stats are funny in church.

And they would say: What was your conversion growth rate? Over the last six months. And that was their way of saying how many people, if your church had 100 people and now it has 125 people, how many of those people were new converts? And I always wanted to write back. And it wasn't even tongue-in-cheek.

I honestly wanted to write back. How on earth would I know? Are you kidding me? I have no idea. If by that you mean how many people profess or confess or like that, we can talk about that.

But If you mean how many people... are committed to Christ. For no other reason than the joy of relationship with God and the forgiveness of their own sins, and they're not co-opting Him. I have no idea. I have no idea.

I think if you had asked a Puritan what was their conversion growth rate, they would have looked at you like you had nine heads. They just would, I don't know. They would have said, I don't even know if I'm converted yet. Like that's the way they thought.

So the point is this. The church is the church local. It's the church universal. It's the church visible. And it's the church invisible.

And in the text, we'll use it in all these different ways.

Now, in this passage, it's using it primarily as the church universal. It's the idea of there is one body. Body. Within which the spiritual blessings of Ephesians 1:4 through 14 that were enumerated for us. There's one Body in which Jew and Gentile, to go back to chapter two.

There's one body that contains what he talks about as the mystery in chapter 4. Three, there's this one church. That you come into, and this one church which has local expressions that have little divergences of geography and secondary and third-level commitments and philosophies of ministry and all these types of things, they have those, and those are not all bad.

Some of those are very helpful, but there is one body.

So, while we gather as a local body with those unique expressions, we are at one with everyone who authentically confesses, not just verbally confesses, but authentically confesses, meaning they orient their life around the Lordship of Jesus Christ and Him alone, and no matter where they are and no matter when they lived. We are at one with them.

So that Paul can say in 1 Corinthians 12:13, for in one spirit we were all baptized into one spirit. body. Jews are Greeks, slaves are free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.

So, in a very real sense, understand: there is only one true. Church. There is only one. It's not lifeline community. It's not Whatever church down the street, it's not some type of organizational structure with concrete leadership that's all within a particular organization.

But there's one true church, and it is all those who have that authentic confession. And have identified themselves, and you're a part of that. You're a part of that.

Now, that means some things that are going to flow out in oneness further in this text. The text reads, There is one body. and one spirit. One Spirit.

Now this is a reference to the Holy Spirit. It's not a reference to yay, sis, boom, ba. We all got team spirit. You got the same team spirit and I got the same team spirit. It's not that.

It's a reference to the idea that there's one Holy Spirit who is galvanizing and bringing together this one body.

Now that's really important to note. Because that means that I can trust that God is at work in contexts where I'm not. I can trust that God is at work in ways that I might not be gifted to work. I can trust that God's at work in ways that I might not even understand. Why things are going that particular way.

It means that I can trust because the Spirit of God is the one.

Now, that gives me some foundational pieces for understanding the church itself and garnering a greater appreciation for the church. What I want to do is, you have got your Bible. Hopefully, if you don't, there are ones there in front of you on the rack. Make sure you've got it, because I want you to turn to a couple of texts with me. I just want to journey through this letter real quick and remind you of the Spirit in this letter, because this is a building point.

When he says one spirit, we should know what the Spirit's done so far, as identified by Paul in this letter to the Ephesians.

So go back to 1:13. Chapter 1, verse 13, and we read. In him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed. With the promised Holy Spirit, who's the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of His glory. You received The spirit That indwells, guarantees your inheritance, gives you security, and that security comes by a seal, an identifier, a mark that He has placed upon you.

Now, that means that He's placed that mark upon every authentic believer.

So that is something universal to all believers. Verse 17 of the same chapter: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. That means that you can go and teach people about the Lord, and you don't have to beat them over the head with a club, and you don't have to force feed them. And if you feel like you're doing that, you probably should stop because the Spirit is the one who ultimately will open the eyes and hearts of people. That is the one revealer, and it's not you.

There's one revealer, and it's not me, it's the Spirit. For through him we both have access. in one spirit. to the Father. I don't have a more privileged access than you, and you don't have a more privileged access than your neighbor.

We all have an access through the Father. Why?

Well, because it's through the same Spirit. And the Spirit isn't conditioned by us.

So it's all through the Spirit. Verse 20. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. This is what the church is. That is, the Spirit is the temple builder.

The Spirit is the one who's building you as a stone. And you as a stone, and you as a stone, and you as a stone, and building us into this great temple. Go to chapter 3, verse 4. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it's now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets. By The Spirit.

