The Worthy Walk Described; Humility, Love, and Unity
Ephesians 4:1–3
Ephesians Lesson #111
June 27, 2021
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, we’re thankful that we have Your Word, that it is not the word of men, that it is the expression of Your thinking from eternity past. It is described in 1 Corinthians as the mind of Christ, the thinking of Christ.
“It is given to us in ways that indicate that it is indeed Your Word and not the word of men. And that as it was revealed by God the Holy Spirit through the writers of Scripture, so we have the same Holy Spirit indwelling us and enabling us to understand that which He has revealed.
“That doesn’t mean that it comes quickly or easily, but that He works in and through our study to come to a greater knowledge and understanding of that which You have revealed to challenge us, to convict us, to reprove us, to instruct us, and to give us guidance for and training in righteousness.
“So Father we pray that Your Word would challenge us today as we study it. We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”
Slide 2
Open your Bibles to Ephesians 4, continuing our study in the opening paragraph. Today we’re looking at the worthy walk as it is described by terms we find difficult to really understand: humility, love, and unity.
This is difficult for us, basically because every one of us is—no exception; there’s not one person in this room that isn’t—struggling with the corruption of your own sin nature, which screams loudly in your soul that it’s all about you. Mine screams that it’s all about me. The sin nature is totally focused on self-absorption.
This goes back to the original sin of Satan in Heaven in eternity past, where he stated his illicit ambition to be greater than God by five statements, each one of which began with the phrase “I will.” At some point in his mental attitude, the focus shifted to him. He wanted to be the focus of attention, not God.
The essence of all sin is rebellion against God. It’s the desire to accumulate to ourselves the glory and the recognition that should be due to God, focusing on us as a creature as the centerpiece of our lives. This is just the opposite of what God intends.
But in order to follow these commands that we have in Scripture related to being humble, being gentle—we’ll have to really work with that word a little bit because it doesn’t sound quite right to our ears. Neither does humility. We tend to think of humility as just being a doormat, so everybody can walk all over us and abuse us and take advantage of us, and it has nothing to do with that.
Then we have to love one another. We struggle with that. We want other people to love us certainly, but this loving other people, “Lord, you’ve got to realize that some of those people aren’t very lovable. It’s about all I can do to stay in the same room with them at times. I would wish to avoid them.”
But that isn’t what Christ did is it? When we were obnoxious to Him in the corruption of our sin and rebellion, He died on the Cross for us. That’s the standard. The next couple of lessons are going to be dealing with these particular issues.
Slide 3
By way of review, we’re looking at the 12 paragraphs of the second section of Ephesians. We will focus on this first paragraph, which focuses on walking in unity. Remember the first section, Ephesians 1–3, was all about the wealth that we have in Christ.
On the basis of understanding who we are in Christ and all that God has provided for us, the second section talks about how we are to live. This is all under the metaphor of walking, which is the picture of how we conduct and live our lives, our standards.
The first part of this section, Ephesians 4:1–16, is walking in unity.
Ephesians 4:17–24 talks about putting on the new man, a difficult section for some, partially because of awkward translations, but that is the idea.
We have already put on Christ, as we will see, but we are also commanded to put on the new man. The verb there indicates it’s like you put on a set of clothes.
Ephesians 4:25–32 is more negative; it focuses on not grieving the Holy Spirit. And then there’s just a whole list of our favorite sins there that we indulge ourselves in at one level or another, and it grieves the Spirit.
Ephesians 5 talks about walking in love.
We’re still in the first section, Ephesians 4:2–3, unpacking all that is indicated here by the Apostle Paul.
Slide 4
Ephesians 4:1. I’ve given you an updated amplified translation to help us reflect on what we have learned. It begins with a statement that is a conclusion,
“Therefore, I, the prisoner of the Lord, strongly urge you to conduct your life in a manner worthy of the exalted position to which you were summoned.”
Slide 5
I pointed out that the first part of this section, Ephesians 4:1–3, really summarizes and focuses us on what will be the main topic of Ephesians 4:7 to the end of the section in Ephesians 6:9: learning how to worthily walk with the Lord.
