Ephesians 4: 11-13
Theme: Ministry
Series: LAOS: The People of God
You Are All Ministers!
It was a fairly cold morning, January 28, 1986. I was in the seminary library working. A little over a month before, my father had died in a farm accident. I was a student working on my dissertation for the Doctor of Theology degree. I was not in the best of moods. I remember that I was on the balcony of the reference room when the manager of the seminary radio station came in and got me. He wanted me to see what was happening on the news. It was the space shuttle Challenger.
A little more than 60 seconds into the launch, the Challenger blew up into a huge red fireball and then great streams of white smoke and haze. The TV stations rolled that footage over and over again. I remember being shocked as I watched the parts of the Shuttle fall into the ocean knowing that seven people were in the craft. I could only imagine what happened to them. In fact, the press spent a lot time imagining what happened to the astronauts in their final moments.
In the days and weeks that followed, studies were done to find out what caused such a failure. Of course, when the Space Shuttle was designed, it was one of the most complex machines ever built. Many thought it would never work. They felt that the complexity would lend itself to failure. So, it was imperative that they find out what went wrong. A camera was able to pick up a small flame from the side of the Morton Thiokol rocket booster. Soon, the flame ignited the main fuel tank. It was discovered that an o-ring had failed. The o-ring is made of rubber sealed with putty. It was used to join different segments of the rocket. On the evening before, the temperature had dropped below freezing and the o-ring became brittle. Under pressure the o-ring failed at about 60 seconds into the flight. It became like a cutting torch, carving into the main tank containing hydrogen and oxygen and caused an unimaginable explosion.
It was probably the cheapest part, an inexpensive rubber o-ring that failed and caused a catastrophic failure. In a complex system, every part is important and when even the smallest part fails, disaster can occur. Did you know that is also true with a Church? God’s Church is a complex system. It is so complex that Paul describes us as a body made up of many parts. And in this important body, there are no unimportant parts. Just one failure can cause a catastrophic disaster. This is why we must pay careful attention to the health and life of the Church. Each one of you is important. When one of you misses church or fails to do your job, when someone is spiritually out of sync, the whole body suffers.
God has done something wonderful to us. He has called us to be his people, his LAOS. We are not a nation or an ethnic group. We transcend those limitations. What we are is the Body of Christ.
All living organisms must be fed, exercised, clothed and tended to. God’s church is no different. And he has devised a plan to take care of the needs of his body. All of us are important to the Body. When one hurts, all hurt. An unhealthy church is one where we stop paying attention to each other’s needs. If we are letting people fall through the cracks, then we need to make sure we seal the cracks.
This means that we are not passive members of God’s church. Rather, we are vital members whose functions are important to each other. If you sit back and do nothing, you are contributing to the diseases that can plague any church. I don’t mean to be harsh here, but I do want us to understand how vital each person’s responsible participation is to God’s Church. You are important to me and I am important to you, not because I am the pastor but because I have a function in this body and so do you.
One of the purposes of the Church is to equip the Saints. It is our responsibility to train each other to care and maintain the body life of the Church. The church is a body of born again, spirit-filled believers. God, in his graciousness, gave the church spiritual gifts. These are abilities, skills, and talents given to each individual in the church for the work of the church. Each one of us is equipped with at least one spiritual gift that should be used to care for and maintain the body life of the church. Some gifts may not be seen as gifts. But, being able to repair a building or fix the plumbing is as important to the Body as is the ability to teach the Bible or to offer godly counsel to life’s problems. So, you can’t say "I have no gift the body," we all are equipped to serve God.
According to this text, one of my functions as pastor is to equip you for the work of service. I am not the only teacher, but it is one of my main roles in Church. When we equip the saints, we equip all for the work of service. This word "service" is the same as the word ministry. We all have ministry to do.
Sometimes my role is to make you aware that you are already gifted and that you need to exercise your gifts. Some are under the impression that unless you teach a class or lead a Bible study, your gifts of ministry are not important. Nothing could be further from the truth. To use the body analogy again, the feet may not seem like a spiritual part of the body. But, let someone cut off your feet and see how limiting it is. The feet might not be good Bible teachers, but the Bible teachers could not get along without them.
We need to understand that the work of service applies to every gift, not just to preaching or teaching or some such gift. Sometimes, it is the practical gifts that are needed rather than the spiritual oriented gifts. For instance, I may visit a widow and it may be a profitable visit for her. But, it might have been even more important if someone had visited and fixed her screen door. That may have lifted her spirits even more and fulfilled a need in the Body of Christ. We need to understand that the work of service takes all forms.
The work of service builds up the Church and produces a healthy fellowship. A healthy Church is one where the members are committed to being unified in the faith to God and to each other. Jesus' final prayer before the crucifixion was that we all be one. Unity is a sign of maturity. And disunity in the church is a sign of immaturity, of a church that has not equipped itself for ministry.
Care and maintenance of the Christian life increases our knowledge of the Son of God. This is why we must teach the Bible to each other–spending some time in Bible study. But, we must also live lives that reflect Jesus to others–we become Jesus to each other by sharing his love. How much like Jesus are we when we do something physical for someone? If we teach a brother that God loves him, then we don’t use our gifts to minister to his physical need, we remain strangers to Jesus and he to us. Our gifts minister to the physical as well as the spiritual needs. If the house we meet in falls into disrepair, what does it say about the body that meets there? It may very well say, they don’t know Jesus too well.
The Church that properly equips its members, produces mature Christians. In the Greek it reads literally, a perfect, full-grown man (Wood, 59). The result of growing up is that we are no longer to be children in the faith. Children are light weight, they are tossed around by every wave that comes against them. Every strange idea is like a gust of wind that blows against us and we will stand if we are mature.
You may think that you are the equivalent of an o-ring. That is not a spectacular, highly visible, exciting part of the body is it? But an o-ring holds two parts of the body together. And look what happens when it fails to function, it lets go and a catastrophic failure takes place.
We are all ministers. Each one of us has ministry to do for the body. No one or no work is unimportant. Let’s be about the business of building up the Body of Christ to the Glory of God.