Again, doubling up on the Spirit as a revealer, but this time that the Spirit is working through human agents. As one who reveals, not just as sort of a maverick entity, in a sense, out here through some type of personal impression. but actually through people and conduits. And then 3.16, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being. And that was the foundational beginning of Paul's prayer.

That they would have this love, remember that prayer? For him that gives birth to a love for one another, and that the ground of that was going to be the inner working of the spirit that would strengthen them in their weakness to that end of perseverant love.

So when he says, Now, after all of those, he says, You've got one body and one spirit. It's not by accident, by the way, that he moves from church immediately to spirit because the spirit's the one who's building this thing, right? According to chapter 2, verse 20. And so he moves right into the spirit, and he has all this as the background of what the spirit has done: sealing, giving security, revealing temple building, making access, strengthening. And that you have that, and so does everyone within the universal church.

has that.

So one of the things that a text like this is supposed to do is supposed to make someone like me. Who, by my own confession before you right now, and you can absolve me and be my priest just for a moment, that I struggle sometimes at dismay over what I see in the evangelical church. And there's an appropriateness to that to some degree, where I have a platform and a voice to speak into some of that. But there's also a part where I have to step back and say, it's the Lord's church. I have to step back and say, now wait a minute, there's one Spirit.

And leave the work of the Spirit to one who's a lot better at doing it, and that is the Spirit.

So it's one thing to be responsible, it's another to be anxious over it. And so we have to recognize we have this one spirit. He's brought us into one body. We celebrate this oneness and commonality. And then we read: just as you were called, to the one Hope.

that belongs. Two to your Call.

Now this isn't the first time that hope has been connected to call.

Okay. We just read 117. The next verse after it will be helpful.

So 117 again. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation and the knowledge of Him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened. What's the Spirit doing? Enlightening you. that you may know what is the Hope to which he's called you.

What are the riches of his glorious inheritance of the saints? Why is that central? What is the hope? He brings us to that. Because Hope has this way of Narrativizing.

narrativizing our lives. It has a way of placing us properly. within a story. If you've lost all hope It's almost always Almost always because you've become someone who is looking down. Assessing where you're at, and you feel unmoored and disconnected.

From life. You feel without hope. The answer for you Is to think through a process of what it means for you to more, to tie yourself off to something. It's another way of saying to narrativize your life and to anchor yourself. To a hope.

Now, hope can be used in two ways in your Bible: objectively or subjectively. That is, there is a hope. To which you've been called. Colossians One Verse 5 says, the hope laid up for you in heaven. That's the object of hope.

We have one hope in that sense: that is, that everybody who's a believer is going to the same place. place. Everybody who's a believer will experience what it means to live eternally in bliss With the Lord. Everybody who's a believer will experience what it is to have heaven one day literally brought to earth and have a reconstituted civilization of which you're a part, the new earth. Everyone who's a believer will experience that.

And it's not as though there'll be these gradations. and classes and levels and things like this. And I've heard some of this taught in different theologies, but there's no indication that somehow you're going to make it by the skin of your teeth and you're going to be the slum lord of heaven.

Alright? It doesn't work that way.

Okay. You're in heaven. You get the fullness of the present.

So we have objectively that hope. But here's what happens, or shall I say, what is supposed to happen in our lives. That. That is supposed to be so Palpable.

So real. That it is supposed to reach back into your morless. Anchorless. Devoid Fallen apart self. and give you a subjective hope as you gaze at it.

The objective is to lead to the subjective. Let me read you something from a wonderful book that I read called Faithfully Present by Adam Ramsey. He quotes the philosopher Peter Kraft. And Peter says this.

Now suppose Both death and hell were utterly defeated. Can you imagine that? Suppose the fight was fixed. Suppose God took you on a crystal ball trip into your future, and you saw with indubitable certainty that despite everything, Your sin, your smallness, your stupidity. You could have, free for the asking, your whole crazy heart's deepest desire: heaven and eternal joy.

Would you not return From that kind of journey, would you not return fearless and singing? What can earth do to you if you are guaranteed heaven? to fear the worst earthly loss. would be like a millionaire. Fearing the loss of a penny, less a scratch on a penny.

Adam Ramsey, a page earlier, said, Our citizenship in heaven makes the worst times in this world livable and the best times in this world livable. because our hope is not ultimately tied to anything in this present world. Hope Is intended to be the thing that secures you and grounds your identity. In the story. That narrativizes you in the struggle and in the various seasons, and he has given you one hope, and that one hope is both objective and subjective.

