Unity and Strength of the Body of Christ

Ephesians 4:16c

Sermon transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

We should pray and ask Jesus to give us light. I would say that if we once yield ground on this
issue of the possibility of a pure heart or a clean heart, if you once yield any ground to Satan in
that area then I think you slip automatically into a lower life and you slip out of the joy and the
delight of the Holy Spirit. So I think it’s just automatic.

Now I sympathize with everybody and myself, I sympathize with us all, that our society is so
wretched and so filled with all kinds of hateful thoughts and thoughts of hostility and enmity that
we’re used to it and it’s constantly filling your television screens and so we live in that
atmosphere. So I sympathize with anybody who says, “Listen there is no way you can live with a
white heart.” But that’s what Jesus has made possible for us and that’s what heaven is and that’s
what the fullness of the Spirit is and what a clean heart is and what a victorious life is and what
the sanctified life is and what being filled with the Holy Spirit is.

It’s a clean heart and that is what came home to me when I heard of this, that’s what I yearned for
and that’s what I saw was different in what these people were talking about, in particular this man
that I met. He seemed to be talking about a cleanness within that was better. Or that was
different or a degree of cleanness that was not what we always accept. I do think it’s possible to
talk about this together for years and yet unconsciously to discount it all and to reduce it to a
level which we can bear or which we can achieve by our own efforts. That level is not cleanness, it
is not purity, it’s a human attempt at morality.

So those hymns are good and I was thinking in connection with that it would be so good, we do have
these Methodist hymnals, and there are lots of those hymns that talk about that, “I want a principle
within” and I certainly was thinking that there is every place for you who have a beautiful voice,
and there is certainly a place for various settings of those hymns and great need for them. Because
of course the society has lost any idea of what that is at all. Of course the mess of the Catholic
Church has further even done harm to the monastic fellowships that stood for that. So there is a
great dearth of any idea of the possibility of a pure life within. Nobody seriously takes that as a
possibility.

So there is great need for it and there are many beautiful hymns that do need certain settings. I
don’t know, I was playing something on the radio in the car yesterday, and Irene said, “What’s
that?” I said the Gregorian Chants and you know how popular they have become. There is something
along that line, it doesn’t need to be a Gregorian chant, it doesn’t even need to be that feel but
there are some good settings in many of the hymn books and it would be well worth while working on
them. We could do it in all kinds of things. I could even envisage “Living Daily in Reality”
bearing one of those or at least a verse but I’m not pushing that because “Living Daily in Reality”
tends to be just for people who are thinking a lot. But certainly we could use it in “Try Church”
and use it in other things so I think there are a lot of words in these hymn books and various
others that say the thing very clearly and plainly. Steve will come this afternoon and dear love
him that’s what stirs him up, the whole business of a clean heart. But I think it is very difficult
in these days to distinguish and to make it clear how clean is clean! How absolutely clean is
clean. I think most people would hear you describe real cleanness and think that’s impossible and

it is impossible in a way but with God all things are possible.

Let’s go to the study today and it is connected directly to what God did in Jesus before the
foundation of the world. He made us in his Son and then you remember he sent his Son in each one of
us to this earth so that his Son could then come forth and fill us with himself and express himself
fully through billions and billions of people. That’s what all this is about and that’s why when we
talk about the body of Christ, it’s the smallness of the religious mind that has turned it into a
little organization here on earth. It is in fact meant to be the fulfillment of God’s plan for the
whole earth.

God’s plan is to fill the earth with his Son. That’s why he sends the spirit of his Son into us and
that’s why when we talk about the body of Christ you’re not talking about some little operation and
I know you will smile because we call the Vatican a little organization, but it’s not some little
organization like the Vatican or all the Protestant churches. It’s not that at all. It’s a great
humanity that expresses Christ himself. That is God’s will and that’s what he will bring about
after this earth is renewed. He will manifest that completely and that’s what he is about here.

That’s why I think it’s so important not to quickly consider putting this person in or putting this
person out because God himself is about something that is beyond us and so one may say, well you
know it’s true, the Church, each Church is not necessary all the body of Christ and the body of
Christ is not necessarily in every church. That’s true but still one has to take very seriously the
people who seem to have been drawn towards Christ. One has to be slow to say they are not drawn it
is not God’s will that they are to be part of the body of Christ. It seems to me the best that we
can do is say as far as we can see at this point, this person is in the body of Christ and our job
is to act as that body so that it becomes fully what God intends it to be.

