The Text: Ephesians 4:1–16
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in 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 us all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.
But grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said: “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.” In saying, “he ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is he who also ascended far above the heavens, that he might fill all things.
And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of 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 and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.
Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love.
Introduction: What Kind of Church?
Pawson opens with the immediate occasion for this sermon: the congregation has, at last, moved into a lovely new building, full in every room, young and old together. But the great question, he says, is not what kind of building we have built, but what kind of church we are going to put into it. We have not built a church — we have built a house for the church. What matters now is what happens inside these walls.
Paul, writing as a prisoner for the churches he had built, speaks with an authority earned through suffering. Any man in prison for building churches is a man to whom we must listen. And he outlines two characteristics he longs to see in a church: unity with diversity, and maturity with charity.
Before turning to these, Pawson notes the meaning of the word walk, which Paul uses for the Christian life: to go in the right direction, one step at a time. Nothing could be simpler. And vocation, he says, is concerned not with career but with character — whatever your job, your true calling is to be a good and godly person.
First Characteristic: Unity
These verses have become supercharged in the ecumenical debates of the day. One camp insists that Christ’s unity has been lost and fragmented, and must be painstakingly rebuilt, like Humpty Dumpty. The other insists — quoting the Keswick Convention motto, “we are all one in Christ Jesus” — that the unity was never lost at all. Pawson’s answer: both are right. The practice of unity can be lost. The principle of unity cannot be lost.
He illustrates this with a note handed to him just before the service by the local parish vicar, worshipping in a very different tradition: greetings and blessing sent in Christ. The practice differs; the underlying unity remains.
The Practice of Unity: Four Ingredients
Paul is primarily concerned with unity within a local fellowship — that is where charity and unity must begin. Four ingredients sustain it, and losing any one of them cracks it.
1. Humility
Not Uriah Heep wringing his hands and murmuring “ever so humble.” True humility is seeing yourself as God sees you. See yourself only as others see you, or worse, only as you see yourself, and humility will never develop. Proud people break unity; humble people build it.
2. Meekness
Not mildness or weakness, but a freedom from concern for one’s own reputation, rights, or revenge — a person you can do almost anything to, and they remain unshaken, unoffended. Fellowship is so easily broken when people take offence at being overlooked or spoken to carelessly. A truly meek person cannot be offended.
3. Patience
The literal Greek means long-tempered — a word that has vanished from English, even as short-tempered survives. We need to be long-tempered to maintain the unity of the Spirit.
4. Forbearance
Kenneth Taylor’s translation says it best: making allowance for each other’s faults. Together, these four ingredients produce the bond of peace — the cement that holds a mixed and varied congregation together. Lose any one, and cracks appear.
The Foundation of Unity: The Trinity
Beneath the practice lies a foundation that can never be lost. Our unity is rooted in the very unity God has within himself — three persons in perfect harmony. You never hear of the Father and Son disagreeing, or the Son and Spirit falling out. Jesus prayed, “that they may be one as we are.” All Christian unity springs from the unity of the Trinity.
Paul moves through the persons of the Godhead in turn. One Spirit — the same breath moving through every heart in the building, the same Spirit touching the person next to you as touches you. Because there is one Spirit, there is one body: you cannot have one breath and more than one body. And one hope: we will all live together in heaven, so let us live together on earth now, since we share one future in the Father’s house.
One Lord — whoever and wherever you were when you came to Christ, you came to the same person Pawson himself met in 1947. That produces one faith and one baptism: since there is only one person to believe in, there can only be one faith, one baptism into him.
One God and Father of us all — and if there is only one Father, there is only one family. Every Christian you meet is your brother or sister. Pawson illustrates this with his own three children: they can lose the practice of peace between them, argue and fight, but they cannot change the fact that they share one father and must live in one house. That is the balance of Scripture — one Spirit, one Lord, one Father is the unity you cannot lose; the bond of peace is the unity you must practise, through humility, meekness, patience, and forbearance.
Paul, describing this one God who is “above all, and through all, and in all,” seems almost to run out of words to stretch the description far enough — he is reaching for the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of God. Pawson recalls looking up at the height of the new building’s windows and thinking simply: what a big God you are.
Diversity Within Unity
God’s unity is not uniformity. Look at a tree: it is one unity, yet no two leaves are alike; the same sap runs through it all, yet produces infinite variety. No two trees are the same; no two people are the same. God alone perfectly combines unity and diversity, and the church is meant to reflect a genuine variety of gifts, not a single mould.
Two conclusions follow. First, there is no division in the New Testament between clergy and laity — only ministry and a diversity of gifts. Pawson insists there should be no such division in his own congregation either. Second, no minister should think of themselves as the minister of the church; he prefers the word pastor, because every member shares in the ministry. Each person has been given a gift that places them in a particular role.
Why this diversity of gifts? Because when Christ returned to heaven, he poured out gifts on his people as the only way to continue his work on earth. All the gifts were originally in him — “in him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” — but rather than keep them, or give them all to one person to continue his work alone, he distributed them so his body could carry the work forward together.
Pawson paints the picture in Paul’s mind: the Roman triumphal procession, where a victorious general, returning from war, would divide the spoils and distribute gifts to his people. That is exactly what Christ did, having ascended on high, leading captivity captive: he took the spoils and poured them out — apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers — a rich variety, each needed, each rare in different measure at different times.
