Equipped, Together

Today we are really excited about all that is going on in the life of the church. Really looking forward to VBS. And like Christa said, if you haven’t been asked harassed yet, you you you just might. So if you find yourself walking in a dark corner of the facility, just watch out. Krista might be on your heels about to pin you down for something. Okay. All right.

But we not not only are looking forward to VBS next month, but Carter, myself, Michelle Moore, and Lee Luden are really excited about taking the students to camp later this month. So, just like VBS is a great opportunity for us to take the seed of the gospel and of what we hold dear and plant it in the soils of the children, we’re also hoping to do the exact same thing. taking that very same seed, planting it in the soils of our middle and high schoolers. we’re taking them up to the upstate to the crossroads student summer camp, the classic CSSC, I guess. And so for the next few weeks, we’re going to be praying ahead of time for student summer camp. the prompt this morning is that we would ask the Lord to save students at summer camp.

You know, ultimately the Lord is the one that sees into the souls of our of our people. He is the one that understands where we all stand with Him. So, what we are asking is that the Lord would use those five days that the chaperones and the students, we’re all going to be in an environment that’s so conducive for faith. And we’re asking that God would use that camp that use He would use the preaching, the worship, the small group times, even the fun breakout stuff that God would use all those things to bring some of these students to saving faith.

So we know here at Sauldam Baptist Church that if we work according to our capacities, we get what we can get. But when we work according to God’s capacities, we get what He can get. So that’s why we’re setting aside this time to pray because none of us can save. None of us can transform. None of us can rescue anybody out of the bondage of sin. So, what I want you to do is grab a neighbor and we’re going to pray that God would use summer camp to save some of our students. Y’all begin praying and I’ll put a bow on it here in a moment. Thank you, guys.

Father God, you say that the message of the gospel is your power to save. Lord, the the good news, Jesus, of what you have done, that is all it takes. It doesn’t take a sinner’s prayer. It doesn’t take fog machines and special lights. It doesn’t take just the right type of environment or anything like that. All you need to put it in a weird way like that because you’re God and what what does God need? All you need, God, is for us to share the gospel. Lord, I pray for the middle and high schoolers that we’re going to take to camp. And I’m begging that you would save some of them. I’m begging that for the first time perhaps the gospel would be abundantly clear for them and that they would embrace it and they would give their lives to you, ready to take up their cross, ready to sacrifice whatever you are calling them to sacrifice in order to follow you.

God, I pray for the very same thing to happen right here this morning. That for the very first time, somebody would be saved. Somebody would give their life to you. That the gospel would would get into their heart. Please, Holy Spirit, I’m begging you get a hold of this that you would you would infuse what I have to say with your power. You would you would get me out of the way. This would be all you. Please, God, you do your work of transforming us, of making us look a little bit more like your son. We love you and it’s in your great name we pray. Amen. Amen.

Well, it is only 11:21, but my mind and my stomach are already on what’s going to happen an hour from now. if you’re like me, you need to eat every couple hours. Not because I’ve got any sort of medical diagnostics. I’m just hungry. I’m hungry all the time. Every Sunday afternoon, we get home from church, whatever time that is, and I sit down to an awesome lunch of a piping hot toasted sandwich. Okay. we have been making our own bread. I’ve been enjoying my own sandwiches, stuff like that for a couple years now. It began as like a it was a bit of a medical thing. I think at this point it’s just kind of a desire thing. And so we’ve been making our own bread for a few years. And I’ve come to learn there are a couple easy mistakes that you can make when it comes to making breads. But if you make that mistake, what you make is not bread. It’s something at best bread adjacent.

One time I left out the yeast. Yeast, it’s only a little bit. Jesus was right. Only a little yeast leavens the whole loaf. But I tell you, if there’s no yeast in it, the bread’s not going to rise. There’s no vibrancy. There’s no life in the bread at all.

One time I forgot the bread flour and I only used wheat flour. What I created was this brick of dough that looked a little bit like bread. But after a few tentative tastes, I realized this is inedible at best.