It is. that thing waiting for you. but it also is that thing that is supposed to then anchor the actual real existential space and time feelings you have when you are tempted to despair When you are tempted to be discouraged, When you are tempted toward disappointment.

So when you feel the temptation. Place yourself in a story. Anchor yourself. Work through a process in your mind. Of turning yourself from navel gazing that always will leave you anchorless and lose your balance.

And look get your eyes up, get your eyes out, and think. Ponder, turn over. The hope that is before you. Right? Let that then begin to place This impending difficulty In a larger story, and now you begin to work from there at what you're to do.

in the given circumstance. But if you're only looking down. If you're only seeing what's in the immediate. You literally will be, as the scripture says, tossed to and fro. You will be.

So You have one body, one spirit, and one. Hope.

Now, one of the things that the text does is it sort of works through the Trinity, right? You got one body and we have one spirit. Oh, okay, the third member of the Trinity. One hope, and now we get one Lord. And that is a reference, of course.

to Jesus himself. One Lord.

Now I want to put up a famous A verse for you. It's the final verse in what's often called the Romans Road. You walk the Romans' road. There's none righteous, no, not one. Romans 3:10.

Mm-hmm. you're reminded that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In Romans 3.23. You're reminded that God, while you were a sinner, commended and gave you His love in Christ. Romans 5.8.

You're reminded that the wages of your sin is death, but there's good news, the gift of God is eternal life, in Romans 6.23. And then you get to that last brick, and it's right here. Romans 10, 9, including verse 10, but I want us to think about 9. Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, You'll be saved.

Now I mentioned earlier. That The visible church. may be filled with people who confess. The invisible church is filled with people who possess. That is, people who, in their confession, have not just made a commitment.

They actually believe what they've committed to, but sometimes people commit to things they don't believe. And this is why we have to ask ourselves important, poignant questions about the nature and the quality of our belief. Here, the confession assumes belief, and that's why the very next phrase is in belief in your heart that God raised him from the dead.

So the idea is that you have embraced Christ. And you have appropriated faith to your life, and now in that confession, you've said, Jesus. is Lord. Jesus is Lord.

Now, I want to give you a simple illustration that I use teaching when I teach a class on the gospel and its implications for life and ministry. And I talk about the two errors we make oftentimes in evangelical. churches when it comes to conversion. When it comes to gospel and even how we talk about it, the first is that we make the error of what could be called decisionism. And so if I were to take my friend George up front here and I were to say, George, I'd like you to come over to my house and we're going to hang out and I want you to fellowship with me for a little bit.

And George comes over and I meet George at the door. And George and I have a wonderful conversation at the doorstep. We talk for about 30 minutes at the door. He kind of looks, I'm like, man, what's going on here? And I finish and I say, George, it's been so great to be with you.

Thanks for coming over to the house today. Take care. And I shut the door and he goes on. Mm-hmm. Now That wasn't the intent.

The intent of the invitation was to come into the living room. into fellowship with me. In this illustration, the door represents the forgiveness of sins. And what happens to us sometimes is we talk about the gospel in such a way that we're inviting people to come just to the door. And that's it.

Because what we're concerned about is to make sure that they get their ticket. Print it up.

so that somehow they can cash it in one day and go to heaven.

Okay. But what happens in that is I invite George, so I say, George, pray this little prayer after me, and I give George a little package thing, and then I tell him afterwards, now it's good news, welcome to the family of God.

Now, I don't know what George meant in his heart when he prayed. I don't know if he did it because he wanted to please me. I don't know if he did it because he wanted to go tell his parents how wonderful it is. I have no idea why he did it, but darn it all, he did it. And so I get to come back and I get to report up to the main office.

That one. Conversion growth rate. George. Right? That's called decisionism.

The gospel becomes the prayer or the package. Rather than a door through which you come into what?

Well, into what Jesus talked about. Every time Jesus preached the gospel, you can see the phrase throughout the gospels, he proclaimed the good news, the gospel, the uwangelion, of God. The kingdom. Which was a way of saying, I'm Lord. I'm the king.

I'm the boss, and I'd like you to come and lay down everything and start living according to my rules, my standards, and my character. And so The invitation is to come through the door, but there's a second error and the second error is moralism.

Now imagine I say to George, George, I'd like you to come over today to my house.

So I'm sitting in my living room, and all of a sudden I look over and I see my window and the side of the dining room opens, and there is George climbing through the window. And I said, George, what? I mean, I own two guns for a reason. Right? George comes through, that's not how you come into my house.