Equipment, Service, Building — Redefined
Paul uses three words that are easily misunderstood today: equipment, service, building. Equipment of the saints does not mean chairs, tables, or projectors — it means the personal resources each believer needs to serve others in Christ’s name. Service does not mean a Sunday worship service — it means what you do for other people through the week. Building does not mean concrete and bricks — it means people.
Pawson tells the story of Charles Haddon Spurgeon and a man who asked for a job to do for the church. Spurgeon asked what his daily work was — an engine driver. Is your fireman a Christian? No. Then go and win him for Christ — that’s your job for the church. We come to church to be equipped to go out and build the church of Christ in the world, in both quantity and quality.
Why does God give pastors and teachers? To support the church — not the other way round. Pawson quotes a woman who told him she came to church to get her batteries recharged for the week ahead. That, he says, is exactly the purpose of the pastoral gift: to equip people to go out and serve, so the church grows bigger and better, in both quantity and quality.
Second Characteristic: Maturity with Charity
God does not want a family of babies. Babies are lovely, and some parents would keep them that size forever if they could. But no parent truly wants a child who never grows up. The greatest satisfaction a parent can know is watching a child mature into a responsible adult, making their own good decisions. And God says the same of his church: grow up. I want a mature church, not childish Christians.
How do you know when you have grown up? Pawson recalls the height chart on the back of a cupboard door at home, marking his children’s growth year by year — until they outgrew it. The spiritual measure is exact too: you have grown up when you have reached the stature of Christ — not physically, but spiritually. It may feel impossible. But God does not begin a work and leave it half finished; he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.
Someone has put Christ’s purpose in coming to earth in an unusual way: to produce a race of Christs — to multiply himself, again and again, until the church is full of people who look like him. It sounds almost irreverent, yet that is exactly what Paul describes: growing up until we all attain to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
The Mark of Childishness
How do you tell when someone is still spiritually childish? They keep changing what they believe. A new book, a new speaker, and their whole outlook shifts again — impossible to pin down, always chasing the latest fashion in ideas. Paul warns against being children tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of those who manipulate Scripture — using a word originally applied to those who manipulated dice, what we might call sleight of hand with a pack of cards.
A mature Christian cannot be fooled this way. They know what they believe — the gospel once delivered to the saints — and will not be shifted about. Maturity grows from truth: the goal of maturity is Christ, but the ground of maturity is the truth about Christ.
Pawson is often asked what he thinks of the ecumenical movement and denominational division. He would gladly scrap every label if he could. But the real scandal of the church today, he insists, is not that we have different names — Anglican, Methodist, Baptist — but that we no longer believe the same things. You can move from one church to another and hear an entirely different version of Christianity, uncertain even whether the deity of Christ, or the existence of a living God, is affirmed. That scandal will only disappear as the church grows up into the unity of the faith, no longer tossed about by the latest theological fashions, until — pray God — you could walk into any church and hear the same truth about Jesus.
Speaking the Truth in Love
But unity of faith is not the whole picture. Pawson recalls a little girl’s prayer: Lord, make all the nice people good, and all the good people nice. Put in theological terms: Lord, make all the sound people loving, and all the loving people sound. It is entirely possible to have such zeal for truth that love for people is lost. It is equally possible to be kind and loving without ever grasping the truth. Real maturity holds truth and love together.
Truth without love becomes too hard. Love without truth becomes too soft. Put them together and you have exactly what is seen in Christ — a man who always spoke the truth, even when it hurt, about God, about people, about the future, yet always spoke it in love. Even when he took a whip to clear the temple, it was an act of love for those the house of prayer was meant to serve.
One Body, One Head
Paul now turns to a biological picture — a body with joints, ligaments, and organs, operating in love. The joints matter enormously (as anyone with rheumatism knows); separate parts of the body are of little use unless fitly joined together and working in a coordinated way. Gifts without love leave the joint missing. As joints in later life lose the fluid that lubricates them, so the fluid that lubricates the members of the church is love.
A body needs more than joints — it needs a brain to control it. Every part must be joined not only to each other but to the head, so that Christ can direct the whole. That, says Pawson, is the church he longs to help build in this new building: a body of members joined together, and responding perfectly to the head.
Why Love Between Christians Matters Most
Child psychologists have observed that in a family, it matters more for father and mother to love each other than for either of them simply to love the children. A child who grows up watching parents constantly argue grows up insecure and frightened, and that insecurity stays with them for life.
In the same way, Pawson argues, it matters more to the watching world that Christians love one another than that Christians love the world. You can work to win people for Christ until you are exhausted — but if you then bring them into a fellowship where believers do not love one another, your work is undone. But if outsiders can say, look how these Christians love each other, you are already halfway to winning them; you have shown them, in your relationships, that God is love.
Pawson closes with a story from an Indian Christian speaking at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, thanking Western missionary societies on behalf of India for everything given — men, women, money, literature, hospitals, doctors, nurses. But then he asked for one thing more: give us friends. Not patrons, but people willing to get alongside. That, Pawson says, is what it means for the whole body to build itself up in love into the one who is the head.
Closing Prayer
Father, we thank you for the truth that your words correspond to reality, and that if we believe them we shall live in a real world with real relationships, because Father, you are real, you are true. We thank you too that you are love. And we pray that in our fellowship here, as we grow into this building and out of it and beyond it, we may love one another and show ourselves the true mark of your disciples. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen.
© David Pawson Ministry CIO
Listen to the original teaching at davidpawson.org
© David Pawson Ministry — Transcript prepared for Koinonia.nu | koinonia.nu