One time I left out the salt. Now, I wasn’t so far in the process where I couldn’t then add the salt. I just decided there’s only a little bit of salt in this recipe. Let’s just see what happens. Bummer. Yet again, each time the final product looked like bread. It had the right shape. It had some of the right coloration. But when I bit into it, when I cut into it, it was flat. It was disappointing and it was inedible because I left out some of the ingredients.

Now, here’s the deal. Just like how bread needs every ingredient working together, the local church needs every believer actively engaged. This isn’t me. This isn’t my thinking. This isn’t some other pastor’s thinking. This is just from the Bible. If you will go ahead and open up to Ephesians chapter 4. We’re we’re going to start at verse 7 this morning and we’re going to see that reality at play. How the local church needs every single member, every believer engaged in the life. And if you don’t have that, the what you create could be a bit flat. It could be a bit disappointing.

There are a few folks that I want to address specifically this morning. Two groups. The first I would call you the not yet believer. What I mean by that is you may be somebody who has heard a lot about Jesus in your lifetime. Maybe church is very familiar to you. You like coming to church. The message of Jesus is something you’ve heard over and over again. You may have read the Bible for yourself. This may also be one of the first times you ever stepped foot in local church. You may be invited here by a well-meaning family member or friend. Wherever you are in your experience with Jesus chronologically, maybe experientially, you haven’t actually tasted and seen how good He is. You do not yet believe. My prayer for you this morning, wherever you are on that spectrum, is that you would you would embrace the good news of Jesus.

The second group I want to address specifically this morning are those that are not yet connected. You may be at Sauldam for the very first time this morning. You may be here for like the third time or you may this you know today might mark two or three years of you being here. You’re faithful to attend Sunday morning services, or at least you’re here today. But your engagement in the life of our church doesn’t extend past what happens at 11:00 on Sunday mornings. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m really grateful you’re here right now, but there is so much more to be a participant of here at Sauldam Baptist Church that I want to I want to present a vision of church that would be compelling enough where you would say, “Yeah, I want more.”

So, without any more ado, I I want to give you the the main truth that we’re all going to take away from this this morning, and then we’re going to unpack the passage. So, if you’re a notetaker, I want you to write this down. This is the main thing that I believe God wants for you today. It’s that God’s grace fuels our growth. God’s grace fuels our growth.

Now, we can put forward a lot of effort and a lot of energy into the activities of our church, and we could accomplish a few things by the sheer force of our determination and our exercise, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We could also read some books and come up with some interesting strategies on How to grow our church or target our community. That’s also not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is a type of life and vibrancy, a type of growth that we can’t achieve. The type of which we prayed for earlier in the hearts of our students, the type of which we’re going to pray next month for the hearts of the kids that we’re going to welcome at VBS. God’s grace fuels our growth.

Now, before we look at growth, let’s just sit down on God’s grace. This is Ephesians chapter 4, verses 7-10. It’ll be on the screens, but I want you to follow along with me. Now, grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. For it says, when He ascended on high, He took the captives captive. He gave gifts to people. But what does He ascended mean except that He also descended to the lower parts of the earth? The one who descended is also the one who ascended far above all the heavens to fill all things.

Now, if your Bible is really good at connecting some of the dots between the Old and New Testament, yours might be like mine and it might have some of those words in verse 8 bolded or italicized. There might be a little mark beside it. You see what Paul is doing is he is quoting from the Old Testament. That is Psalm 68. So for us, we have to ask this question. Why in the world does Paul reference that? And why did Jesus come down? Why did Jesus descend? Why did He walk this earth?

Well, you have to understand what Psalm 68 was originally talking about at the time that it was written. It was a psalm dedicated to how incredible and how great and how wonderful God is to secure and rescue His people to put them in a place where they could worship Him. This is the type of song they would have sung as they were walking to Jerusalem to go celebrate the annual sacrifices. This is a type of victory song. Whenever your team wins on Saturday and you get to hear your school’s song, this is the type of thing the band would have been playing. They would have been playing Psalm 68.

