Walk in a Manner Worthy

Scripture: Ephesians 4:1–16

Read Ephesians 4:1–16 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

I, therefore, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live worthily of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, putting up with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

(Ephesians 4:1–3)

The Walk Begins

The first three chapters of Ephesians have told us what God has done. The next three chapters tell us how we are to live.

The hinge is the small word at the start of verse 1: therefore. Paul has spent three chapters on the eternal counsel of God, the cosmic exaltation of Christ, the Spirit’s seal, the great salvation by grace through faith, the bringing of Jew and Gentile into one new humanity, the temple, the mystery, the prayer that the saints would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Now he says: therefore. The rest of the letter follows from what came before.

This is the order of all sound Christian ethics. Doctrine comes first; the Christian life comes second. The Christian does not work her way up to grace; grace comes to her, and then the life of the Christian flows out from what she has been given. The Lutheran tradition has always insisted on this order, against every attempt to invert it. The gospel is announced to the saint; the saint walks because she has been raised. She does not walk toward salvation. She walks because of salvation. The walk is the fruit of the resurrection, not the means of it.

The verb Paul uses for the Christian life from here on is peripateō, which means walk. The NET renders it “live,” but the picture in the Greek is of walking. He has used it before in this letter: for the way the dead once lived in their offenses and sins (2:1–2), and for the good works God prepared beforehand for the saint to walk in (2:10, where the NET says “so we can do them”). Now he uses it as the master metaphor for the new life. The Christian life is a walk. It is steady, it has direction, it covers ground over time, it follows a path, it is undertaken one step at a time. It is not a sprint. It is not a single decision. It is a walk. Paul will use this verb in five places across the next three chapters (4:1, 4:17, 5:2, 5:8, 5:15). Watch for it, even where your English Bible says “live.” The walk will be characterized in different ways at different points (worthily, no longer as the Gentiles do, in love, as children of light, carefully and wisely), but it is the same walk. It is the Christian life as Paul conceives it.

And the one calling the Christian to walk is, again, a prisoner. Paul opens chapter four as he opened chapter three: with his chains. He had named himself “the prisoner of Christ Jesus” in 3:1. He names himself again now, this time as “the prisoner for the Lord.” The chains are still on. The man writing these words is not free to move. But he calls his readers to a walk that is wider and longer than any walk a free man could make. The freedom of the Christian is not a freedom of geography. It is the freedom to walk in the calling she has been given, regardless of the cells the world might place her in.

We turn to the walk itself.

Worthy of the Calling

Paul urges the saints “to live worthily of the calling with which you have been called.” The word worthily in the Greek is axiōs, from axios, a word whose root sense is usually explained as having equal weight on the scale. To walk worthily of the calling is to walk in a way that matches the calling. The two sides of the scale are to balance. What God has done in calling them is to be answered by what they do in walking.

The calling has been described at length already. They have been called by the Father, in eternity, in Christ, by the Spirit, into adoption, redemption, inheritance, the body of the new humanity, the temple of God’s Spirit. That is what they have been called into. The walk worthy of that calling will be a walk that corresponds.

What does that walk look like? Paul names four things, paired into two pairs, and then a fifth thing that holds the others together.

The first pair is humility and gentleness. The Greek words are striking. Tapeinophrosynē, humility, belongs to a word family the Greek world generally despised. To be humble was to be low, base, of no account. The pagan moral tradition prized self-assertion, glory, the public display of one’s worth. Christianity took this rejected word and made it a virtue. Humility is the disposition of the saint who has heard chapters one through three. She does not boast. She has nothing to boast about that did not come to her as gift. The Christian’s humility is not a performance. It is the natural posture of someone who knows where her standing came from.

Praÿtēs, gentleness, is the strength that does not assert itself. The related adjective could be used of an animal that had been tamed: still powerful, but now tractable, useful, no longer wild. Christian gentleness is not weakness. It is power under control. The saint who has been given everything in Christ can afford to be gentle with others. She does not need to win. She does not need to dominate. She has nothing to lose in being gentle, because everything she has she has been given.

The second pair is patience and the related disposition of “putting up with one another in love.” Paul names them together because they describe the same thing in two registers. Makrothymia, patience, is the long-tempered endurance of difficulty without losing one’s footing. Anechomenoi en agapē, putting up with one another in love, is the patience extended specifically toward fellow saints whose faults are ongoing and visible at close range. The Christian who has been forgiven much will bear with the small offenses of those whom she lives alongside. She does not require them to become perfect before she will love them. She loves them as God has loved her: as they are.

