Diversity in Unity for Unified Maturity

(Ephesians 4:14-16)

There is an intentional diversity in the gifts that Christ gives to the church.  The gifts are individuals, diverse individuals, and they are given in order that through their ministry the whole church would be characterized by maturity in faith and a full knowledge of the Son of God.

The result of the work of these ministers is that we are to no longer be like children; so gullible and easy to sway.  While this is true and must be emphasized for those of us who have been saved, we ought not be derisive of the trusting and childlike faith that describes those who first come to see Christ as a beautiful and surpassingly gracious savior.  The point is that we ought to move past the stage of wide-eyed innocence into a stage of mature understanding. 

The imagery of the boat on the sea is excellent.  Maturity doesn’t calm the waves or still the winds; maturity allows you to withstand the waves. Maturity allows you to properly harness the right winds in order to get you to where you need to be.  Those who remain immature in their knowledge of the Son of God are easy prey for the sophisticated religious philosophers because they have never really recognized and understood how to examine these teachings on their own.  Or, worse, “they recognize it only in theory, but have never learned to make sue of it.” (F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 88) 

Thus, a local church that is filled with mature believers who are filled with the Spirit and properly using their own gifts so that the church as a whole is characterized by maturity will continue to grow less and less likely to be led astray by falsehood.  And while there are probably more well intentioned and fully convinced purveyors of false doctrine than I would like to contemplate, there is also no shortage of those who intentionally use parlor tricks, argumentative trickery, or well planned deceptions in order to deceive people in order to gain for themselves whatever it is that they desire.  Like a card counter or a gambler using weighted dice, it may look genuine to the untrained eye, but it is anything but genuine when examined carefully. 

Love is the concept, the reality, that both begins (4:2) and ends this section (vv. 15,16).  In our struggle for personal and corporate maturity, we must keep the love of Christ and our love for Christ squarely in our minds.  Tough love is only tough if it is also truly loving; acting in a way that is truly unloving is not the will of God for anything that we do.  If we are slandered as unloving or uncaring because of our attention to the majesty of God and our desire to love and honor Him above all others, we must do our best to explain how saying something that may be unwelcome or cause distress in the conscious of our audience is really a loving thing for us to do. 

And Gospel truth is never unaccompanied by love.  We hear of some people who are ‘all truth but no love’, but in fact people without love cannot be ‘all truth’, any more than people without a concern for truth can be ‘all love’ in any serous sense of the term. (Bruce, 89)

And once again, Paul is not stressing an individual’s spiritual growth in a vacuum.  His detailed analogy of how the body fits and works together verse 16 signals the conclusion that the goal is corporate maturity.  We must strive for corporate maturity in our local churches, and not merely our own personal spiritual maturity. 

A spiritually mature church is not marked by ranks of credentialed theologians who seem detached and unconcerned about the obedient spiritual lives of the church or of the souls of their communities. Nor is a spiritually mature church marked by its lack of committed and convinced theologians, or by those who profess theological humility or ignorance while having boldness in calling for action.  The mark of a mature church is that it will strive for excellence in theology so that the loving actions that are present are rooted and grounded in truth.  In practice, the mature church will, at best, succeed in imperfectly finding the balance of theology and activity while never ceasing to strive in becoming more faithfully obedient to God. 

Summary:

In a paragraph: The ministry of the church is reciprocal.  Those who teach do so in order that the body may individually grow so that the whole body will be mature.  This results in an identity of mature solidness in the faith that is not broken by new or different teachings that are spoken in clever and compelling ways.  The church is to be defined by truthfulness in deed and word.  Through it all, Christ is clung to and proclaimed as both the source and the goal of all growth and stability in the gospel. 

In a sentence: Resulting from the ministry of the church, Christians are to mature in faith and knowledge so that unbiblical, deceitful, or clever teaching will not sway the church.