What Paul is telling us is that while this was written thousands of years before Jesus came, the whole time God’s point for this psalm was to be about Jesus. This whole thing is about Jesus. It’s about Jesus securing a victory for us that we cannot achieve on our own. Why did Jesus lower Himself to do something for us? You see, God’s grace is not random. It is personal and it is tied to the victory of Jesus.

Bryan Chapell is a pastor. He is a Bible commentator and he writes it this way. Jesus has defeated our spiritual adversaries, making what captivated us in the bonds of sin His own captives. Sin, death, and Satan are now overcome by the power of our King. To put it in other terms, Jesus has conquered for you what has been conquering you. Jesus has rescued you from what you needed to be rescued from. Sin, death, and Satan have dominated us. They have dominated our world. And Jesus came to rescue us from those things.

God’s grace is His capacity to rescue us and to forgive us. And man, if you give me a second, I’m going to trust nobody else has opened this one yet. It tasted like somebody did. God’s grace is His capacity to rescue and forgive us. Christ came down to deal with sin, death, and Satan.

Sin is a legal state that we have before God. We come to church and I think that we kind of muddy the waters of these terms sometimes. What it means to sin. It means to cross the line of what God wants us to do. I’m at the line of the stage. If I stepped, I would fall down. The Bible says we’ve all sinned and we’ve all fallen down. We’ve all fallen short of the glorious standard that God has for us. We’ve all missed His mark.

Death. Death is the final enemy you and I will ever face. Aside from a couple extremely notable exceptions in the Bible, death is undefeated, we will all get to our deathbed one day. And guess what? We can’t beat death. Death dominates.

And Satan, Satan is the unseen force that we cannot defeat, which brought Adam and Eve and therefore us into the situation to begin with. Satan is the one who keeps us living in things we’d prefer to avoid. I don’t think any of us in this room want to be perpetually angry. Right? Does anybody in the room want to struggle with depression? Does anybody in this room want to envy and covet and be jealous of what other people have? No. But we are under an influence of the evil one who keeps us wanting things that in our right minds we know we should not want to want.

So may I offer for you this morning if if you are still under the burden of your sin. If you know that you have done wrong and you don’t know the way to get right. If you still feel buried under the fear of death because you know one day it is coming and you want a way out. If you feel shackled to things that you know are bad for you, Jesus has come to rescue You. Jesus left His throne in heaven on a rescue mission to secure for Himself a people that would love Him with everything. A people that cannot earn His favor. A people who cannot buy their own right standing with God. Jesus came to rescue us from our sin, from death, and from Satan. And He has come not just to save us.

What Paul also wants us to see in verses 11 through 13. God’s grace doesn’t just save. God’s grace fuels. God’s grace fuels our growth. Look at verses 11 through 13 with me. It says He, that’s Jesus, Jesus Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry to build up the body of Christ until we all we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.

What an incredible statement. Jesus has given leaders to the church so that the church would grow up and have the same mature stature of Jesus Christ Himself. In other words, Jesus says local churches ought to look like an adult where the head is of a proportionate size to the body. We’re not supposed to as a church look like a baby where the head looks a little too big for that body. If we met an adult that had the same head body proportions as some of our babies back in the nursery, we might have some second thoughts. We might say, “Huh, that looks a little different.” Right?

What Paul is saying is God’s design for the local church is He has given the church leaders so that the body would come into maturity to match the head Jesus Christ. By grace Jesus gives His church leaders as a gift. Those leaders what He tells us in verse 12, the leaders are not meant to do all the work. In fact, the ones who do ministry, look at verse 12. It’s not the leaders, it’s the saints, it’s the members. By grace, Jesus gives His church leaders not to do the work, but to equip the members to do the work.

