Ephesians: Lecture 31
Speaker Notes
Equipping the Saints for Service
Ephesians 4:12-16
12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
14 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. 15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. 16 From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 2:10
10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Millard Fuller (1994) essay quoted by Jürgen:
We had a big time down in Charlotte, North Carolina last year. We decided to build an entire city block of houses – 14 houses in only 5 days. 14 houses in 5 days. We sent out a call. Folks came from 28 states, and 2 Canadian provinces. Former President Jimmy Carter and Roslyn joined us. People came from 86 Charlotte churches – it was really something. But you know what made me just about as proud as anything else? After we gathered the first morning and had our devotionals, like we always do, we grabbed our hammers and went to work. And there went an Episcopal priest, and the most conservative Baptist preacher in Charlotte, to begin hammering together. When you’re on the roof of a house, working for God, it don’t matter if you’re a conservative or a liberal. All that matters is that you can hit the nail on the head. Those two preachers didn’t know each other before they started work on that house; now they’re good friends. That’s “the theology of the hammer”.
The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas (1974 edition) (chapter 3 On Societies as Organisms pages 11-12):
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It is hard for a bystander not to do so. Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae together like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
What makes us most uncomfortable is that they, and the bees and termites and social wasps, seem to live two kinds of lives: they are individuals, going about the day’s business without much evidence of thought for tomorrow, and they are at the same time component parts, cellular elements, in the huge, writhing, ruminating organism of the Hill, the nest, the hive. It is because of this aspect, I think, that we most wish for them to be something foreign. We do not like the notion that there can be collective societies with the capacity to behave like organisms. If such things exist, they can have nothing to do with us.
Still, there it is. A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can’t be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.
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Hebrews 6 Biblegateway link
Habits of the Heart by Robert N. Bellah (1985 edition) (chapter 9 Religion pages 220-221):
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Today religion in America is as private and diverse as New England colonial religion was public and unified. One person we interviewed has actually named her religion (she calls it her “faith”) after herself. This suggests the logical possibility of over 220 million American religions, one for each of us. Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and who describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Shelia’s faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining “my own Sheilaism,” she said: “It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.” Like many others, Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific injunctions. We will return to Shelia later in this chapter, for her experience and belief are in some ways significantly representative. But first we must consider how it came about that “Sheilaism” somehow seems a perfectly natural expression of current American religious life, and what that tells us about the role of religion in the United States today. How did we get from the point where Anne Hutchinson, a seventeenth-century precursor of Sheila Larson’s, could be run out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to a situation where Anne Hutchinson is close to the norm?
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