Maintain the Unity of the Spirit

November 2, 2025 · Pastor Max Curell · Ephesians 4:1-6 · Ordination

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Sermon Notes / Transcript

Ephesians 4:1-6 — Maintain the Unity of the Spirit

Speaker: Pastor Max Curell
Date: November 2, 2025

Thank you. Good morning. How's everyone today? My name is Max Curell. I'm from Bloomington, Indiana. I'm one of the pastors at Trinity Reformed Church there. We have quite a history with the Coughlins.

Not as much history as you have, but we do have a long history with them. It's a real privilege for me to be able to speak to you this morning and to share from God's Word with you. I've got to meet some people already today, and that's been good.

Have you met anyone new today? Anyone meet anyone new today? It's going to be easy today because there are a lot of people here that are guests. It's difficult for me to meet new people, as I don't know if you have that same problem. I always have a little bit of difficulty just cold turkey meeting people.

Not simple. It would be a lot nicer if I knew I had something in common with them that I could start right off with. I met David, and I found out that he grew up on a farm, a dairy farm, which made it easy for me. Then we started talking dairy farms.

You might go to a convention of plumbers and you would say, "I've got something in common with all these guys. I can talk about plumbing," or a homeschooling convention, or whatever kind of thing you might be at. It would be easy to sit down and talk to people.

But here we are today, a very diverse group of people from a lot of different places, a lot of different backgrounds. And we are here meeting together, connecting, and we are groups of God's people who have come together in this place. This is what gives us an advantage.

We may be from Kansas, we may be from Indiana, or other foreign, exotic parts, but if we share in Jesus Christ, we have something significant in common. And this morning I chose a text from Ephesians chapter 4 because I wanted to talk about things that we all have in common. I hope that we all have in common.

It's a text that's full of a lot of things, and you could hover on just one word. It's short verses, but just one word in any part of the text you could hover on for a long time. I'm not going to hover on them for a long time.

But you could, so if I don't say the thing that you're looking for today, I'm sorry. We can talk about it later. That'd be great. There's just so much packed into these six verses of God's Word.

Paul begins it by referencing his imprisonment for the gospel. He was in prison for preaching Jesus Christ to Jews and to Gentiles. And so this is one of what are called the prison epistles, where he wrote epistles to Ephesians, to Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon while he was there in prison. And he had some time because he was in prison.

Scripture Reading

So let's read together God's Word from Ephesians 4, starting with verse 1.

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Opening Prayer

Let's pray together.

Father, we thank you this morning for your Word, for this particular word from you.

Father, we ask this morning that you would open our eyes and our hearts to understand your Word, and that through it we might find life in Jesus Christ, and that we might be changed for following you more specifically, more directly, more wholly with our lives. Help us, O Lord, and thank you, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Walk Worthy of the Calling

So Paul says, "I therefore urge you." And pastors always want to say, whenever you read "therefore," you want to find out what it's there for. "I therefore urge you."

This "therefore" is talking about the first three chapters of the letter that are expounding on the blessings derived from us being in Christ.

He says in Ephesians 1:3:

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places."

"In Christ" is a theme throughout the New Testament. We did a summer Sunday school class about this theme at our church. It was a great time because it was all about the reality of being in Christ, what theologians call union with Christ, that we are united to Him. And it was a wonderful time.

All through the New Testament, you find these words. If you don't believe me, go home, get on your phone app of your Bible, and do a search for "in Christ," the words "in Christ," and you'll see that it's dozens and dozens of times it's talked about.

It was just a common reality. It was something that they understood of themselves more than they understood the name of being Christians. They understood themselves as being the people in the primitive or early church. They understood themselves as being the people who were in Christ. This is something that's true of everyone who belongs to Jesus Christ.

And this idea of spiritual union is so important. It is profoundly important. And I have some I call "old dead guys." They're like old theologians that have been gone for a long time, but we like to read the old dead guys because they say a lot of really good things, right?

They're dead, but they're not. They're with God now, right? But a lot of them talk about this idea of spiritual union. And one of them says:

"It is now very generally neglected. The expression spiritual union is unknown in most professing Christian circles. And even where it is employed, it is given such a protracted meaning as to take in only a fragment of its precious truth."

Protracted means it's like deferred. It's a deferred meaning. It's understood to be in the future.