And then Paul lists five types of those leaders. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers. Now, I put some of my theological cards on the table here. When I’m reading this, I do not think Paul is talking about the original apostles or the original prophets. I think what Paul is saying is every local church is being given leaders who embody these characteristics. I believe the apostolic office ended when the original apostles gave their lives for Jesus Christ and John died on the island of Patmos. I don’t think that we still have people who speak authoritatively over the church as apostles like the way they had back then. I also don’t think that more scripture is being written by prophets today.

No, here’s how I would define these. I would say an apostle that is a scent one who extends the mission. Apostles are really good at starting things. Apostles kind of come in. There’s a whole lot of energy. Things start getting things start moving. You have prophets. A prophet is a trutht teller. A prophet is somebody who speaks truth to power, who is not afraid to confront. An evangelist is someone who is gifted at sharing the gospel. It just flows from them. It’s very natural for them. A shepherd, that is a caring nurturer for a flock. That is somebody who walks alongside the sheep and coaxes them along in kindness. And then a teacher, that is someone who can explain God’s word clearly.

A local church needs a diversity of these gifts because the church matures only when there’s that only when there’s a diversity of gifts equipping the members to Act. Again, those who have an apostolic sort of bent, they don’t do the ministry. Prophets, they don’t do the ministry. Evangelists, they don’t do the ministry. Shepherds, they aren’t doing the ministry. Teachers, they’re not doing the ministry. They are all equipping the members to then go and do the ministry. That’s the order that Paul at least writes this in. Paul, it’s like he’s saying that leaders equip members because it’s members who will do the bulk of the work.

Think about it this way. I’ve got my own little radius, my own little network of connections. I’ve got a few friends at a local coffee shop that I like to talk to. There’s some people at some grocery stores that know my name. Now, let’s be generous. Let’s call it a dozen people that recognize me in the community. You probably also have a dozen to two dozen people in your community that recognize you the way some folks recognize me. I cannot go and share the gospel with the people that you know at the grocery store. Not in the way that you can. My job is to equip you for ministry so that you can take the truths of God and the heart of God and apply them to others.

And the same thing happens here. If everything was dependent on what Pastor Jeremy Simmons could do, ministry would only happen when I am present in the room. And we don’t want that. What we want is what we want is a a body of people who were all being released for ministry where they work, where they live here in the local church and elsewhere.

F. F. Bruce, he’s another former pastor. He put it this way. Within the unity of the body, each member has a distinctive part to play. Within the unity of the body, each member has a distinctive part to play. Later this week, you can go look at 1 Corinthians chapter 12 where Paul talks about this and he compares the local church to a physical body. And he says, “If we were all eyes, then we wouldn’t get anywhere because you wouldn’t have any feet. If we were all hands, then there’d be no blood pumping because you need a heart.” In the same way, a local body, it’s a it’s a body. We all have different roles to play. We’re all different parts.

So, what Paul is saying here is for a local church to be healthy and to be mature, there’s got to be a diversity of leaders all acting in it. And these diversity of leaders are God’s gift to that church. They are God’s gift. Look at verse 11 again. He Himself gave Jesus gives. Jesus is the one giving the gift of these leaders to local churches. So naturally, we pray to the Lord of the harvest. God, please give us more workers. Give us more leaders. Give us more laborers for Your harvest.

When leaders equip and members engage, the result, Paul tells us in verse 13, is that a church grows in unity in the faith, in the knowledge of God’s Son, and they grow into the maturity with a stature that’s measured by Christ. The same is the opposite is true when gifts are withheld or when only one type of gift is being used. I’d say the church malfunctions. It stagnates. It’s like bread without all the ingredients.

You know, part of the reason that I really enjoy the bread that we make is because it’s got a mixture of flour. There’s a little bit of the wheat flour. There’s a little bit of the bread flour. The wheat flour is what gives it its strength to hold together. The bread flour is what helps soften the flavor. You need the sugar to balance out the salt. You need the yeast to come alongside the other ingredients. Bread without all of the ingredients is not bread. Church without all of the ingredients cannot be the fullness of what God wants it to be.