Ephesians 4:4–6 talks about what we have in common for every believer … the unity, the oneness that we have. The command is stated in Ephesians 4:3 that we are to maintain this unity. It is produced by the Holy Spirit.
It doesn’t say “create the unity.” We are to maintain the unity. This is a unity that is ours positionally in Christ, and we are to maintain it, the focal point of Ephesians 4:4–6.
Slide 6
By way of review, the term that is translated “beseech” is better understood in our language as “strongly urge.” It sets up a command that gets further expressed by the infinitive “to conduct your life in a certain way.”
Slide 7
It’s very similar in structure to Romans 12:1, which should be translated “I strongly urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice.”
Instead of just saying right off the bat, “present your bodies a living sacrifice …” by saying it this way, “I urge you to do that,” it sort of softens the command a little bit; but it’s still a command.
Slide 8
We are to walk worthy, as we’ve studied, which has to do with conducting our life in a manner that is worthy of the calling. I talked about “the calling” last week that this isn’t just a reference, as some translations will have it, to our invitation to trust in Christ.
It is a reference to our new position in Christ, an exalted position that we have in Christ that gives us a new identity. We are to walk in a manner that is worthy of that new identity that new exalted position to which we have been summoned.
Slide 9
Eternal Realities: focuses on those things that are related to our legal identity before God. Nothing changes about these things. We don’t experience it when we get saved; but nevertheless, it is something that is real.
As we read the Scripture, we discover that God did a lot of things for us at the instant of salvation, but we didn’t necessarily feel any different.
Just think about the thief on the Cross, who said to the Lord, “Remember me when You come into Your kingdom,” which is a clear indication that he has come to understand that Christ was the Messiah and that he’s trusting Him.
But as he hung there on the cross in incredible torment, he didn’t feel any better because he had gotten saved. He was still in incredible, awful, horrific pain.
Many people think that when you get saved, there ought to be some sort of emotional something or other, a rosy glow or whatever, that somehow you just feel uplifted and everything. And sometimes people do, but that is not necessary, and that certainly is no criteria for determining the efficacy of your faith in Christ.
These are the things that are ours in Christ, and at the instant of salvation Christ uses the Holy Spirit to identify us with His death, burial, and resurrection. This is our new position in Christ, called positional truth, sometimes referred to as identity truth.
Temporal Realities: our day-to-day experience as we walk with the Lord. When we are walking in the light, we’re in the circle, we are being filled by means of the Holy Spirit as we walk by the Holy Spirit.
When we sin, we’re not walking in the light anymore, we’re walking in darkness; hence, we need to confess sin to be restored to fellowship.
Slide 10
Our focus is on the left side of the chart, which we now have in Christ, and what we have learned in this particular study in Ephesians 2–3, focusing on this new identity.
The things that are introduced, for example in Ephesians 2:5–6, we are told that at the instant that we trusted Christ, we were made alive together with Christ, we were raised up together and seated together with Him in the heavenlies at the right hand of the Father.
At the instant you trusted Christ, you are legally identified with Christ and positionally seated with Him at the right hand of the Father in heaven. You can’t get more exalted than that as a creature, and that is our new identity.
During our study in Ephesians 2, we saw that God created a new man between Jew and Gentile. Now there’s a new entity that’s referred to as a new man in Ephesians 2:15, He created in Himself one new man from the two.
Ephesians 2:16, He reconciled them both to God in one body. Then we are being made a holy temple in Ephesians 2:21–22.
We are referred to in other passages of Scripture as the body of Christ, as the bride of Christ, as the royal priesthood and family of God, thus we are this new household that God has created from the day of Pentecost.
This is distinctive to this age, and it did not occur for any believer in the Old Testament. So we have privileges because of our position in Christ that Noah never experienced, Abraham never experienced. David never had it, Moses never had it. No one in the Old Testament had this.
But you and I have this! That’s why the Gospels refer to John as the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, because he saw the fulfillment of the prophecies in the coming of Christ. But he is not as great as the least in the Church Age. That’s who we are.