We're all thinking about our union with Christ being something for heaven. That's what it's all about. When he's saying, no, this is something we can believe and enjoy and understand now, knowing that we can taste and see right now that God is good, as it says in First Peter, or that we may partake in and taste of God's glory now.

Have you guys ever sung that song, "It Is Joy Unspeakable and Full of Glory"? Is that something they've ever sung here? Maybe that's too, I don't know, that must be too Michigan. That's my background.

Joy unspeakable and full of glory, full of glory, full of glory.
Joy unspeakable and full of glory.
And the half has never yet been told.

Okay? But it's something that we understand now.

First Peter 1:8 says:

"Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him, and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory."

This is what we have.

Another one of those guys named Matthew Henry said:

"There is much of heaven and the future glory in the present joys of improved Christians. Their faith removes the causes of sorrow and affords the best reasons for joy."

So here in chapter 4, the apostle marks a transition from those things that we have from God into some things, exhortations of how we should live, how we should comport ourselves since we are in Jesus Christ. How should we then live?

It says, "I urge you." I was thinking about this word, "urging," and we don't think about urging. Have you urged anyone to do anything this week? Have you done any urging?

We do a lot of general kinds of calls to people, right? But urging is not a general kind of anonymous call to something. One might invite a friend to an event, but that's very different from pleading with them, urging that they be there.

There's an intimate pleading involved in what Paul is saying because he feels a sense of responsibility for the people that he's writing to. And what does he urge them to do? He urges them to walk in a manner worthy of the calling. This is a common theme in Paul's epistles.

Common theme about urging men to walk worthily, worthily.

I asked my wife when we were driving over through, I can't remember where we were. We were in Missouri, yeah. It was in Missouri, not Illinois. I asked her, "Do you think that people in the church today urge people to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord?"

We had a long talk about whether we thought people urge one another to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. I won't tell you how the talk went.

I can say this: We all in the church do a lot of urging. We do a lot of urging people to do things. I'm not sure how much urging we do to get them to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, but we do a lot of urging to walk in some manner, right?

Christians are supposed to accommodate themselves to the gospel and the glory to which they're called. This is our vocation. This accommodating oneself to the gospel is what Paul goes on to talk about as he goes into verse 2.

Humility, Gentleness, and Patience

He says you're supposed to do this with humility. You have humility. And he's about to go, in the book of Ephesians, in the rest of chapter 4, he's about to talk about gifts that God gives to the church.

And he does this in other passages of Scripture where he talks about gifts. But he starts off by saying, "Hey, have humility," because you don't want to go into the idea of gifts as a proud group of people.

He says this in First Corinthians because the Corinthians were a proud group of people, and they were in a lot of trouble because they were proud about their own gifts and they were lording it over other ones in the church with their gifts.

He says the same thing in Romans 12, just before he talks about God giving gifts. He says:

"For by the grace given to me I say to every one among you, that he should not think of himself more highly than he ought to think."

Don't think of yourself as exalted. Paul talks then about these assignments of gifts.

I enjoy sometimes in worship services looking over the congregation back home and just watching people as they worship. Because it's interesting to see. I have the privilege of knowing a lot about the people in our church.

I know a lot of the things that they've come from. I know a lot of the things that they're going through now. I know a lot of their pain, and I watch them as they're worshiping. And it's wonderful to see them be self-forgetful. They're just there, loving God, and they're not noticing the people around.

There are exceptions. There are people who will be noticing people around them, but for the most part, they're self-forgetful, and they're just saying to themselves, "I'm just happy to be here. I'm just happy to be here. God made me alive in Jesus Christ. It's a privilege for me to be here."

They're not trying to see themselves as set apart with some kind of superiority. There is a great humility in the realization that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, as it says in Galatians, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. We are all one in Jesus Christ.

We have this thing in common. Remember, here's a bunch of people. Here we are near Sabetha, right? Now I know where these places are. I was on Google.

I looked at this church building from Google Street Maps. You can read the building dedication stone in the front of the church using Google Street Maps, right? But from all of these places, here we are together. What do we have in common?

Well, if we are Christians, if we have received the benefit of Jesus Christ, we have in common God's salvation of us through Jesus Christ. Nobody should be superior. Nobody's better. We are all one in Christ Jesus. Humility helps us to just be happy to be here.

We're just happy to be here.