You see, Jesus Christ is the head of Sauldam Baptist Church and He is the standard for our maturity and He is intent on continuing to give us leaders as gifts so that we would mature and measure up to Him. The stakes are incredibly high. Think about it this way. When newcomers visit our church, they ought to see a mature body of people that collectively resemble Jesus Christ. We need everybody engaged. We need every person engaged in the life of the church here at Sauldam because without everyone participating, we can’t be all that God wants us to be. And Paul outlines what that looks like in verses 14-16. I I say it this Way. God’s grace is stunted when we don’t engage. If the church is a body, then every body part matters. And when we don’t use our gifts or we don’t make room for others to use their gifts, Paul says there are three major blunders that we fall into. I’ll keep that bread theme going. We’ll use it that way.

The first blunder is verse 14. We’re like bread that doesn’t rise. I’ll read it for you. And then we will no longer be little children tossed by waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, by human cunning with cleverness in the techniques of deceit. When you leave the yeast out of bread or you use old or inactive yeast, your dough stays flat. It doesn’t rise. No matter how long you wait, that dough won’t become bread. It’s technically bread if you bake it, but it is underdeveloped. It is fragile. It gets tossed around. It gets broken up.

Without active participation from every believer, the church remains immature, flat. We are spiritually underdeveloped. When all of the leaders aren’t engaged, when all the members aren’t doing ministry, we are easily tossed around by false teaching and cultural pressure, and we never rise into the fullness of maturity that Christ has designed us for. The stakes are high.

The stakes aren’t just high that way, but it’s also in verse 15. I would say that we lose our flavor. Verse 15 reads this way. Speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into Him who is the head, Christ. When every member is not engaged in the life of our church and when there’s not a diversity of leaders using their gifts, we lose our flavor. Have you ever tasted bread that didn’t have salt or sugar? Probably not. If you buy your bread from the store, the reason that you crave bread, aside from the fact that I’ve been talking about it for a few minutes now, is because it tastes good. It’s got sugar, which our bodies are like hardwired to crave. And it’s got the salt, which attacks our other desires. Salt and sugar help give bread its flavor and its distinction. Only a little bit is needed for an entire batch of bread, but only a little bit affects the flavor incredibly.

When believers don’t engage the body, no matter how few, we can’t learn how to speak the truth in love. Some people, when everyone isn’t engaged, become harsh, like oversalted food, and you just want to spit it out. Other people become flavorless, lacking any sort of truth and love because they’re not engaging, and they’re like bread without sugar. It just doesn’t have anything. A mature church is one where everybody’s engaged. Where the language is seasoned with truth and grace, where our lives are flavored in such a way that we come across like we love the Jesus we sing about. A Christianity that entices non-believers to the gospel is one that’s modeled by people who speak the truth with love, whose lives match the good news that God has come to rescue us and there is a way of freedom and joy available to you. When people meet us, they are supposed to come away saying, “Wow, that was different and I want a little bit of that.”

Paul also says in verse 16, the final blunder though when everybody’s not engaged is that we become poorly mixed together. We’re poorly mixed together. Verse 16 says it this way. From Him the whole body fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part.

Something I’ve come to learn from making bread is that I can toss all of the right ingredients into the bowl, but that doesn’t make it bread dough. I have to mix it. And I’ve got to mix it well. I’m not saying three spins of a spoon in the middle. I’m talking a couple minutes of running it through a bread mixer or a lot of minutes of me getting in with a spoon to get all the stuff mixed up together. You can have all of the right ingredients in a bowl, but until you mix it, it won’t become dough. That’s what happens when believers stay isolated or disengaged. We are like the ingredients of bread on the outside of the bowl, never getting mixed into the middle, never contributing to the life in the middle. We may all be in the same room, but without love binding us together, we’re not a body. We’re not becoming bread. We are disconnected baking mix. Christ’s goal is more than just our individual maturity. It’s our unified maturity working together. You see, Christ did not just come to save you. Now, He did. He came to rescue you, but Christ came as well to rescue a people, a bride for Himself. He came to rescue a body of people that would love Him completely, that would be His body in this world as He, the head, is directing its activities. So, what would we look like if every person here used their gifts to help others grow? Jesus designed us to be an organism where every member is actively engaged, and His grace-given leaders equip members for ministry. That’s what His grace empowers. That’s what His grace fuels, and that’s the kind of church that He wants us to become together. That might require two moves of us. The first one would be this: for all of us to use our gifts for the benefit of others. It would require all of us to engage in this, to use our gifts to help others grow into maturity so that they can take something to the lost and the hurting people that they interact with every day.