Slide 11
Ephesians 4:2–3 tells us what should be characteristic of this worthy walk. It begins with the phrase “with all lowliness and gentleness” in the New King James. The word that is translated as “lowliness” is “humility” in some translations. It’s difficult for many people to understand humility, especially if you use a dictionary which just says it’s the quality of humbleness.
Most people have trouble with humbleness. It’s really bad practice to define a word with itself. You run into the same problem when it talks about love. Love is an emotion. Well, biblically it’s not. It’s a mental attitude. It’s not an emotion. It doesn’t have anything to do with how we feel.
We have to take time to understand these words because we’re so self-absorbed and so focused on making sure that we have our rights observed and recognized, that we want to assert ourselves.
Anytime time that you feel like you may be taken advantage of, you can go to any number of places in Houston and find a course on assertiveness training. Yet that mentality runs counter to what the Scripture says.
It’s translated “with all lowliness and gentleness, with long-suffering, bearing with one another in love. “
Ephesians 4:3, “endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
These four terms are tough for us to deal with: lowliness, gentleness, love, and unity. Everybody wants to talk about unity, but the only way that humans attempt to achieve unity is to sacrifice everything that is distinctive. That is the opposite of what the Scripture says. It is the unity of THE faith.
It is not at the expense of any doctrine, but on the basis of what the Word of God reveals. We can’t have unity if people are making things up about what the Bible means in every other chapter, which is standard today. We have to look at these words, and part of what we have to look at is some of these little words.
There was a very well-known Greek professor at Dallas Seminary, S. Lewis Johnson, who was pretty much a generation before me; his last year was my first year. He used to say, “The big words are important, but it’s extremely important to pay attention to the connective words and the little words, because it’s so often we think we know what they mean and we don’t, and we have to take time to understand them.”
What exactly does “with” mean? I can hear you say, “Well, I know what ‘with’ means.” Do you really?
Slide 12
Here’s a list from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, ten different nuances to the word “with.” So which one is it? That’s where we need to take some time. Some of you may not know this; they’re listed in the order of their most frequent uses.
The first is the most frequent meaning, the second is the second most frequent meaning, and so on down the line. The first one is something that accompanies something else, and I’ll tell you right now that’s pretty much what we have here.
Slide 13
But in Greek it’s the preposition META. You have this twice in this verse. It is “with all lowliness” and “with long-suffering.” So it has a basically very close nuance in each of those two uses. But when you look at the last phrase “bearing with one another in love,” “with” isn’t in the original, but it’s sort of loaded into the participle that’s used there.
This is the first word, and the Greek lexicon indicates that it often shows something where two things are associated closely together. They take place along with or accompanying with. One example is of states of mind. That’s what we have here: a state of mind, a mental attitude, the mental attitude of humility.
Frequently what we discover if we do a search through where these words are used, is in a number of places these two words are used together to express this particular virtue.
The first word that is translated lowliness is the Greek TAPEINOPHROSUNE. PHROSUNE has to do with a mental attitude, that of lowliness. But we have to understand a lot of these words by their opposite. It is the opposite of self-exaltation.
It is not thinking of yourself more lowly than you ought to or more highly than you ought to. It’s to have an accurate understanding of who you are, and that’s clearly what Scripture teaches.
It’s not some sort of self-abasement. It is not the idea of dressing down or whatever you may think that it means. It doesn’t mean to be somebody’s doormat. It has the idea of recognizing who you are. We will have a couple of great biblical examples of its meaning.
The other word is PRAUS. It can be translated “gentle,” the dominant way in which it’s translated, or “humble” or ‘considerate.” “Meek” is also a major way in which it’s translated, passages like “the meek shall inherit the earth.” People wonder what in the world that means.
This is really important to understand as we’ll see in the case of Moses. Most of you thought Moses was just a doormat; he just let all those 3 million Israelites stomp all over him all the time in every sort of case. But Scripture says he was the meekest or humble man in the world at that time in the Old Testament.
That doesn’t mean that he’s letting everybody walk all over him, take advantage of him or anything else. We have to understand this context because it’s so important if we’re going to see this developed in our own lives.