And the fifth thing, the one that holds the others together, is the bond of peace. Paul tells the saints to be “making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Notice what is being said. The unity is not something the saints create. It already exists. The Spirit has already made the saints one. What the saints are called to is not the manufacturing of unity but the keeping of it. They are to keep what has already been given. The unity is a gift; their job is not to lose it.

The Lutheran Confessions have insisted on this distinction with great care. The unity of the Church is the work of the Spirit through the Word and the Sacraments. The saints’ faithfulness in those means of grace, and their love toward one another, are how the unity is kept visible. But the unity itself is the Spirit’s gift, not the saints’ achievement. This is one of the most pastorally liberating realities of the Christian life. The Christian is not asked to create unity through her own effort. She is asked to keep a unity that has already been given, by means of the very grace by which it was given.

The Seven Ones

Paul now grounds the call to unity in something deeper than the saints’ effort.

He says, in three short verses, that the unity of the Church is rooted in seven realities, and ultimately in the unity of God Himself. Each of the seven is named with the word one. They climb upward, from the saints’ standing, through their confession, to the One God who stands behind it all.

One body. The Church is one body. Not many bodies. Not federations of bodies. One. The image returns to chapter one, where Paul said that “the church is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:23). There is only one such body, and every believer belongs to it. The local congregations are not separate bodies; the one body of Christ is found gathered in them, wherever the Word and Sacraments go.

One Spirit. The same Holy Spirit dwells in every member of that body. There are not different spirits for different Christians. The Spirit who marked the saints with His seal in 1:13, in whom they have access to the Father in 2:18, in whom they are built into God’s dwelling place in 2:22, who strengthens the inner person in 3:16, is one Spirit. He cannot be divided. Where He is, He is fully there.

One hope. The saints share one future. Whatever the differences in their callings, their gifts, their lives, their sufferings, they are all walking toward the same horizon. The same resurrection. The same heading up of all things in Christ. The same new creation. They are not pilgrims to different cities. They are pilgrims to one.

One Lord. There is one Lord: Jesus Christ. Not many lords. Not different lords for different saints. The Christian’s allegiance is to Him alone. The Roman empire of Paul’s day was full of lords, and at the top of the heap was Caesar. Paul stands inside the empire, in chains, and confesses one Lord. The confession was costly then. It is costly still.

One faith. There is one body of doctrine, one gospel, one apostolic teaching that defines the Christian faith. The saints do not get to make it up. They do not get to negotiate its terms. The faith has been given. The Lutheran Confessions are precisely the Church’s careful articulation of this one faith, in fidelity to Scripture, against every attempt to add to it or take from it.

One baptism. The saints have all been baptized into one body: the same washing, the same name placed upon them, the same seal. There is no first-class baptism and second-class baptism. There are not many baptisms for many groups. There is one. This one baptism is the great equalizer of the Christian Church. Every saint enters by the same door.

One God and Father of all, “who is over all and through all and in all.” The seventh and highest one. The Father is the source of every other one. There is only one such God. He stands over the whole reality. He moves through the whole reality. He is in the whole reality. The unity of the Church is the unity of the One who has called her into being.

These seven are not optional. They are the bedrock on which Christian unity stands. Where these seven are confessed and lived, the Spirit’s unity is being kept. Where any of them is denied, something foundational is being lost. The Christian Church across the centuries has guarded these seven as her most precious possession because they are nothing less than the architecture of her life in God.

Gifts of the Ascended Christ

Having named the unity of the Church, Paul now names her diversity.

The unity is not uniformity. The same one body has many parts, and the parts are not the same. “To each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” And the giving of those gifts is named, in verses 7 to 11, in a striking way: it is connected to Christ’s ascension.

Paul quotes Psalm 68: “When he ascended on high he captured captives; he gave gifts to men.” The psalm pictures God ascending in triumph after a victorious campaign, leading captives in His train and receiving the spoils of His victory. Paul reads the psalm Christologically. The triumphant ascent of God in the psalm is fulfilled in the ascension of Christ after His victory at the cross. Christ has ascended: risen from the dead, taken up to the right hand of the Father, exalted above every power. And from that position of exaltation, He gives gifts to His Church.

Paul pauses to draw out what the psalm implies: “Now what is the meaning of ‘he ascended,’ except that he also descended to the lower regions, namely, the earth?” The NET takes the descent as Christ’s coming down in the incarnation, reading “the lower regions” as the earth itself. Others, ancient and modern, have read the Greek phrase (literally “the lower parts of the earth”) as the grave and the realm of the dead. The Church’s confession that Christ descended into hell does not need to rest on this verse; it stands on 1 Peter 3:18–19. Either way, Paul’s point is the same. The descent and the ascent are one movement. The same Christ who went down has come up, “in order to fill all things,” and now from the height of His exaltation He gives gifts to His people.