You come through the door, the forgiveness of sins, into the kingdom, but the invitation is to come into the kingdom. Moralism tries to get into the kingdom, but without coming through the door. It tries to come in and say, okay, we'll live under you, Jesus.

Sort of. But it'll be done on my terms in my way, and I'll I'll carve my own and come through the window. But the Lord has told you how to come. And part of lordship is listening to him. Part of lordship is accepting the fact that he gave his life for you.

Part of lordship is embracing the fact that the forgiveness of sins only comes in and through Jesus. But the invitation is not just to get your sins free, it is so that you could serve, so that you could be set apart, so that you could have life under a Lord. For eternity.

So when we say there is one Lord, It is yes, that it's exclusively through Jesus, but it is also that there is only one boss. who ultimately calls all the shots. And that same boss is yours and mine.

Now, that doesn't negate the fact that he has given you civil authority. If the cops pull you over, don't say, I don't need a ticket, Jesus is Lord. If you do, I hope they give you double. You're just being sassy now. It doesn't mean that there's no ecclesiastical authority it's instituted by.

It doesn't mean there's no domestic authority. Kids, you can't look up and say, Dad, you can't ground me. Jesus is Lord.

No, you have realms and spheres that God chooses to work through. But I will tell you something. Little little side note. Jesus is Lord does mean you can't be a busybody. Jesus is Lord does mean you can't be a meddler.

And Jesus is Lord does mean that you need to make sure that you're under his lordship. And you're actually living you. Siloed, isolated. Not, Lord, but what about? No, no, you.

Under his lordship, because you have one Lord, one master, and it's not you. It's him. One body, one spirit, just as you are called, to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith. One Faith. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here.

But what I want you to see is Here, I don't think The word faith, similar to the word hope, can sort of have an objective-subjective kind of sense. And I don't think here it's objective in the sense that it's one body of doctrine, sort of like the faith once for all delivered to the saints. There is that in Scripture that is important. But I think, piggybacking on the idea of one Lord, he's making the point that as you come to him, you come the same way everybody comes. You come in a common vein.

You come in a common vein. Now If you haven't lived real well up till this point, That's really good news for you. That's really good news. If you have lived really well, that's really good news too, because you haven't lived near as well as your ego is telling you. And so you come.

By means of one. Faith. One faith. I'm going to give you another hymn. And I'll put the lyrics up here, but this is just verse 2 and 3.

From Rock of Ages. Rock of Ages. This is the version before Deaf Leopard. Rock of ages, all right? Verse 2 and 3.

Not the labor of my hands can fulfill thy law's demands. Could my zeal, no respite, no? Could my tears forever flow? All Four. Sin could not atone.

Thou must save, thou alone. It's verse 3, I want you to key on. Nothing in my hand I bring. This is what real faith is. Nothing in no good works.

Nothing in my hand I bring. Simply to thy cross I cling, naked, come to thee for dress. Helpless, look to thee for grace. Foul. I to thy fountain Fly, wash me, Saviour.

Or I'd die. You have one faith. One faith. So the message isn't complicated. When you ask somebody If you were to stand before God, And he were to ask you, How would you spend, or why would you spend eternity?

Should I let you spend eternity with me? If God were to ask you that. And if you were to say anything other than I have trusted in what Jesus Christ did for me upon that cross, and I want him to be Lord of my life. If you've got you involved in that equation anywhere. Then it is Amiss.

on the gospel. You come by faith. Before him and this one faith is common to all and you anchor on it. You base your life on it.

So, one other side note I would say about that is. It's not just about coming Christ, it's this, when you feel like you're spinning your wheels. When you feel like you're doing the wrong thing. When you feel like a sin keeps laying hold of you and you can't seem to get out of its clutches. Yeah.

Don't think in terms first of what you need to do. Think in terms of what you are believing. That is wrong and an error. Because your actions are always following your beliefs. Always.

You're always acting. From a particular structure of belief.

So go back into your beliefs. and anchor yourself. to what it means to be rightly oriented in faith. to your Lord. There is one Baptism.

One baptism.

Now let me ask you a question. What does the word baptize mean? Mean. What does the word baptize mean? I've heard people say, well, it means to immerse.

No, it doesn't mean to immerse. Immersion is a signification. The word baptize means to identify.

Okay, so in the ancient world, they might take a cloth and they might baptize it in a dye, they would immerse it in a dye, and then taken up, it would have the color of that dye as a result of immersion. But the word baptized means to identify with.

Now, that's the way at its core it's used in your Bible.