So that’s what comes out if you look at Ephesians 4:16 and the continuity is got from reading from
verse 15. “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the
head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it
is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love.”
What is happening is Christ from really from even before he came to earth as Jesus of Nazareth,
right from the earliest days, from Abraham’s days and from Adam’s days; Christ himself was in the
process of manifesting himself through humanity. This is what he is doing more obviously than ever
before in this thing called the Church. And it’s from him that the whole body that is his, “joined
and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied when each part is working properly makes
bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love.”

So it’s important to see that we are not just a lovely group of Christians trying to persuade all
the others to believe in Jesus as their Savior. It’s not that at all, it’s Christ himself beginning
to be formed in individuals like us and then working in us so that together we manifest him and he
shows himself as he really is. That’s why it’s so important that we see that we have been brought
together by him and that he knits us closely together as he has knit the body together. The body
only operates because these fingers are attached to this hand and this hand to the arm and the arm
to the shoulder da da da. That’s the only reason it works. So it is with Jesus and the body.

The only way his body is able to work is if we are actually working with each other but you know so
often we think of it as, “Oh yeah we see that and I better work with Lucy. Lucy is the organist and
the singer so we work together.” That’s so crude, sure that’s the way human organization works but
Jesus working together is far finer than that. We experience a little of it when I say something

and you say it more tenderly. There correction well yes if I am awake there will be a correction
there. That or I do something and you do something privately that I never know about that actually
enables God to bring about a result that is beyond what either of us could do on our own.

So there are a thousand ways. So when one way we can see oh yes Irene creates the garden and she
does that because the rest of us can’t do that, that’s a very obvious way but in all kinds of other
more subtle ways Jesus uses her and her insights to correct you in your insights or to supplement
something that you see and then you come back and do it the other way around and then at the
spiritual level it’s happening again and again in invisible ways that none of us actually are aware
of. So that’s the beauty of it. It’s a wonderful fulfillment of all of us that we even don’t fully
understand ourselves.

That’s why it seems to me there is a great mystery; it’s not just a bunch of us guys as we say in
America. Bunch of us guys got together and it’s not that. It’s a fine spiritual supernatural
sensitive creation that God himself has brought about and is working to fulfill. If you say to me
do you think outside we could look pretty dumb? Sure, sure. You have only to look at the Bible to
see some of the people that he used and how dumb they were in so many ways. Yes undoubtedly we may
not appear as fine refined perfectly balanced spiritual replicas of Christ but God all the time is
working inside us to bring such a picture about.

That’s why it’s rather interesting to be together and to see each other in that way. If you say to
me is it right to talk about Lucy’s failure to organize in this way or my tendency to be dominating
in that way? Oh it’s not bad, it’s not wrong to do it but we need to see that that isn’t the
issue. Those aren’t the issues. The issues that we can fix by our human engineering are not the
ones that really matter. The ones that really matter and that produce life in some little Indian
guy that is sitting beside the Ganges at this moment, the life that enables God to do that is
concerned with a far finer arranging that he is bringing about in his body here.

So that’s really the kind of thing we are talking about. I do think that it is helpful at times for
you all to realize how precise the Greek language is that of course the letter was written in. One
of the advantages I think of Greek for me was actually the act of translation forces you to get down
into the details of the piece. So it might help you to see there on the top line that’s the Greek
and of course on the bottom the fourth line down that’s the English transliteration so that in that
first block, ‘from’ that Greek word is ‘eh’, ‘xee’, ‘ex’ and you can see we translated it into ‘ex’
in English letters. So actually I should pronounce those English letters, you’re pronouncing more
or less what the Greek is. And that is ex ‘hou’ [who] ‘pahn’ to [taw] ‘soma sunarmologoumenon kai
sumbibazomenon’ and then ‘dia’ is ‘through’ and da da da.

So you can see that, you can see how it runs from whom the whole body, fitly joined together, that’s
one of those compound words and it’s interesting that’s the passive. So it’s being fitly joined
together, being fitly joined together by Christ because it’s from whom. It’s from him that that
being fitly joined together takes place. It’s not us fitly joining ourselves together it’s being
fitly joined together from Christ, it’s his energy that is doing that. So that’s why we talk about
the body as being a living body with Christ actually giving strength at this moment. So you almost
have to take it and think of it as the plants outside. The plants are not something that yields,
Irene cuts this bit off and that’s all that happens, then she cuts the other bit off, no because she
can’t make it grow after that.