Slide 14
A couple of verses we ought to look at that are tangential to this that helps us sort of fill in all of the various aspects and nuances: Colossians 3:12, “Therefore, as the choice ones of God, set apart to God and beloved.”
Notice I have retranslated this, instead of “the elect of God”—as we’ve studied the word “elect,” means choice ones, not chosen ones. It is translated that way in a number of other passages. It refers to the fact that they have certain qualities that make them choice or excellent.
The quality that we have that makes us excellent is that when we trust in Christ as Savior, then the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us. That makes us qualified, not anything that we do on our own. We become the choice ones of God.
“Holy,” is one of those religious words people have a hard time with, and the basic root meaning of the word “holy” is to be set apart to the service of God. When we are called saints, which is based on that same word, it’s emphasizing the fact that in our salvation, by virtue of our position in Christ, we are positionally set apart to the service of God.
Many Christians spend most of their life struggling with whether or not they really want to be set apart to the service of God. And there are others that say, “Well, I’m just glad I’m going to heaven and I don’t have to do anything else.” But we have been set apart to the service of God for a purpose. We’ve been set apart to serve Him. That’s part of our calling: being “the called” is to be in service to God.
We are the choice ones set apart to God and beloved. Then comes the command to “put on tender mercies—that means genuine compassion, not the pseudo-compassion of liberal guilt. It’s genuine compassion and care as an expression of love.
Mercy is close to that meaning and is the application of love to specific situations—kindness …” Both of these are part of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23.
Slide 15
“Humility—TAPEINOPHROSUNE—meekness—the first one is a little different variant. I think the first one is PRAUS and the second one is ‘humility.’ I didn’t put that on the slide—long-suffering.”
Notice it’s a command. The reason I want to emphasize this is the command is that we have put on Christ, positionally. How do we know that? Galatians 3:27, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” It’s very important to understand that.
Slide 16
Back to our diagram: We have the eternal realities on the left, temporal realities on the right, and here is this white circle, the circle of light, and at the instant of salvation, we are baptized by the Holy Spirit.
Now that doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit baptizes us. The Greek grammar is very precise. Remember what John the Baptist said? “The One who comes after me, He will baptize you by the Spirit …” That means Christ will baptize you by using the Holy Spirit to identify you with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.
That is being described in Galatians, that “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” Positionally, we have “put on Christ;” we are “in Him.” But experientially, in terms of our walk by the Spirit, we are to also “put on Christ.”
There are two aspects to this:
1) It is our identity, but
2) It has to be part of our reality, our experience.
That is the process of spiritual growth and maturity as God the Holy Spirit works in us.
What does it mean to put on Christ; what can we do to make that happen? This is a good question. I think the answer comes from that important passage in Galatians 5:17–25 where the basic command is to “walk by means of the Spirit.”
Then there’s a description of the conflict between the Spirit and the flesh or the sin nature. Then a description of the works of the sin nature and then the fruit of the Spirit. Notice, Galatians 5:22 doesn’t say the fruits of the Spirit; it’s singular, because all of these different attributes are the fruit of the Spirit, the character of Christ.
“Putting on Christ” is just another way of looking at growing spiritually where, as we walk by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit is manifesting all of these attributes in our life: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”
These are all different facets of the same character. It’s not like Christ is producing a little bit of this this week, a little bit of that next week, a little bit more next week, and then we get part of another diluted because we’re not walking by the Spirit.
It’s a complex that expresses the shift in our character. It is putting on the new man, as we’ll see in Ephesians 4. Colossians 3:12 says we are to put on Christ, so you could ask the question, how do we do it?
Slide 17
Colossians 3:13 gives us a participle of means, telling us how to do it, “by putting up with one another.” That’s what bearing with one another means. That’s a nice way to put it, but anybody who lives closely with other people is aware of the fact that sometimes you just have to put up with their sin nature.
I often tell people who are coming to me for counsel hoping to get married, “Well, do you really understand the sin nature of the other person?” Now you never will fully, I know that, but do you understand the trends of their sin nature?
