Nikki and Colleen talk about what it means to have unity in the church—not the unity that the world seeks, and how it functions even during disagreements. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: Last week we finished up chapter 3 of Ephesians, and today we’ll be looking at the first six verses of chapter 4. Now, as we begin looking at this next section, we need to remember all that Paul has just taught us in the first three chapters of the letter. As we remember these truths, they will give meaning and context to Paul’s instructions. In Adventism, we often saw instructions for the church as the means for gaining salvation. But as believers, we now understand that these instructions can only be obeyed, let alone understood, after we’ve been saved and made new. Attempting to obey them before salvation is an exercise in futility and fruitless deeds of the flesh, and we’re certain to misunderstand and misinterpret the commands anyway, as spiritual things are spiritually discerned. Scripture tells us that those who are in the flesh cannot understand the things of God, let alone please Him. So these truths we learned in the first three chapters are truths that alter our very identity, as well as our relationships to each other and to the world. And I want you to notice the tenses as I read what’s true of us. We were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world to be set apart and blameless before Him. We were predestined to adoption as sons and daughters of God through Jesus. We were redeemed through the blood of Christ. That’s past tense. And we were indwelled and sealed by the Holy Spirit, who’s the guarantee and first installment of our eternal inheritance. We were raised from death to life and created into something altogether new in Christ. We were seated with Christ in the heavenly places, and we were given works predetermined by God for us to walk in. We were reconciled through God to each other and are made a people for His possession. He owns us. We’re members together of God’s household. We’re family, and we, the church, are being built together in a temple for God and by God. And so we live in what can often feel like two realities, the reality of all that Scripture says is true of us and the reality that on this side of glory, there is much that separates us. Whether it’s as simple as the distance between us or as complex as our various denominational convictions, our political worldviews, or our approaches to family and social norms, it’s in these places where we often feel our separations and conflicts, and it’s when we often find ourselves wondering what God wants from us and how we can please Him. Well, it’s in sections of Scripture like the one we’re going to look at today where we find God’s will for the church even now, as we live here on this side of eternity. As we submit to God’s word, it begins to inform our lives in every aspect of life here and now, and the things that separate us begin to look smaller in the light of who we are in Christ and what that means for all of us. Now, before we get started, let me remind you that you can write to us with any questions or comments you have by sending an email to formeradventist@gmail.com. Visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails containing new online articles and other ministry news. Don’t forget to sign up for this year’s Former Adventist Fellowship Conference, convening online-only this year. Registration is free but necessary so that we can get you set up with the breakout Zoom sessions and any other materials needed. Just write to formeradventist@gmail.com, and be sure to include your mailing address in your request for registration. And last, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Colleen.
Colleen: Yes?
Nikki: As I was preparing for this podcast, I couldn’t help but go online into a former Adventist Facebook group and ask the members there how they understood what it meant to walk in a manner worthy of the calling. And I also asked them what they thought “unity of the Spirit” meant in Adventism, and their answers were very interesting, and they were all similar, and I want to ask you the same question before I share their responses.
Colleen: Okay.
Nikki: So, if you had been told as an Adventist to walk in a manner worthy of the calling, how would you have heard that? And what did you think “unity in the Spirit” meant?
Colleen: You know, I’ve tried to think what that might have meant to me as an Adventist, and I actually am not sure I could have explained it. I think if I had been thinking about walking in a manner worthy of the calling, it would have meant acting like a good Christian in public and being bold about my unique beliefs so that I would be representing Adventism correctly to unbelievers.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I think that’s what I would have thought. I felt a lot of pressure never to feel embarrassed about keeping the Sabbath or being a vegetarian if I was with people who were not Adventist, because it was embarrassing to admit I went to church on the seventh day of the week, and it was embarrassing sometimes to admit I was a vegetarian, especially before it was popular.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But I felt compelled to have this strong commitment to the unique distinctives of Adventism, so that, even if I was confronted, I would loyal to the truth, because I was taught that ultimately I would have to defend the Sabbath at all costs, and so any discomfort I experienced was practice for the end.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So I think that’s how I would have understood it. Now, as far as unity in the Spirit, I don’t know what I really would have thought about that. Somehow, the bottom line for me was I had to stay loyal to the Adventist group, to the Adventist teaching, to the Adventist identity. If people inside the organization did things that were wrong, which they often did, I wasn’t to worry about it because I was just supposed to look to Jesus, and He would make everything right, and people could be bad and it wasn’t my concern. Never mind the fact they might be sinning against me, I had to look to Jesus and all would be well. What about you, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, first of all, I just have to respond to that and say, that’s a lot of Adventist propaganda tied up into a phrase of Scripture, isn’t it?