So, and I'll illustrate it, reading to you a verse. This is Mark 10, 38. Just listen. Jesus said to them, you do not know what you're asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or to be baptized with the baptism with which I'm baptized?

Well, this is long after this is after his baptism. What's he getting at? He's talking about suffering here. But he's using baptism as a word because baptism is a placeholder for identify with. Can you identify with my sufferings?

You're going to have to identify with my sufferings. You're going to have to identify with my persecutions. Can you identify with my persecutions? That's his question.

So here you see kind of the rudimentary, basic, abstract definition. of baptize or baptism needs to identify with now. There are two primary ways that baptism happens in our lives that show up in the text of Scripture.

So there are two primary ways. The first is called spirit baptism.

So baptism of or baptism by the Holy Spirit. And let's be clear about this biblically and doctrinally. Baptism. Of or by is not a kind of secondary, we don't have anything in the text that would indicate that it's a secondary notion. The only place you have that is a transition time in Acts where you have people who were baptized in John's baptism.

But didn't have the fullness of the gospel yet given to them, and subsequent to that, then they get the fullness of the gospel, and so they experience a kind of second baptism in that vein. But what you have is a text like this. We already read it, but it says, For in one spirit we were all baptized into. one body.

So, there's no such thing as a believer in Christ who is not baptized or identified in this way. By or with the Spirit.

Now, the Spirit's baptism is primarily an identification of his presence on and in your life that then is identifying you with what? the one body. The church.

So, spiritually, mystically, in the realm of the invisible universal church, the baptism of the Spirit is identifying you as His. Right? God identifies you in that way. As his, and you see the word baptism used that way. You also see it used, classically, right, as water baptism.

But I want you to notice something about water baptism. This is Colossians 2, 11 through 13. In him also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. You were spiritually marked, not in a way in your flesh. He's distinguishing here, right, that it wasn't this Judaistic demarcation of Abrahamic covenant fidelity, but now it's about a new covenant.

A different circumcision by the putting off of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. He has circumcised you. Paul, in different contexts, will talk about the circumcision of the heart. having been buried with him in baptism, In which you also were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead.

Now, this is very similar to what happens if you've been at a baptism that we've done in water here at Lifeline. We take people and we speak about the fact that they are. Lost in sin, and now having come to faith in Christ, they are buried with Christ out of Romans 6, 3 in the likeness of his death, and raised Romans 6:4 to walk in newness of life in this symbol of going under the cleansing water of Christ, the blood of Christ, washed anew, brought up from the water, cleansed and made whole, washed now for a newness of life, is the symbolism of that process of immersion. It's a way of saying they are identifying publicly with Jesus. And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcised flesh, God made alive together, having forgiven us all our trespasses.

So there's this symbolism that happened.

Now, one thing. that we curated in the American church and the non-denominational or evangelical church for far too long. Is the idea that you come to Christ and then you might sometime when you feel like getting up the courage, get baptized. That is wildly foreign to the entire history of the church. It's foreign.

And I have to be honest with you. If you are a believer. You just get baptized. Why?

Because you have one Lord. Because you have one Lord. Because you have one body. That is to say, that what he's after is you. Saying I am with him and I am with them.

Right? So in the in Acts So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about 3,000 souls. They're brought into the church. They're received.

So, baptism is a kind of thing, and the reason why you do it. here, the reason why you do it with the church. is actually theological. You do it with the church because, in part, you're being received by the church in water baptism. And they're saying, We're so glad that you have confessed.

That's what you have possessed in your life, it's not that the waters make you a believer. 1 Peter makes this point, that's just the washing of your body, but it is also the pledge of a conscience toward God. And there is something happening, and that something happening is you saying, I'm with him, and I want everybody to know that I'm with him, and I want his lordship over my life.

Now, I think when it says one baptism here. And I might be splitting a few hairs. This is my interpretation, but I think it's a reference to water baptism. And the reason I think it is, is because he's already identified the Spirit before. He's identified the Lord, and he's grouping these, it seems, around respective members of the Trinity.

And to be baptized in this way with the Lord is the heart of what it means to confess. In fact, I dare say this. When you read Romans 10, 9 and 10. I am fairly confident While it may be uncomfortable for us, I'm fairly confident that to confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that raised him from the dead, that in Paul's mind he thought of that confession happening at baptism. You have to go back into the early church and understand baptism didn't save, but it was not divorced.

From your belief. It simply was the externalization of that belief. It was tied to it in this confessional sense. And so baptism is important. If you're here and you haven't been baptized, to quote the Ethiopian eunuch, what prevents you?