Because if you’re both walking according to your sin nature, your sin natures better be compatible or you’re going to be in divorce court in about 30 seconds. You have to be able to put up with one another when you’re both out of fellowship, and you’re both letting your sin nature have its way.
That’s what this is talking about: sometimes we have to put up with one another. It’s the same word that Paul uses over in 1 Corinthians 13 when it says that “love bears all things”—it puts up with a lot. But that’s what love does … just think about God; He puts up with a lot from us!
I know He puts up with a lot from me, probably puts up with even more from you. I don’t know. We are to put up with one another, and the next participle is “by forgiving one another.” Now that’s where it really gets hard.
Peter thought he was doing a good job when Jesus said you need to forgive one another, and Peter said, “We forgive one another seven times?” Jesus said, “No, 70 times 7.”
In other words, infinitively. You don’t stop. It doesn’t have a small qualifier on it. We are to put on Christ. We do that by bearing or putting up with one another, and by forgiving one another.
Then Paul says, “If anyone has a complaint against another, even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do.”
Think about this… maybe I ought to just say, “Go home and reflect upon it, and let’s bow our heads and close in prayer, not deal with this too much.” We are to forgive one another, and look at the standard.
It’s an impossible standard, isn’t it? To forgive one another as Christ forgave you! This requires a lifetime of reflecting upon and learning about how Christ has forgiven you. What was involved in that?
First of all, the sin had to be paid for, and He had to go through excruciating agony physically on the cross, and then for three hours He went through excruciating agony spiritually as He was legally, forensically separated from God the Father when He bore in His own body on the tree our sin.
That’s what it means to forgive; that’s how He forgave us, and that is our standard. It’s not, “Well, you know, my cousin or my brother or my mother, they’re very forgiving. I just can’t quite be that good.” Well, they’re not the standard. The standard is Christ, so that is an extremely high standard.
Slide 18
We will see this when we get to the end of Ephesians 4, where Paul is talking about the things that we need to do or not to do in order to not grieve the Spirit.
Ephesians 4:32, “And be kind to one another, tenderhearted—there’s that word again, and it means compassion or the exercise of mercy to those who may not deserve it—by forgiving…”
We have the same word there that is in Colossians 2:13; it is CHARIZOMAI in both passages. The Greek noun is CHARIS, the word for grace. Here it means to be graciously forgiving to one another. It’s emphasizing the motivation of the forgiveness, whereas the other word that’s used for forgiveness is emphasizing the act.
This is emphasizing that which motivates the act; it is the idea of being gracious even though they don’t deserve it. “… by forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.” Uh-oh, there’s another comparison. This time it’s God that we’re compared to. So we forgive as Christ forgave, and now we forgive as God forgave. It’s impossible!
That’s why it’s a fruit of the Spirit, because only God the Holy Spirit can produce that in our lives as we walk by the Spirit and study the Word, and over time God the Holy Spirit will produce these changes in us.
We can’t do it ourselves. We’re not even supposed to try to do it ourselves because we can’t. The sin nature cannot produce the virtues of the fruit of the Spirit. Only the Spirit can do that.
Ephesians 5:1—that chapter division is that a bad place. We are to be kind to one another by forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you—“Therefore, be imitators of God.”
See, it’s another high standard. Paul wants us to understand this is impossible. This is only going to come about if we’re walking by the Spirit.
Ephesians 5:2, “And walk in love—conduct your lives on the basis of love—as Christ also loved us—there’s that comparison again—as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling aroma.”
Slide 19
That takes us back to John 13:34–35. Actually the Old Testament commandment from Leviticus that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves gives us a much lower standard. It’s quoted in Galatians 5:14 that we are to love one another as Christ loved us.
Galatians 5:16, it’s, “walk by the Spirit,” and by the time we get to Galatians 5:22, love is the first fruit of the Spirit. The emphasis all through the Scripture is we just can’t do this on our own.
Jesus said, John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another—not love your neighbor as yourself, but—as I have loved you.”
