Gifts from Our Ascended King - Ephesians 4:7-16

Well, every almost every one of us has a memory of doing something that initially, we didn't know about, that we do now without even thinking about it. Right? So, like, maybe learning how to ride a bike, learning how to swim, maybe you water ski, or go to Colorado, or Utah, and ski, something that you once didn't know how to do, and now you know it's muscle memory, right? There was somebody likely that was bigger than you, maybe a parent or an older sibling that helped you walk through that process. And maybe it was learning to ride a bike. Maybe it's a parent that just had their hand on your back. As you tried to balance that bike for the first time, Maybe, uh, it was an older sibling that kind of put their hand underneath your stomach as you tried to swim for the first time. Maybe it was someone holding your back because you went down the bunny slope, right? Something like that. We're all wobbling for the 1st time, and probably absolutely convinced that if this person let go of us, We're just gonna die at that moment, okay? But now, think about what that hand on the back of the seat was actually doing. Or maybe that stabilizing hand underneath your stomach as you learned to swim for the first time. That hand is there for stability, for courage, a steadying presence, a little bit of comfort that you need, to take this risk for the 1st time, but that stabilizing hand was not meant to stay on forever. Right? Nobody teaches a kid to ride their bike, and then with the expectation that they're going to jog behind you for the rest of your life. There's an expectation that that hand will come off at some point. The whole goal is that you would grow until that hand becomes less and less necessary. And here's the beautiful part. Once you learned to ride, one day you become the one riding behind standing behind someone else and you're the stabilizing hand. You learn to pass it on to someone else. As your confidence grows, as you become more aware of the process. Now you become the one that equips someone else. And you remember that 1st successful ride on the bike, the 1st successful ride all on your own, like the wind blows that used to knock you off, the sidewalk has a little bump in it, that dog that barks, that used to knock you off your bike. You don't trip anymore. You don't get knocked off after you learn to do that. And notice 2 connected things happen in that process. One, there's a stabilizing presence for you. And two, you grew up. You learn something about yourself. And the growing up is what finally kept you from getting knocked off, from learning how to swim, from skiing successfully. Now, why am I telling you this? Well, because that is a beautiful picture of what Jesus is doing with his church in Ephesians chapter 4. We started Ephesians chapter 4 last week. Jesus gives his people steadying hands, leaders who are going to run alongside you, who are going to equip you. We're going to encourage you, who are going to be a stabilizing presence to help you to grow up. so that one day you can do the same with others, so that you can study other people. And then together, we become a church that can really ride the winds and the waves and not get tossed by the winds and the waves. We've been in the book of Ephesians together for about 3 months now. And here's the pattern. The 1st 3 chapters are almost entirely about what God has done. In chapters one through three, he chose us. He made us alive in him. He brought us out of our sin. We are dead in our sins. He tore down the dividing wall. He brought us the Gentiles, the outsiders into his presence. He's building a church. He tore down the dividing wall, and he loved us with a love that surpasses knowledge. And then chapter 4 turns a corner. It's the hinge point in the book of Ephesians. 6 chapters right there in the middle, Paul turns the corner. Paul says, therefore walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called. That was last week. We looked at Ephesians 4, one through 6. And we heard about how there's one body, one spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Seven times, Paul uses the word one, one, one. Seven, the number 7 is the number for perfection or completeness in the Bible. So Paul is saying, hey, there's a completeness to the church. I'm bringing everyone together. There's unity here. And we've been made one. So before we pray, and we jump into this passage, I want you to know where we're headed this morning. As we get into verses 7 through 16, I want you to know that there are 3 words. They all start with the same letter, like a good Baptist, we're going to have GGG for all 3 of these. We have the giver, the gifts, and the goal. That's how this passage breaks down. The giver, the gifts, and the goal. So we'll be in Ephesians chapter 4, verses 7 through 16. There's a giver who hands them out. The gifts that he gives and the goal that he's growing us towards. So I want us to pray, and then we'll jump into this passage together. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that you've gathered us here to this time and this place each week, to worship you, to be reminded of the good news that we have in Christ. And so, Lord, I pray that you would speak to us this morning. You'd encourage us and challenge us. That as a result of our time together, we would look more like Jesus. And if you would, take a moment where you're sitting and pray that God would speak to you personally this morning, that he would guide you and direct you through this time together. Take a moment to pray for that. And next, pray for someone around you, to your left, to your right, or maybe in front or behind you. Could be a spouse or a stranger or a child. pray that God would speak to them, and it would be helpful to them this morning. And lastly, pray for me that God would speak through me. with clarity, boldness, and accuracy. Well, Father, we love you. and we trust you. We ask that you would use this time for your glory and for our good. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, 3 points this morning. First is the giver. And it's this. Let's go to the next slide. Our ascended king is the one who hands out the gifts. Our ascended king is the one who hands out the gifts. Let's look at verse 7. And notice the very 1st word, but grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. So last week, we have one, one, one, one, this week, but each one of us is given a gift. Grace has been given to each one of us. So Paul is explaining that the church is meant to be unified, but not uniform. Unity, but not uniformity. We're meant to be unified, but we're not going to look identical to each other. He says, hey, being made one doesn't mean that we're all the same. God is making one body and then gave that one body many different parts. And notice that grace is measured out to each one of us, to every believer. And it's Christ that's doing the measuring. He's doing the one that decides what gifts are being given. Then Paul reaches back into the Old Testament. Look at verse eight. It says, therefore, it says, when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men. So Paul is pulling from Psalm 68, which is a victory hymn of a king who wins this great battle and comes marching home. So when a king won a great victory in the ancient world, he would march up to the city in triumph, there'd be this big celebration parade, everyone's gathering out to the streets to see their victorious king marching through the city gates in triumph, and he would usually lead a train of captives behind him. All the people that we've put into, that we brought into the prison behind them. And so he would also bring with him the spoils of war, any gold or any treasure that they had taken from the enemy. And so now here in Ephesians 4, the king from Psalm 68. Paul says, this psalm is about Jesus. Jesus, he says, when in the greatest battle in history, he went into battle against sin, Satan, death, and hell, and then the grave, and he won. It was a total crushing, never going back victory. And Paul adds a little bit of a twist to this as well. Normally, a conquering king would come home with the spoils of war all for himself. It's like, he's the conquering king. He gets the treasure. It's all for him. It's not for the people. But Paul says, Jesus is a king that actually gives the spoils away. He doesn't keep him for himself. He doesn't hoard it. He gives it to his people. Now, before Paul tells us what those gifts are, he actually pauses for a second. And verses 9 and 10 are kind of this quick side note, like almost like a footnote. So your translation may have put them in parentheses. Most of our Bibles actually print versus 9 and 10 in those parentheses, even though there's no parentheses in Greek. There's actually no punctuation in Greek. So translators have actually added them to help us understand what Paul is doing here. Paul does this a lot. In verse eight, Paul makes his main point, and that point is the king ascended, and he's giving gifts. And then in verse 11, he's going to pick up that same thought right back up. He says, and he gave apostles and prophets and so on. But in between, verses 9 and 10, Paul reads his own word from verse 8, that word is ascended, and he just like can't move on. He wants to stop and explain what he means. He wants to add just a little bit of color, a little bit of texture to what verse 8 means. And so versus 9 and 10 are like this side comment before he swings back into verse 11. All right? And that's what those parentheses are marking. So let's look at verse nine. In saying he ascended, what does it mean, but that he also descended into the lower regions, the earth? Verse 10. He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. So the one who went all the way up, Paul says, is the one who 1st came all the way down. Jesus' descent, he says, is the incarnation. When Jesus 1st came to earth and he became a baby. Philippians 2 says that he emptied himself and humbled himself. So some of us might read this verse and maybe we've been brought up to think the lower regions, this is like Jesus descending into hell. That's not what Paul's talking about. He's talking about the dissension from his throne in heaven into mankind. So Jesus went down into humanity, down into a manger, down into a life of service, and ultimately down into the grave. And the essent that Paul is talking about, we call this the exaltation, that Jesus ascended to the Father, and he has been glorified by the Father. So Paul is saying, he who went that low, all the way down into the lower regions of the earth has now gone that high. He's the name above every name. He is exalted by God. Christ is above all, Christ fills all, and Christ gives gifts to his church. So before we talk about the next few verses, man, can we just marvel for a minute? Marvel at his authority. He is far above all things. And then marvel at his generosity. He didn't have to give us anything. But the king who conquered hell comes marching home with his arms full and he starts giving out gifts to his people, his church. He is a king who has authority and who is generous. That's the giver. Second point is the gifts. Let's go to the next slide. The gifts. The king gave the church leaders to equip the saints. So let's look at verse 11. It says, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers. Now notice something. The gifts aren't things, right? Like when you're a kid, you just want Christmas and birthday to be like, what are all