There's wa well, there will be water.

Well, turn the ho faucet on.

Okay. Come and get baptized. It's vital for you. to do so. There's one baptism.

And then we finish. One God. And Father of all, who is over all and through all. And in All. One Father God.

The third member of the Trinity. Here It attributes direct deity to him. This doesn't mean that somehow Lord and Spirit, we have all kinds of texts that point to the deity of Jesus and the deity of the Spirit. But here there's this identifier of. Father.

A Father, the first person of the Trinity.

So we read in 1 Corinthians 8:6, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. One God. The father.

Now look at the descriptor though.

Okay. It says, who is over all, through all, and in all. What does all there mean? Does that mean everything?

Now I've actually heard people say that it means things like everything. Um there was a book that was written almost. Oh man, it had to be. Late 90s, maybe 2000-ish, it was called the God Chasers. by a guy named Tommy Tenney.

And it man, it was bestseller in evangelicalism, because evangelicals love to read bad books. And The book Had this idea. Here's actually what the book talked about. It said that God is so much in all. That You could be drunk and on a bar stool.

And if you're drunken on a barstool, God is in the barstool. And that drunk could come to faith on the barstool because the presence of God is in the barstool.

Now Let me share with you. That that's called panentheism. That's what that is. That's called panentheism. That's not Christianity.

God isn't in the bar stool.

Okay. Here's it. If you're sitting here and you say, I feel the Holy Ghost because He's in my chair. No, you might just need to take a shower. He isn't in the chair.

in the molecules of it. Like, that's a misunderstanding of world view. There are world views based on that. There's actually Christian heresies of Christian universalism that are rooted in the idea of panentheism. Just was a book a few years ago.

Again, bestsellers, lots of Christian reading it. Guy named Richard Rohr writing about the universal Christ. And all you have to do is just realize that you're already saved because he's already redeemed you. And belief is just you coming to the realization that you're already his. No, what you need to realize is you're not his.

You're not. You you have been independently your own. Through sin. And he wants to have lordship over your life, so you come to him. Come to him.

So Theology matters, and when we say he is Overall, he's Through all, and he's in all, what does he mean? Let me put up a little chart for you here. Over speaks of his sovereignty.

So he's over, he works all things according to the counsel of his will.

So he is over Oh. Meaning that his sovereignty, there's nothing that is outside of his sovereignty. There are things that are outside of his direct causation. There are things that happen in a world where he sustains them. in secondary creatures.

Cause those things, and he sustains the context in which those things are caused. That's called his permissive will. But he is over all things.

Now, the good news with that is that that means that the worst news you get tomorrow didn't surprise Jesus. The worst news you get doesn't surprise the father. The Father, the Spirit isn't somehow trying to figure out plan B because you got bad news. He's over all. He's through all.

That means a word called imminence. That's different than the word imminent. Imminent means soon and coming. Imminence has the idea of present among. present among Instruments.

He's through all. He's talking about all believers. Think about the context. The context is a letter to a church. He's talking to them about the fact he's going to go down the road in just a little bit.

He'll go down the road in Ephesians 4 about gifts to the church.

So he's talking about the idea that God works through people. He works through Us. to minister to one another. That God is active in his body. In his body, under the Lordship of Christ through the power of the Spirit.

And to speak of, and so we have Ephesians 2:10. We are his workmanship. Created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

So he laid out works for you to do here, and you do them, and as you walk in them, you're being used by him as his instruments because he's working through you. And in. And I love 1 John 3. 24, whoever keeps the commandments abides in God and God. In him.

God in him. And by this, we know that he abides in us by the Spirit whom he has given us. Yeah. So, God, the Father of all, is at work, and He works through the person of the Spirit and does that in us.

So, when we come to the end of this text, And we see that we have this one God. And Father of all, who is over all, who is through all, who is in all, we think back on those seven ones and recognize that we have all these things in common. with believers everywhere.

Now, that is intended to then stir us to the dispositions we talked about two weeks ago, but also to anchor our identity.

So, to close with this morning, if you feel more less. If you feel anchorless, If you feel like you're just bobbing up and down in the waves. Let some good theology assist you this morning. And be reminded that your identity will never be found in you. It's never going to be found by going introspectively and going real, real deep to figure you all out.

It will be found by placing you within a larger story among God's people. Because you have one spirit. One Lord, one God and Father. of all. Father, I ask that you would bless us.

that we would walk with you. And that we would ponder you, that we would orient our minds and hearts to you.