What gifts? Paul names them in verse 11, and they are striking: “some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers.” The gifts the ascended Christ has given to His Church are not abilities or talents abstractly considered. They are persons. Specifically, they are persons who hold offices in the Church: people whose vocation is to preach Christ’s Word and shepherd His flock.

This passage stands behind the Lutheran doctrine of the office of the ministry. The Augsburg Confession, Article V, confesses that to obtain such faith God instituted the office of preaching, giving the gospel and the sacraments. The Augsburg Confession, Article XIV, on church order, adds the related point: that no one should publicly teach or preach or administer the sacraments in the Church unless properly called. Pastors are not self-appointed. They are gifts of the ascended Christ to His Church. The Church does not have ministers because she invented the office; she has ministers because Christ has given her some.

The fourfold list (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers) describes the various ways this gift has been given through the centuries. The apostles and prophets, in the foundational sense Paul named in 2:20, were given once at the founding of the Church and laid the foundation of New Testament Scripture. The evangelists were the missionaries who carried the gospel to new ground. The pastors and teachers (the Greek word for pastors, poimenas, means shepherds; the two nouns are joined in Paul’s Greek and probably name a single office) are the shepherds who care for established congregations. All of them are gifts. All of them are given by the same ascended Christ. None of them is a human invention.

For the Work of Ministry

Paul now names the purpose of these gifts. And the purpose is striking, because it is not what the modern reader might expect.

The pastors and teachers given by Christ are not given so that they may do everything while everyone else watches. They are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, that is, to build up the body of Christ.” The Greek word for ministry here is diakonia, service. That work of service belongs to all the saints, not just the pastor. The pastor’s task is to equip them (to teach them, to feed them with the Word, to pray for them, to administer the Sacraments to them) so that they may live the Christian life in their own callings, in their own homes, in their own places of work, in their own neighborhoods.

This is an important verse for the Lutheran doctrine of vocation. Every saint has a vocation and a Spirit-given service in the body of Christ. Pastors have a distinct public office: the ministry of preaching the gospel and administering the Sacraments on behalf of the Church. That is the office of which the Augsburg Confession, Article XIV, speaks, and no one takes it up without a proper call. The pastor equips the saints for their works of service, but he does not merely perform one interchangeable version of every Christian’s calling, and his office is not the whole of the Church’s work in the world. The saint who serves at the bedside of a dying neighbor is doing a work of service. The saint who raises children to know Christ is doing a work of service. The saint who works honestly at her job is doing a work of service. The saint who shares the gospel with a co-worker is doing a work of service. The pastor’s task is to equip such saints for such work, by the steady ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Paul then names what all of this is for. The equipping is for the building up of the body of Christ. Not the building up of the institution. Not the building up of attendance numbers. Not the building up of programs. The building up of the body. And the body is built up until the saints attain something specific: “the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God,” and “the measure of Christ’s full stature.”

This is the goal. The Church is being built toward maturity. Not toward growth measured in earthly terms, but toward growth measured in Christ. The whole body together is meant to grow into something, and the something is Christ Himself. The full stature of Christ is the measuring rod. The Church is mature when she conforms to Him.

Growing Up Into Christ

What does this maturity look like in practice? Paul tells us in verses 14 to 16.

First, it looks like doctrinal stability. Paul says the saints, when mature, will “no longer … be children, tossed back and forth by waves and carried about by every wind of teaching by the trickery of people who craftily carry out their deceitful schemes.” The picture is striking. Children (small, light, easily moved) are at the mercy of every current. The saints, when mature, will not be. They will know the gospel. They will recognize false teaching when it comes. They will not be moved by every new fashion in the religious culture around them.

This is not a license for arrogance. The Christian who knows the gospel does not lord her knowledge over others. But it is a recognition that doctrinal seriousness is part of Christian maturity. The Lutheran tradition has insisted on this against every attempt to sentimentalize the faith. The saints are not merely to feel; they are to know. They are not merely to experience; they are to understand. The Christian life rests on truth, and the truth is one truth, and the truth has been given, and the saints are to know it well enough that they cannot be turned aside by every wind that blows through the culture.