the toys? What are all the things that I'm giving? My kids are at that age right now, seven, 5, and 2, that it's like, they just want the toys, all right? But that's not the gifts that Jesus is giving. The gifts are actually people. So we won't camp out on each of these rolls. There are healthy debates about each of these. Like, are they offices? Are they roles? Are they giftings? Are they responsibilities? What are these exactly? And what do they each represent? What do they each mean? How do they play themselves out in the church? One of those debates is a simple one. Our shepherd teachers together. There are some translations that break those up separately that say there are shepherds and there are teachers. And then there are some manuscripts, some ancient papyri, that say that there's just one. They are shepherd teachers. That word shepherd in Greek just means pastor. So whenever you see pastor in the New Testament, that's a shepherd, all right? It's the same word that's being used. But here's the big idea. Jesus gave his church leaders. That's what Paul is explaining here. Now, we have to understand something here because it's easy to sometimes mix up. You've hopefully heard about spiritual gifts, the way that the spirit gives every believer, at conversion, some kind of gifting. Every believer has at least one spiritual gift, no believer has all the spiritual gifts. We need one another to build up the body, but every believer has one. So the way that the Spirit gives gifts, we can look at 1st Corinthians 12 or maybe Romans 12, we go to 1st Peter 4, gifts like teaching or mercy or serving. But that's not exactly what Paul is explaining here. Paul is not giving us another list of spiritual gifts. Christ isn't handing a gift to each believer here. He's actually giving gifted people. leaders to his whole church. So the spirit gives spiritual gifts. every believer. Christ is giving godly leaders to his church. That's what's happening here. All right? But here's the question. What are these leaders for? We've got 5 here. Well, verse 12. Let's read it. It says, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. So a question that we could ask is, who does the work of ministry? Look at verse 12 again. Who does the work of ministry? It says, the saints. So who are the saints? That's every believer. Every Christian. So biblically, the leaders don't do the work of ministry. They actually equip the church to do the work of ministry. That word equip, it's such a rich word. It's the word for like mending a torn fishing net. So oftentimes in the ancient world, you made a living by fishing. So you'd cast these huge nets into the sea to gather up all the fish, but, as you might expect, those nets would break over time, they get worn out. And so that word equip means to mend a torn fishing net so that it can catch fish again. So Paul is using that word to just give you the imagery of pastors mending nets so that the whole church can fish. So the whole church can make disciples. So the whole church can share the good news about Jesus. Like I was thinking about it this week, maybe using a different metaphor, a different illustration. Imagine you decide to hire like a personal trainer, all right? It's not a new year, but oftentimes in the new year. We all make New Year's resolutions. And so maybe you decide, I'm going to hire a personal trainer. And there's a part of us that wants our trainer to be, like, super impressive, like they walk the talk, they take their own medicine, they're really fit. They're a good trainer. They've done all the work. But a good trainer is not gonna work out for you, right? We understand that. They hand you the bar, they correct your form, they monitor your process, they are progress. They check in on you, they ask how you're doing, because you didn't hire a personal trainer to get fit for you. You hired a personal trainer to help you get fitter. You helped them, you hired them to help you. Now, imagine that you paid a whole year for a personal trainer to help you. And then you bragged about how strong that trainer had gotten at the end of the year. Like, look at them, they've done all these workouts. I hired them. They're incredible. They can lift so much, they're so fast, the cardio's incredible. Everyone be like, uh, I thought that trainer was for you. I thought you were supposed to get fitter and healthier. What if they did the workouts and you're in the same place that you started a year later? And yet that's often how Americans think about church. We show up, we watch the ministers, the pastors do ministry, and then we head home feeling like we got a workout in. And the Bible says that's backwards. That's not how church is supposed to function. Look at the end of verse 12. It says the leaders equip the saints for building a social media presence. No, that's not it. For building a platform to be known. No, that's not it either. For building a bunch of fun events. Nope, that's not it. No, the leaders equip the saints for building up the body of Christ. So church leaders aren't meant to do ministry to people. We're meant to do ministry through people. That's the process that the Bible outlines for how the church works. Godly and gifted leaders don't exclusively do ministry to people, leaders do ministry through people. And it's the body of Christ that is meant to do the work of ministry. So that should make us really careful about following a pastor or joining a church where the leaders do the bulk of ministry and everyone else just shows up and watches. But when you find a church where the people are doing the ministry, And the leaders are doing the equipping and the encouraging and the stabilizing hand, You just found a biblical church. And you found a beautiful church that's