That’s the standard, implying several things. First of all, it implies the fact that we’re taking time to read the Scriptures to come to fully understand how Christ loved us. Passages like:
John 3:16, “that God loved us in such a way.” This is the example of God’s love.
Romans 5:8, “God demonstrated His love for us.” This is how Christ loved us, and that’s the standard, that we are to love one another.
All of this is just background for further understanding how these parts fit together, being humble, thinking in a pattern of humility and gentleness, which has another sense to it.
Slide 20
Colossians 3:10, “and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him.” We have put on the new man.
Now here, because we have put on the new man, we are renewed according to knowledge, the knowledge of Scripture. That’s why we keep emphasizing the importance for every believer, that we all need to be reading through the Scripture over and over and over again, immersing ourselves in Scripture.
A lot depends on your schedule, but this is the tool God the Holy Spirit uses to reshape us; we have to be reminded. This is the purpose of Bible class, so that we can dig deeper into all of these things.
Romans 13:14, “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh—that is, the sin nature—to fulfill its lust.”
Slide 21
That was TAPEINOPHROSUNE. The other word, PRAUS or PRAUTES, is translated “gentle” or “gentleness,” “humility,” “considerateness,” “meekness,” part of the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. All of these are being worked on together.
Slide 22
Two great examples in Scripture of humility:
1. Moses, from the Old Testament, Numbers 12:3.
In Numbers 12:1, you discover that his dear sister, Miriam, and brother, Aaron have joined together in a conspiracy against him because they’re jealous of the fact that he has remarried, and is doing all of these things. He has more authority than they do, and that’s really the problem.
After describing this circumstance, Numbers 12:3 is a parenthesis. God the Holy Spirit is giving him this information, and Moses is writing it down, “(Now the man Moses was very humble—the Hebrew is translated in the Septuagint with TAPEINOPHROSUNE meaning humility—Now the man Moses was very humble, more than all men who were on the face of the earth.)”
What does that mean? I’ll give you a hint: it means he is under the authority of God. The contrast: Miriam and Aaron are in rebellion against the authority of God. No matter how rebellious the Israelites got … there’s the rebellion of Korah and the priests and two or three others.
Whenever that happened, what did Moses do? He went to the Lord in prayer. He was submissive to the will and plan of God. That’s the essence of humility, being properly related to the authority of God and knowing who we are and knowing our role.
Slide 23
2. Jesus.
Matthew 11:28–30 Jesus said, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
What’s the context? See, it’s real easy to take these verses out of context. The context has been Jesus’ fight with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and their burden of legalism that they are placing on everybody. They just were putting all of these additional requirements on everyone.
The Mosaic Law has 513 commandments. After the return from Babylon, the religious leaders took each one of those saying, “In order to not break the Sabbath, for example, we have to come up with a bunch of rules that will keep us from even getting close to violating the Sabbath law.”
So they would add additional rules. This is called putting a fence around the Law. Later on after the first century, another fence is directed around the Law, so it’s just a lot of man-made rules.
Jesus is contrasting Himself and grace to the legalism of the Pharisees. Matthew 11:28, “If you go to them, they’re going to put a burden on you, but if you come to Me, I will give you rest.”
Matthew 11:2, “Take My yoke upon you.” That was the language the rabbis used in talking about the Law—it was a yoke. So if you were under this Rabbi you had that rabbi’s yoke; if you are under that rabbi you had that rabbi’s yoke.
Jesus said, “Take My yoke upon you … for I am gentle and lowly.” There are our two words used together: gentle and lowly. He is meek and lowly. The first word is PRAUS and the second word lowly is TAPEINOPHROSUNE. The idea is He is gentle.
This word really needs to be understood in light of the context in which it is found. Aristotle talked about the fact that humility was in between being harsh and just being rolled over, basically. It’s in the middle. It has the idea of not being harsh, not responding to somebody with irritability or impatience. It is being understanding and careful with them depending on who they are.
TAPEINOPHROSUNE is Jesus’ humility, and that means He is totally submissive to the authority of the Father.