Somebody is making it grow inside; it’s a living experience that the plant is having. That’s what

the body of Jesus is. So you can say oh we’re doing this, big deal. We don’t produce any strength
at all. It’s Christ that produces strength in us. Fitly joined together, ‘kai’ and
[sumbibazomenon] compacted and that’s the word that old Tyndale translated as knit together. So
it’s as if the first compound word ‘sunarmologoumenon’ is God made us to be joined together but the
joining together, the being knitted together is something that Christ himself is doing daily. So
God made us to work together but Christ is the one that actually does that knitting together.

That is why things that you are going through on the road are so important because Christ during
those is making you closer to somebody else here in the body or fitting you to be joined to them or
being joined to them during a phone call in a way that you don’t even understand. Compacted by that
which every joint supplies and the way that goes is you can see is ‘dia’ is ‘through’ by every
joint ‘afaes’ of the supply or by the supply of every joint. The best translation we can do in
English is, “by that which every joint supplies.” The joint is not just the elbow; the joint is the
muscles and the ligaments. So it’s the joints, Christ gives strength to those joints to join them
together. Some people say those are the pastors and the teachers, no the ordinary obvious
translation is that every one of us is in some way a joint where a joining force that brings us
together. It’s something that we do for each other and with each other. Of course you can see
that’s why the pure heart is so vital because you are affecting how close another person feels to
you or how they understand you or how they fear you or how they feel they have to walk on eggs round
you or how they are being drawn to you invisibly.

They are all affected by the purity of your own heart towards Christ and to them. So that’s why the
ligaments are so vital here in the body of Christ. They’re not just the joints you see, it’s not
just the joints, it’s the ligaments and muscles that hold those bits together. That is going on all
the time according to the ‘energeian’, effectual working in the measure of every part. So each part
receives different degrees of Christ’s strength and life in different ways and in different measure.
The ‘energeian’ is his actual working. He is actually moving now. I think often we don’t get
that. We think oh no my joint and my body it just keeps going independent. God made it and he now
has nothing to do with it but of course that’s wrong. We know that. He is holding it all together
but more than that in his body he is himself actively engaged in drawing us towards each other and
actively engaged in enabling us to cooperate with each other in his work.

He is actually alive doing this. We think couldn’t be, impossible, nobody would have that kind of
love for us. But that’s what this means that our Father watches every second of our lives and he is
watching out all the time for ways to strengthen us so that Christ his Son is fully manifested in us
together. So it’s a fine thing. So I talk in my simple way, the books you know, you’ve plenty to
do. You can spend the rest of your lives just getting these books on the web, yes but that’s only a
little part.

There is a magnificent spiritual ministry to take part in that Christ is all the time training and
preparing you for it together. Of course it changes the way you look at each other. I mean you can
say, “Oh yeah Marty can sing and Lucy can play so maybe they could get together and sing. Or Peggy
is good, she can do this.” But it’s a crude idea of the beauty of Christ and he is involved in
doing a far deeper work than that. That’s what comes down you know when we get into really looking
at the Greek. By the strength that comes in each part and then ‘taen auxaesin’ for the increase of
the body maketh onto the edifying of itself in love. So from whom the whole body makes an increase
of itself so that it is built up in love and of course that is the whole purpose. The whole purpose
is to build up Christ in each one of us so that he is seen as he really is.

So that when we know it’s very hard for us to imagine what it will be like at the end of this life
but it’ll be something like seeing Christ as he is with everyone of us a vital part of him and
setting forth a particular beauty of his. In some amazing way he then will really rule the universe
through all of us and we will take part of that. So each of us will be actually part of glorified
Christ, so that’s part of what is taking place here. It’s very deep and beyond anything I ever
conceived but we do need to begin to glimpse that that’s the kind of thing that Paul is talking
about in this verse. The purpose of it all is that Jesus himself by his own strength and beauty
would build up completely the manifestation of himself through each one of us and through us working
together.

So I just encourage us to see that God is calling us to something far deeper that just an ethical
moral way of life or something far deeper than just running a little business so that we can get his
word out. It’s something far more complex and far deeper than that and it’s a great privilege to be
part of it.