Walking Worthy
My Bible study was a little shortened this week due to the tight schedule, so I made it more freeform, and we focused on the end of the passage more than the beginning, and didn’t get to this point. So I’m turning it into an ABC post =P.
Check out Ephesians 4:1-6. In 4:1, Paul exhorts us to walk worthy of the calling “to which we have been called”. Hopefully we’ve all been learning about how God has called us out of sin into life (and if not, go re-read the first three chapters of Ephesians and look for this). Ok, great, but what does it mean to walk worthy and how do we do it? Paul lists out a bunch of things in 4:2-3: humility, gentleness, patience, tolerance, and unity in the Spirit.
Notice these are all interpersonal things, about how we should act towards one another. And this is a great link to our theme of “one for all and all for One” and the emphasis on what Christian community should look like. These qualities are all things that should be present in our fellowship. So we should check ourselves: how are we doing on each of these categories, and where can we improve? How can we take practical, real steps in building the strength and unity of our community?
Humility: demonstrate it by serving one another, whether in an official role in fellowship, or in a less formal (but still very important!) way. If you just come to fellowship seeking to get your needs met, perhaps you should check yourself for self-centeredness.
Gentleness: as opposed to being hard on one another, especially in restoration for sin (see Galatians 6:1). If someone came to you with a sin to confess or a burden that they need prayer for, how would you respond?
Patience: literally longsuffering. Are we quick to judge people in the fellowship because of a minor fault? Are we willing to forgive people when they wrong us, sacrifice for them and walk with them on the long road of becoming more Christlike?
Tolerance for one another: some of us will have our differences, but they should not be insurmountable with Christ’s help. Do you have conflict with people in the fellowship that you let remain unresolved? Also related to patience, see above.
Unity in the Spirit: note, that’s “in the Spirit”. That’s the only way we get unity. Look down to 4:4-6. Let us be all for One, and that is Christ.
Since first humility and gentleness and then patience are headed by the preposition “with”, in contrast to the participial phrases that emphasized action more than characteristic, my take was that these things were character traits that were to be taken together with love as aspects of the fruit of the Spirit (viz. the end of chapter 3). These would then come out in the form of outward acts of tolerance for the sake of unity in the Spirit.
The advantage of this is that it reminds us that this is all about the love that Paul prays for us to understand so that we may be filled with Christ’s fullness. How are we supposed to work out our love, while God works in us to supply that love? Bearing with one another: forgiving, teaching, exhorting and encouraging the other members of the body, our brothers and sisters in Christ, for their – our – maturation.
Lue-Yee Tsang
October 27, 2008 at 10:52 pm