Slide 24
We always get this picture from liberals who never know how to handle the Bible correctly, and they always talk about Jesus, meek and mild, but they can’t really figure out what to do with these passages like John 2:14, which happened the first time He went to Jerusalem for Passover.
He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves and the moneychangers doing business. He wove together a weapon and began to whip them and turn the tables over and chase them out of the temple, because He was cleansing the temple.
Now that’s not “Jesus, meek and mild,” so the liberals will take their little razor blade and cut this verse out because it doesn’t fit their pusillanimous view of Jesus.
Slide 25
At the end of His ministry, in that time period between the entry into Jerusalem and the crucifixion, He goes to the temple, and He goes through these series of interrogations by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the chief priests, and the lawyers.
Matthew 21:12–13, “Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. And He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” but you have made it a den of thieves.’ ”
He gets rid of the people who are abusing the poor, the lame, and the crippled. Once He does that, they come to Him and He heals them.
Slide 26
The ultimate illustration of humility is in Philippians 2, where we will end this morning.
Paul is challenging, exhorting the Philippians, Philippians 2:3, “Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit.” That’s how we understand what humility is. It is the lack of self-absorption. It’s the attitude “it’s really not all about me it’s about you,” serving one another.
“Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit—the opposite of humility—but in lowliness of mind—TAPEINOPHROSUNE—let each esteem others better than himself.”
That’s a good way to understand what humility is, but the best example is given in the next paragraph, which expresses what Jesus did at the cross.
Philippians 2:8, “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death …” He humbled Himself. He submitted Himself to the authority of God no matter what it might cost Him to do the right thing. That’s what humility is. It is not being a doormat.
It is being submissive to the will and plan of God. It is thinking accurately about ourselves, not in an inflated sense, not being filled with selfish ambition and conceit, but to understand that we have been called.
This calling, this exalted position, is to serve the Lord, and to serve the Lord we have to first learn and grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I was told as a young pastor, “Pastor, if you want to grow this church, as soon as somebody comes to church, you need to give them a responsibility,” I said, “No I don’t. I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know if they know the Word. I don’t know if they walk with the Lord.
If they don’t know anything about the word, they need to sit under my ministry and really absorb the teaching for at least two years before I give them anything to do.” You can’t just give a newborn baby something to do. They’ll mess it up.
Slide 27
What happens as a result of Jesus humbling Himself? God is the one who exalts Him. We are not to exalt ourselves. We are to humble ourselves and let God exalt us in due time.
Jesus, because of the crucifixion, is exalted by God, Philippians 2:9–10, “Therefore God also has exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and those on earth, and of those under the earth.”
Christ died on the Cross for our sins. That’s the picture of humility. We are to serve the Lord as the Lord Jesus Christ did. Even though He was perfectly God, He did not look at it as something to make an issue of, and He served the Lord.
Scripture teaches the only way to salvation is for us to recognize the Christ did everything and we simply accept it and believe it.
Closing Prayer
“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to study these things. It is difficult for us as human beings with an arrogant sin nature to truly understand concepts like humility and gentleness in this sense, to understand what it means to love one another, and what it means to forgive one another and have the unity of the faith.
“Father as we probe these verses help us to understand and to conceptualize what this means, and we pray that as we study these things that God the Holy Spirit would use it to produce in us this fruit.
“We know it doesn’t come quickly. It comes in stages and incrementally. But as we study, as we grow, as we walk with You, God the Holy Spirit is the One who takes Your Word and produces that growth and that fruit. We pray that we might see that.
“Father, we pray for any who may be listening today that’s never trusted Christ as Savior, that they would come to understand that we do not earn our salvation, it doesn’t come because we forgive one another, because we’re humble. It comes because Christ humbled Himself and paid the penalty for our sin on the Cross, and all that is left for us to do is to trust Him.
“The instant we form those thoughts in our mind that Christ is indeed our Savior, the One who died for us, at that instant You know that we have trusted Him and we are made alive again. We are born again, and we have new life. Father we pray that any who are listening that have never trusted Christ would understand it in a very clear way. We pray these things in Christ’s name, amen.”