If this was the Jeremy Show and I did everything here, y’all would be severely stunted. No pastor has everything a local church needs for it to be what God needs it to be. It’s not in them. I can only meaningfully minister to a few dozen people at a time. Y’all need Al. We need Donna. We need Buck. We need the crew up here leading us in singing songs for worship. We need Seth as a moderator. We need Arthur. We need everybody engaged in this. Which means if you are not yet connected, if you are not in a place where you can contribute, we need you. We need you. We need every person here using their gifts. If you don’t know where those gifts are, get involved in the life of our church and soon enough you’ll discover something that doesn’t make sense to you. That’s your gift. If you come up against something you’re like, “Why is this this way? This doesn’t make sense,” or there’s this need here, “Somebody should do something about it.” Guess what? You got the sight and the passion. You probably have the gift to meet that need as well. That’s the first move. The first move is that all of us need to use our gifts.

The second move then is that we need to help others discover their gifts. We need to create places where more and more people can use their gifts for the benefit of this church. Which also means, man, on a Sunday morning and on a Wednesday night, whenever you’re interacting with people here on the church campus, or if you’re in an ISI group on a Monday morning or on a Thursday afternoon when y’all are getting together, man, when you see something in somebody’s life that reminds you of Jesus, tell them that. Say, “Hey, when you were really kind to so-and-so, man, that looked like Jesus to me.” Tell them that. Or when someone does something that impresses you and is done for the kingdom, and say, “Hey, you did that really well. Have you considered using that more for our church?” We need to find ways to help others discover and use their gifts.

I’ll come back to the beginning as I start to wrap up the sermon. Here’s the deal. Bread is only good when all the ingredients are involved. Church only works when all of the believers, all of the members participate according to God’s design for them. Let’s be in a place where we can receive as many of those grace-gift leaders that God has for us so we can be the type of body that the head wants us to be here.

All right, if you will bow your heads with me, please. Father, thank You for today. God, You’ve been so faithful to Sauldam Baptist Church for, man, close to 200 years. You have given us leader after leader after leader, and I’m humbled to step into that lineage of men that have pastored this church. Lord, I want to do a good job. I know part of that task for me, Lord, is helping others discover their gifts and getting them into positions of ministry. Lord, I pray for all the members of our church that they would see themselves not just as receivers of ministry, but as active leaders of ministry, as participants in ministry, no matter what their credentials or their education or their spiritual background might be. Lord, I don’t know the hundreds of people that are connected to our church members. I don’t—I—I know the hundred some odd folks that call Sauldam Baptist home regularly. But God, I pray that You would release all of our people into ministry. I pray that You would help us to find avenues where they could discover their gifts and use those things for Your glory and this church’s good. Please, Father, would You help us to not be overly protective of our own little kingdoms here? Help me, Father, not to be overly protective of what I contribute to Saul. But God, help us to recognize when You bring a new shepherd into the mix that there would be places where they could nurture. God, when You bring a new teacher into the mix, there would be places, Father, where they can teach. New evangelists, God, that we would get behind them as they share the gospel and teach us how to do it, Father. More kingdom pushing leaders, these apostle type folks, God, that we would follow their lead. We would let them expand Your work. Father, the prophets, those that tell truth to power and aren’t afraid of confrontation. God, would we listen to them? Father, let us be a body that is hospitable to the movement of the head. Please, Father, we love You. We give ourselves to You, and it’s in Your great name that we pray. Amen.