He goes on. He says, "And gentleness," or meekness, "with patience." Meekness is a quality of mild-manneredness and self-control. Mild-manneredness and self-control.

It can be for men or for women. They even talk about this being a characteristic of animals, animals that are trained. If you ever worked with horses, you know that horses are very powerful. You don't want to take any advantages and make any assumptions about horses when you're working with them because they're powerful creatures.

But you know that horses, when they approach a man, if they approach a man and they are not wild, and they trust that man or woman, they approach them, they have what's understood to be this idea of meekness, gentleness.

We all of us have the ability to be lording and coming on strong, but this isn't that characteristic. This is a gentleness where we're not approaching in aggression. If you've ever trained an animal, you should understand this isn't how you train an animal. But it's certainly not how God's people should act toward one another, with aggression.

But he says, when you do it, do it with patience. Not just being meek, but be meek for a long time.

It's interesting. I'm not a big Greek and Hebrew scholar, but this is an easy thing to see in Greek and Hebrew. In the Greek, right here, when it talks about patience, the literal words really can be translated, "take long breaths."

Because when we get anxious, we go. But if we're not anxious and we're patient, we're probably breathing.

In the Hebrew, it's different. It literally is translated in some places, "having a long nose." Well, why? Because if someone is impatient, what happens when someone is impatient and they get angry is that their nose flares and turns red and can be fiery. So to be patient is to have a nose that doesn't get red fast. Okay?

We're supposed to be meek toward one another with patience.

It takes patience to live together with other people. It takes patience because we're sinful and we're not perfect. We're moving forward. Gentleness with patience.

Bearing with One Another in Love

Then he says, "bearing with one another in love."

We have groups that meet in homes back home, and it's a place for family atmosphere, the kind of "I know you well" kind of relationships in the church, right?

And so when we have these groups, people will meet together and they'll be in a group for six to nine months, and then sometimes they'll come and say, "You know, I'm kind of tired. I'd like to try some new people." And we try to encourage them not to stop now and try new people.

Why? Well, because after six to nine months, you really get to know some people, and they really get to know you, and they're getting on your nerves, and you're getting on their nerves. And finally, there's an opportunity for some real work to be done in your life. And at that time, what do you want to do?

You want to skip off and find somebody else, right?

Well, this commitment to bearing with one another in love is like that. We want to shoulder the weight of relationship and responsibility for one another in love. And that means going through some things that might not be easy with that person, or they might be going through something that might not be easy that's represented by us.

And so we do this with love, joined together with love, bearing with one another in love, urging one another on in the faith.

Verse 3 says that we should be "eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." And "above all these things put on love," Colossians 3:14 says, "which binds everything together in perfect harmony."

The unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

In this sentence, Paul will tie together the attributes, the accommodations of our living worthy in the gospel to which we've been called. He's tying that together with the rest of the passage, to the truths around which the Spirit arranges us in unity.

So here's how we should act. And this unity should come to us. We have the Spirit who's living in us. This unity should come to us.

Now we should act this way, according to the gospel, walking in a way worthy of the gospel. Now here are the things that we confess together, the things that we, this is one of those places where I'm saying these words. It's one and two words, but they represent so much, and I can only say just a little bit about each one.

The Sevenfold Unity

Verse 4: There is one body and one Spirit.

One Body and One Spirit

We are one body in Jesus Christ. This is God's church, His invisible church. Those people who are believers in Jesus Christ, it doesn't matter if they're from Indiana or from Kansas, from wherever, it doesn't matter.

They are one. We are in Christ. We're not many bodies. We are one body. There are not many spirits.

There is the one Holy Spirit that dwells in that one body.

And Jesus talks about this in John 17 in His high priestly prayer. He says in verse 21:

"I pray that they may all be one, all of us, all of us, Bloomington, Indiana, Morrill, Sabetha, Kansas, all one. I pray that they will all be one, just as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You have sent Me. The glory that You have given Me, I have given to them, that they may be one even as We are one, I in them, You in Me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that You sent Me and loved them even as You loved Me."

This is a huge, huge prayer made by Christ concerning the church, its unity, and the life together of its people.

That they may become perfectly one. This is meant to be a testimony to the world that the Father sent the Son and loved His church as His own child, Jesus Christ. This is for us. We are united with God in Jesus Christ.