Second, it looks like the joining of truth and love. Paul’s phrase is “practicing the truth in love.” The Greek participle, alētheuontes, covers both speaking the truth and living it; many translations render it “speaking the truth.” Paul does not separate truth and love. The saints are not to speak truth without love, and they are not to speak love without truth. Either alone is partial. Together they are the speech and the life of the mature Christian. Truth without love hardens. Love without truth softens into nothing. The saint who has grown up into Christ holds both at once, because Christ Himself is both the Truth and the Love who came to us.

Third, it looks like growing up into Christ as the Head. Paul names Christ as “the head,” the same image he used in 1:22–23. The body grows up into the head. The Christian is becoming, gradually and over time, more like Christ. Sanctification is not finished in any saint’s lifetime, but it is happening. The saint who began this study as a child in the faith may, by the end, be a few inches taller in Christ. The Lutheran tradition has confessed this without claiming perfectionism. The Christian is becoming what she is. She is being conformed to Christ. The growth is real, even when it is slow.

And finally, it looks like every part of the body doing its proper work. “As each one does its part, the body builds itself up in love.” The body grows because each member is doing what God has equipped her to do. The hand does its work, the foot does its work, the eye does its work, and the body grows. Paul does not single out a few impressive members and leave the rest off the diagram. He says each one. The body that is built up in love is the body in which everyone is participating, by the gifts she has been given.

The section ends. From the call to walk worthily, through the seven ones, through the gifts of the ascended Christ, through the work of ministry, to the maturity of the body, Paul has given us the architecture of Christian unity. It is not the architecture of the world. It is the architecture of a people who have been given everything in Christ and are now learning, slowly and together, what it looks like to walk in what they have been given.

The saints in Ephesus, hearing this read aloud, would have known what was being asked of them. So do we. So we walk.

For Discussion

1. Paul opens chapter four with the word therefore. The Christian life flows out of what God has done; it does not produce it. Where in your own life are you tempted to invert the order, to live as if the walk produced the salvation rather than flowed from it?

2. The marks of the calling-worthy walk are humility, gentleness, patience, and putting up with one another in love. Which of these is hardest for you in your current season? Which is hardest for your congregation?

3. The unity of the Church is the Spirit’s gift, not the saints’ achievement. The saints are called to keep it, not to create it. How does this distinction change the way you approach disagreements within your congregation? How does it change what you expect of the Church?

4. The seven ones (one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father) are the bedrock of Christian unity. Which of the seven is most clearly confessed in your congregation? Which is hardest to hold onto in the cultural moment we live in?

5. Paul says the ascended Christ gives gifts to His Church, and the gifts are people: pastors and teachers given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.” How does this change your view of your own pastor and his office? How does it change your view of yourself and your own service as a saint in your vocation?

6. The mature Church is one in which the saints are no longer tossed by every wind of teaching, but practice the truth in love and grow up into Christ. Where does your own discipleship most need this kind of maturity? Where does your congregation?

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, You who through Your Son have called us into the body of Christ, give us grace to walk worthily of the calling we have received. Clothe us in humility and gentleness. Make us patient with one another. Teach us to bear with one another in love. Keep us in the unity of the Spirit and in the bond of peace. We confess one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Hold us in this confession. Send to Your Church faithful pastors and teachers, gifts of Your ascended Son, who will equip us for the work of ministry, that the body may be built up in love. And bring us, slowly and together, into the full stature of Christ: practicing the truth in love, no longer tossed by every wind, growing up into Him who is our Head. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Looking Ahead

Next session we read Ephesians 4:17–32. Paul has called the saints to walk worthily. Now he describes that walk in starker terms. There is a way the Gentiles still live, and the saints are no longer to live that way. The chapter turns from the structure of Christian unity to the moral specifics of the new life in Christ. Paul’s image is one of clothing: the saints are “to lay aside the old man who is being corrupted in accordance with deceitful desires,” and “to put on the new man who has been created in God’s image.” The two movements, laying aside and putting on, will frame the whole next session.

And then the moral specifics arrive. Paul names them concretely: lying, anger, stealing, unwholesome talk, bitterness, malice. He also names their replacements: truthful speech, honest work, words that build others up, kindness, compassion, forgiveness. He does not float in abstraction. He names the actual stuff of human life and tells the saints what to take off and what to put on. The whole section ends with one of the most beautiful imperatives in the New Testament: that the saints forgive one another just as God in Christ also forgave them.

Before next session, read Ephesians 4:17–32 at least twice. Read it once for sense. Read it a second time noticing the verbs Paul keeps using: lay aside, put on, put away. Notice the parallelism: every old thing he names is matched by a new thing. The Christian life is not a stripping down. It is a changing of clothes.