Good morning, how are you all today? Do you remember a time some days ago when I talked to you about storms?
Jesus and his disciples were in a boat crossing the sea of Galilee. A storm came up and threatened to drown all of them. Jesus, who had been sleeping, sat up, stood up, and spoke up. He rebuked the wind and calmed the waves. Another storm had been defeated.
After I spoke to you about that storm, I asked you to write me a note telling me about the storms in your life. You did wonderfully well and I received quite a few notes. Arlene put them in a cup on our table and before most meals, I have read out one of the notes and it included in my prayer for the meal.
One of those notes stuck out for me. It said, and I paraphrase, “GIBC is like an eagle, but can't fly because one of its feet is tied to a rope.” My question is, "What is keeping the eagle down? "What's the rope?
But in Ephesians 4 Paul tells us that the rope is unity.
A church divided will be just like that eagle. Unable to fly anywhere. I'm not saying that GIBC is divided, if it is, I don't know about it.
What I am saying is that if GIBC is going to take off any time soon, then it needs to be united.
Ephesians 4:3 says, “Make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace.” The words “make every effort” suggest a lot of hard work is involved in building and maintaining unity.
This verse is found in a paragraph that mentions unity over and over again. If you read it closely, you will see that it talks about one baptism, one faith, one Lord, one God and Father, who is overall and in all and through all. By this time, you're probably saying, “OK, so unity is important for us.
But how can we get unity or even more important how can we keep our unity.” In his letter to the Ephesians Paul made it very clear how the Ephesian church could remain united.
Look at Ephesians 4 verse seven.
That verse says, “But to each one of us, grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.” Somehow, a thing called grace has been distributed to each one of us. The verse says that each one of us has something called grace.
Where did we get this grace? Apparently Jesus Christ had some grace that he gave to everybody who is in the church. Now he didn't give it out carelessly. Instead, he divided it up among us. It seems that your grace may be different than my grace. Let's examine this a little bit further. In Ephesians 4:8 Paul continues his discussion of “grace” by quoting from Psalms 8:18 where it says, “When he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.” Sounds mysterious doesn't it? Who is he? What does ascended mean?
Well, I think we can safely say that he is Christ whom he was talking about back in verse 7. “Ascended” is a reference to the ascension of Jesus Christ from the Earth up into the heavens (see Acts 1:9 ff). In ancient days, kings often went out to war with their armies, trailing behind them. They may have gone to conquer new territory. Or they may have been defending themselves from an attacking army. Whatever the reason for the war, one thing was clear, somebody won and somebody lost.
The victorious King would return in triumph to his capital city and behind him would be a long line of captives. These of course, were the soldiers from the enemy army who had surrendered to him. There was also all the stuff they had taken from these captives. The victorious King would bring these captives home with him. Then he would take the stuff that had also been been taken and distribute it to his own soldiers, to his household, and also to the population of his kingdom.
So when, here in verse 8, Paul says, “When he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people” He's referring to a different king. He is referring to Christ.
Christ had won a great victory when he rose from the tomb on Easter Sunday.
He had defeated death and taken it as a captive. Then when he ascended into heaven he went with these captives. He also went with all the stuff, including death that he had captured.