This is again part of that theme of union with Christ. Have you ever thought to yourself, "I am united to God. I am in God. I am in Jesus Christ"?

He said, "That they may be one, just as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us." Have you thought about yourself being in God? You're in God, united to Him, united to God within Jesus Christ.

C. S. Lewis said, "Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?"

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? But this is what Jesus prayed for the church, that they would be one. There is one body, one Spirit.

One Hope

Just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call.

We all hope for things, don't we? We could go through this room and think, well, what is it that we would hope for most? And I think over time, as we would talk, we would come to a biblical understanding of what we all hope for the most. If we asked one another and talked together, we would distill it down.

And we would decide that what we really hope is that we hope for that day when we'll be present with the Lord. It should be what we hope for. It should be what we hope for more than anything we hope for in this world. We should be hoping for the day to be present with the Lord.

This is the hope. We hope.

"Blessed be the God," it says in 1 Peter 1, "blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you."

Finally, he says:

"Though you've not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not now see Him," as we read earlier, "you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls."

We have a great hope.

Romans 8 says that the creation groans because it's oppressed by the situation of sin and the fall. And then it says that we ourselves groan inwardly as we eagerly wait for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. This is our hope, the great hope that belongs to our call.

We hope for one day being done with this body. This body causes me a lot of problems. It's the result of sin. This body is contaminated.

It causes me lots of problems. God's made me a promise: He's going to give me a new body. That I will be with Him and I'll have a new body. And I live in the hope for that day, but not just for the new body.

That's just like, what? The side dish, right? No, I'll be present with God. I will be present with God, enjoying Him, fully enjoying Him, without distraction.

One Lord

There's one Lord. One Lord Jesus Christ. He's the head of the church. Every benefit flows from Christ.

The Puritans used to like to create charts to show how God did the salvation and the damnation of men. There were orders of salvation and damnation, and one of those Puritans did this. It's a chart called The Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation. It was done by a man named William Perkins.

And what he does, you see this chart, it's just a visual chart, literally, it's a chart. And right down the center of that chart is a spine. And that spine is Jesus Christ.

And every single benefit that God gives to His people, every single one, comes directly from Jesus Christ. There is no benefit that does not come from Jesus Christ.

Nothing:

Nothing comes to us from God that is a good gift that doesn't come to us through Jesus Christ. Okay? There isn't any à la carte. "I'll take a little of this."

There's a single meal. And we see this actually demonstrated when we take communion, when we have the Lord's Supper. We realize that nothing comes to us except through Jesus Christ.

There's a single meal for us in Jesus Christ. He is the vine; we are the branches. Every ounce of energy, every ounce of life, every benefit from God the Father comes and flows through Him. He is the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through Him.

There is one Lord.

One Faith

There's one faith. Romans says, Romans 3, well, all through Romans, it talks about our faith in Jesus Christ that brings us righteousness. No one is righteous by the works of the law.

I was speaking with a young college student a couple of weeks ago. It was after IU won their last football game at home. Downtown, some guys had been talking with him. They brought him over to talk to me. We were sitting on a bench.

He was telling me about how he had come to IU to study, how when he left home he had gone to church, how he was working hard to please God, and how he had kind of stopped working to please God, and how he was miserable. And he had been crying for like, as he talked, he had been crying in front of others, but he was sitting with me, crying with me for 10 minutes, just crying about his life and where he was.

And I tried to explain to him what it says in Second Corinthians 5:21:

"For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."

I was trying to explain to him the righteousness that God gives us as a gift through Jesus Christ.

He just holds this righteousness out in Jesus Christ. Here, look at this. And I said to him, "It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?" Because all he was talking about was how he was working, how he was working, how he was working.

And he looked at me and he's shaking his head. "Yeah, that sounds too good to be true." That God would give this as a gift to you. But this is the faith that we have.

We have faith in God, in Jesus Christ, and the offer and the gift of Jesus Christ for salvation. This is where our righteousness comes. By faith, we are given righteousness.

One faith.

One Baptism

One baptism. There's one baptism. It has a lot of applications in our lives.

That we are baptized with water, but that isn't going to save us. None of us will be saved just because we got baptized with water.

If we're not baptized and filled with God's Holy Spirit, if we don't receive the Spirit of life, we won't have any salvation. This is the baptism that is of the highest importance, the reality of baptism in that God actually gives us His Holy Spirit and makes us alive through Him.