functioning the way Jesus wants it to. Some of the people are meant to equip the leaders are meant to equip. And here's what that means for us. Every member, every believer, is a minister. Now, that word can sometimes have a lot of baggage, like who's the minister, like the pastor's the minister, the deacons, the minister, maybe a ministry leader is the minister, maybe the paid staff is the minister. The Bible says every believer is a minister. It says that every believer is a minister because you're called to do the work of ministry. That's all that a minister is, someone who does the work of ministry. You don't need a title, you don't need to be paid. Now, let me say this next part clearly and gently. Because service comes in all shapes and sizes. And that's a good and beautiful thing. There are some ways to serve in ministry in church that are light ways, and there are some ways to serve that are heavier ways. So, for example, some ways to serve may take, showing up 30 minutes early, staying 30 minutes late, all right? Other, maybe more heavier ways to serve, might involve showing up 2 or 3 hours early. and stay an hour late. Other ways to serve might look like practicing songs during the week. You're not just showing up early and staying late. You're practicing lesson plans. You're preparing for ministry that's going to happen in several days or weeks or months. And none of those is more spiritual than the others. The light or heavy ways, the hours, uh, don't matter to the Lord. So some of us may serve in several light ways. Some of us may serve in one heavier way. And both of those are wonderful. Some of us are in a genuinely difficult season right now, and maybe temporarily stepping back from serving in the church is actually the right thing for you. That can be really healthy, and there's no guilt in that. Nobody's keeping a scorecard of the hours that you serve in a church. And honestly, it's about something just so much more beautiful than ours. The reality is, you've been created by God. You've been gifted by God, to be used in the hands of God. That's a beautiful thing. That's what God wants of you. And when the gift that he put in you is finally doing what he made you to do. Man, many of you have experienced that. something comes alive. There's a joy in you in serving the body of Christ that you just can't explain, that you don't feel anywhere else. So when you maybe opt out of serving permanently in a church, we don't just leave a gap in the body. We leave a vacancy in our own lives that we don't get to fulfill, that we miss the joy that we are made for. So I wanna, man, can I just invite you to do what the Bible commends, to discover, to develop, and to deploy your gifts. God has given you a gift to use in his church. And if I can just suggest one specific way to start. I would love, this is just Tyler. I would love for every member. Every member of Northland Riverside to be in the rotation to serve in kids' ministry. That's just a pipe dream for Tyler. As I've been praying for our church for several weeks and several months now. Man, I would just love if every one of us was in the rotation to serve in kids' ministry. Especially those of us who might be serving in lighter ways, would you prayerfully consider adding that to your ministry to a way that you can serve the church? Our kids are part of the body, and they need the whole church pouring into them, not just a few of us. The 3rd point that Paul gives is the goal, the giver, the gift, and the goal. He says, the goal is a grown up body that can't be knocked down. So let's read verse 13. Why do the leaders equip us? Where is all this headed? Verse 13. It says, until we 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 the goal is maturity. It's grown upness. And notice, he says, it's we all. until we all attain to the unity of faith. It's together. So the finish line is that every church would grow up into the fullness of Christ. Now watch what happens when we don't grow up. What happens if we don't grow up into Christ-likeness? Verse 14? 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, in deceitful schemes. So a kid riding a bike for the 1st time without that hand on his back, very likely to get off, knocked off. By one gust of wind, by one dollar bump in the sidewalk, by one dog that barks at the wrong moment, by one quick turn, And Paul says spiritually, that's exactly what a believer who never grows up looks like. a person who's easily knocked on their back. And church, man, we are surrounded by the winds and the waves. A new influencer, a new take, a new outrage every single day, a new political agenda, And Paul says, man, that is oftentimes, maybe not always, but it's often human cunning. It's deceitful scheming. It's craftiness, that word is like wily, it's trickery. It's not coming straight for you. It's coming around to you. It's gonna flank your side. And a spiritual child gets swept off their feet by all of it. One podcast this way, one influencer this way. One news line, one stressful week. And we go down. And can I be honest with you, one of the most, one of the things that discourages me the most as a pastor is watching people get tossed around like this. And even more discouraging, it's usually not new believers. It's usually Christians who have been walking with Jesus for 10, 20, 30 years. And as I see it, I've often asked myself, like, why is that happening? Why is it not the new believers? And there could be a lot of reasons why, but I think one common reason is that sometimes we can have a lot of Bible knowledge. But somewhere in all that knowledge, a leader, a godly gifted leader, never sat us down and spoke the truth to us. We never got equipped to do the work of ministry. Someone never spoke the truth in love to our hearts. So we may feel knowledgeable. We may have verses memorized. We may have grown up in the church almost all of our lives. We may even have a seminary degree. But when difficulty or conflict or real pain comes, all that knowledge can't hold us up. will not sustain us through. But a leader, a believer who's actually grown up. The wind and the waves hit, and you don't get tipped over. You don't get knocked on your back because you've grown up, life is more steady. So how do we grow up like that? Paul's going to talk about it. Verse 15. It says, rather, so rather than being tossed by the waves, rather than being knocked by the wind, rather than all the deceitful schemes that come your way, he says, speaking the truth in love, we're to grow up in every way, not some ways, every way into him, who is the head? Into Christ. So we grow up speaking the truth to one another. But notice it also says in love. Truth without love, often hurts people. And love without truth tends to just flatter people. But truth in love spoken back and forth? Well, that builds us up. John one, Jesus is full of grace and truth. He's full of it. And so he calls us to be full of truth and love. Speak it to one another. But let me speak the truth in love by naming, I think, 2 things that keep us from growing. You might be wondering like, how do I grow into Christ-likeness? How can I continue to grow? Well, I think there are 2 things that keep us from this. First, and I've seen this in my own life. Some of us, we're often resistant to receiving the truth in love. Maybe we've built up pride in certain areas of our lives. There are certain corners of our lives that the gospel hasn't reached down. There are certain things we want to hold tightly because honestly, the pain is kind of a comfort to us. The bitterness helps us get through difficult things. There are some areas of our lives. We've said, Jesus, I don't want you to touch that yet. And so we resist people that speak the truth and love. We've built up pride. So when someone speaks the truth and love, we get defensive. That doesn't feel good, we make excuses, like, well, they didn't pick the right time. They didn't say it in the right way. They used a tone. They didn't, you know, have all the wisdom to say it to me at the right place in time. That could be one thing that keeps us from growing. And I think second, maybe we've never actually asked a faithful church leader to speak into our lives. As humans, we love to pick voices that look wise on the outside, but are foolish inside. We love it. Or maybe we pick voices that we've never learned to actually speak the truth in love. Maybe they've struggled with that. Or maybe we've gone years in the Christian life without ever asking others into our own business, into our own lives, into our own issues. Because we'd rather not do that. It feels good to just kind of go through life on our own. But Paul says, speak the truth in love. And can I tell you just from my own life, just about every good thing I've learned in ministry, almost all of it, I've learned the same way. There was an older, wiser man that spoke the truth in love, who equipped me, who taught me, who called me out on my issues. Oftentimes because I actually went and asked him. I said, I need this in my life. Without you, without godly leaders. Man, I was just gonna mess it up over and over and over again. That's how the body grows. Not in a vacuum, not in a classroom, not through a textbook, but in person to person. That's the picture that Paul lands on in verse 16. Look at verse 16. 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. Look how that ends. The body builds itself up. A healthy body will grow. So I just got back on Friday from overseas, my family and I, we went to Morocco for a couple of weeks to visit family, and all throughout Morocco, there are a ton of buildings growing up. I would estimate like 50% of buildings are lived in, and 50% of buildings are vacant. They're just building structures so fast that people cannot live in them quickly enough. And so there's a ton of empty buildings all over the city that are just kind of in the process of being built. And because of that, there's scaffolding everywhere. You drive past a construction site, and the most visible thing is the scaffolding. There are pipes, there's poles, there's planks, tarps are everywhere, but nobody's drives past, rather in your Morocco or anywhere else here. Nobody drives past a building being built with scaffolding all over it and goes, oh, look how beautiful the scaffolding is. Right? We don't look at that. It's a support structure. It's temporary. The scaffolding isn't the building. It's there so the building can go up. And when the building can stand on its own, the scaffolding comes down. The leaders, the ministries, even the preaching, of the church, that's scaffolding. But you, you're the building. Believers in Jesus are the beautiful building that God is constructing. And God wants a building that stands, a body that builds itself up in love and catch the phrase in the middle. Every joint with which it is equipped. There's that word again, equipped, that mending of the nets. The same as verse 12. And then that key phrase, when each part is working properly, Everyone plays a role because everyone's got a gift. And then Jesus is giving leaders to help equip those people to use their gifts, to discover, and develop, and deploy the gifts. So the body grows when each part does its part. And it's beautiful when it happens. And here's the thing about a body. You cannot grow up as a severed hand. Sorry, right? What does a severed hand do? Nothing. A severed hand does nothing. So Christ gives godly and gifted leaders who equip the saints so that every member serves one another, so