There's one baptism: Indiana, Kansas. We have all these things in common. Yes, we grew up on a dairy farm. That's not important, though.

What we have in common are these realities, these things from God that we gather around and order our lives.

One God and Father of All

There is one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Matthew Henry says:

"One God who owns all the true members of the church for His children. He's the Father of all such by special relation, as He is the Father of all men by creation. He is above all, by His essence and with respect to the glorious perfections of His nature. And as He has dominion over all creatures and especially over His church, and through all, by His providence upholding and governing them, and in you all, in all believers, in whom He dwells as His holy temple by His Spirit and special grace."

This is God.

Romans 11:33:

"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, how inscrutable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor, or who has given a gift to Him that he might be repaid? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever."

Forever and ever.

Did you grow up singing the song "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know"? Do they sing that in Kansas?

Okay. So I'll ask you, what about the Father? What about the Father? Jesus says in that high priestly prayer that He wants the church to know that the Father loves them even as He loves Jesus Himself. What about the Father?

I ask people this question. I read a book recently and it actually outlined this question. I ask people this question once in a while now:

Did Jesus die because the Father loves us, or does the Father love us because Jesus died?

Now, did Jesus die because the Father loves us, or does the Father love us because Jesus died?

You might make an argument that both are true in some way, but right on the surface, though, immediately you should have thought of a couple of verses. Right? John 3:16, you probably thought, "For God so loved the world that He gave His Son."

I find in conversation with many people that they're sure in their heads that Jesus died because the Father loves them. But I also find that when I probe a little into their convictions of their hearts, they're not nearly as sure that the Father actually loves them.

And I've thought a lot about why. And I think it's a lot to do with this idea of one faith. It's a lot to do with the reality that people have a befuddled view of their justification. Down inside they're mixed up. They're confused between working to earn Christ as opposed to resting in Christ.

And this becomes a constant problem with them. They just:

And you say, well, do we consciously think that? Well, I don't think we do a lot of times. I think unconsciously in our hearts, we really think that we're going to get God's approval by things we do.

Even though we know that Jesus Christ is a gift from a Father who loves to give His Son to save sinners, we still do this. And what happens because of it is we have the problem of perhaps never really experiencing what the psalmist calls the joy of God's salvation.

It sounds too good to be true, but it's still true that God has done this because He loves us.

We don't have a "Father Loves Me, This I Know" song, do we? But I think the Scripture is filled with it. The Father loves me. The Father loves me.

And this is why we have the ability to have justification in Jesus Christ and salvation.

Maintain the Unity of the Spirit

So, brothers and sisters, how do we maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace today? How do Max from Indiana and David from Morrill, how do we do this?

Well, God's Word shows us how we do it. We live lives worthy of the calling to which we've been called, worthy of the gospel that we have received. This is how we live together. And it's beautiful.

Is it possible? Is it possible? Forget about the Indiana people, they're all going to go home.

Is it possible for the Morrill and Sabetha people to work this way? Right? This is what Paul says. "I urge you. I urge you." This is very, very important.

Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which we've been called. Rehearse our shared participation in Jesus Christ and reflect on all the benefits that flow from Him.

So whether we're, you know, I was looking at state nicknames, people in the states. The Hoosiers are Indiana, you know the Hoosiers, and the Jayhawkers are Kansas, you know the Jayhawkers.

If you try to figure out where the name comes from in Indiana, good luck, because the best possible scenario isn't very flattering.

At least with the Jayhawkers, there was some gunpowder involved. Right?

But we're here today, whether from Indiana or from Kansas, joined through the Coughlins, right? Well, no, I'm schnookering you. That's only the occasion that brings us together.

We're here because we're joined through the great mystery of Jesus Christ and His bride. That's why we're here today. Okay? And this is what we celebrate together. This is what we know together.

Let us therefore together maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Closing Prayer

Would you pray with me?

Father, we pray that You would make these words come into us deeply, that we would be challenged to love and patience, long-suffering, caring for one another, bearing one another's burdens, and that we would do so seeing the way in which You have provided for us in Jesus Christ, seeing the ways that we have agreed together in the truths that You have put forth before us, living together in love, so that we may be a testimony to the world of Your absolute magnificence.

We pray and thank You, and pray this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.


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