that the whole body grows up into Christ-likeness. That's the process Paul is working us through. It starts with him. The name who is above every name. He has the power, he has the authority, and he's been generous to give you gifts and the church leaders. He gives godly and gifted leaders who then equip every person, every believer so that every minister, that's you, serves one another. So the whole church grows up into Christ-likeness. So that we can stay standing with any difficulty that comes our way. And this is exactly as I was reading this this week. Man, I got so excited for this passage and I got so excited for what we're planning this fall. We've been praying and talking through what God wants for us to do as a church. And we've got something coming this fall that I'm just so excited about. It's coming on Wednesday nights. I can't tell you all the details, but I can tell you, at the end of August, We will start meeting every Wednesday night. And so if that's something you want to be a part of, put it on your calendar now. Now we'll have everything, something every Wednesday night to help build us to grow up together. So mark your calendars. But even before the fall, I want you guys to do 2 things. Let's put up the next slide, 2 things to pray and ask this week. How do I want to grow this fall? How do I want to grow this fall? And then secondly, How can we meet that need together? Because we're meant to build each other up. We build each other up by using our gifts together. We look to Christ, who's our authority, who is our head, whose distributed gifts and distributed leaders. Because we don't want to just have a gathering that serves on a Sunday. We want to be a people who grow up into Christ-likeness. And before we wrap up, we have to go back one more time to the giver. Because everything in this passage flows down from one direction. It all flows from a king who 1st came down. And then remember verses 9 and 10. He descended before he ever ascended. And here's what that means for all of us. We were at the very bottom. We were at the very bottom, and we were stuck. Chapter 2 told us the truth. We were dead in our sins. We were outsiders with no hope and without God in the world. And we couldn't climb our way up to him. So the king came all the way down to us. And he met us in our sin and in our mess and in our chaos, in our broken lives. He came down into humanity. down into a manger, down into a servant's life, into suffering, onto a cross and into a grave. He went lower than any of us could ever go. And then on the 3rd day, it says God raised him from the dead. Not that we finally climbed our way up to God, but that he finally came all the way down to us to rescue us and adopt us and make a place for us. So what do we do? We turn away from our sin and we turn towards him. We turn towards Jesus. We stopped trying to earn a place and we recognize that Christ came all the way down to give us one. That we're ministers. We're saints in his church. We're gifted people who've been given gifts by the Spirit, who've been given leaders by Christ to equip us for the work of ministry. Every one of us has a memory, the steadying hand on the back of a seat, or the steady hand underneath us to help us swim. And that moment that they let go, we rode off. We swam off. That hand did something good. It was stabilizing, but it was meant to lift so that we could grow and then go and steady somebody else. And that's exactly the kind of body our king is building. He's growing us into a body that cannot be knocked over. But here's the one thing we can't miss. Godly and gifted leaders come and go. We fail. We make mistakes. Uh, we move on. But God promises he never will. God never does. He's not running alongside you for a season and then quietly letting go. His hand doesn't lift off of you as soon as you grow. His hand is the very thing that grows you. He has descended for us. He has ascended for us. He will hold us all the way at the end. So church, let's continue to grow up. Let's speak the truth in love to one another. Let's equip the saints for the work of ministry. Let's serve in light ways and heavy ways. Let's show up on Wednesday nights this fall and grow up together. And one day when the winds are howling and the whole world is trying to knock us over, will be a church that stands strong because we've grown up into Christ-likeness. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you that you've spoken to each of us this morning in a personal and profound way, that you've given us something from your word, some encouragement or some challenge to take into our week, some way that you've equipped us. And Lord, I pray that your word would not fall on deaf ears and cold hearts, but ears that are receptive, hearts that are warmed to the gospel, that have been made alive by your spirit, so that we would take this word into the world, that we would take it into our hearts and into our minds and that we would walk with you all of our days. And Lord, I pray that we would be a biblical church, not a church that just shows up for a show, but a church that is equipped to do the work of ministry. and that we would rely on the spirit that has gifted us, that we would look to leaders, to equip us, and that we would be saints that serve one another. that we would understand our calling, to be ministers who do the work of ministry, not to be people on the sidelines, but people that walk in faithfulness, to do the work you've called us to do. And as we look around at the ministers around us, we would grow in love for one another. We'd be so encouraged by our brothers and sisters who love us well. And Lord, we thank you. You are in all and through all and above all. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.