Colleen: It is!
Nikki: And your answer isn’t unique. You know, I’m not sure exactly what I would have thought. It’s hard, you know, to know exactly how you would have answered, but –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – I think the phrase “walk in a manner worthy of the calling” would have put a picture in my head of a particular Adventist. It would have put a picture in my head of somebody who was very modest and who knew all Scripture and all Spirit of Prophecy [laughter] –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – who’d read Ellen, who was vegetarian, better yet vegan –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and who was able to live with this gentle spirit in the world, so that if someone were to ask them about their faith, they would be able to confidently give the Adventist message because they would know it way better than I did.
Colleen: Wow. Did you know anybody like that?
Nikki: Well, people who appeared to be that way –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – in New England, yeah –
Colleen: Ah.
Nikki: – I did.
Colleen: Um-hmm. Okay.
Nikki: And they were very intimidating. They weren’t people I was able to get to know. They were very quiet.
Colleen: That’s really interesting, that somebody that represented this biblical concept to you as an Adventist was somebody who was very unapproachable in real life.
Nikki: I have someone in mind right now, and I remember when I got around her I felt all of my wickedness. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: I was so different from her. And I didn’t know how to relate to her. And you know what? That happened even when I came to California. The Adventists here certainly didn’t look like some of the people I have in mind from New England, but they still had something about them I didn’t know how to connect with, that I didn’t have.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And it did come from being raised in Adventist schools and going to Adventist mission trips and being Adventist to their core. As far as “unity of the Spirit,” I think it would have been unity of the cause. You know, you have the Spirit of Christmas and you have the cause of Adventism. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yes.
Nikki: It was the three angels, you know?
Colleen: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Nikki: I think that’s probably how I would have answered it.
Colleen: Committed to the tradition.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah! So I want to share with you some of the stuff that people said on Facebook. I’m going to leave their names off because it was a private group, but I’m going to share some of the stuff I got. So, with my first question: “What did you think ‘walk in a manner worthy of the calling’ meant?” The first answer I got was: “Sabbathkeeping. Preferably being vegetarian.” And that’s all she wrote. I got another one that said, “Be a good SDA, attend church each Sabbath, eat vegetarian, no smoking or drinking, and avoid any unnecessary activity with Sunday Christians, especially the avoidance of Sunday stuff, lest you receive the Mark of the Beast.” Another person said, “I would have to strive towards perfection, sinlessness, in order pass the IJ.” That’s the Investigative Judgment, for anyone who doesn’t know. Someone else said, “Everyone is watching what you do, so make sure you don’t embarrass the church or the family name.”
Colleen: Yes, oh yes.
Nikki: Another said, “Don’t eat meat. Super keep the Sabbath. Read the quarterly and participate in the Sabbath school class. Go for Bible study. Join clubs or be part of a singing group or choir. No jewelry” –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – “though I secretly loved it.” [Laughter.]
Colleen: Oh, yeah, me too. Didn’t wear it, but wanted to. [Laughter.]
Nikki: Well, you could have, you know, in Southern California.
Colleen: Well, yes, but I wasn’t there, was I? [Laughter.]
Nikki: No. Another person said, “In Adventism everything had to do with propping up the image of the church. That was behind every call to live worthy of the calling. If the image is right, the church is right.” And then I got several more about don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t wear jewelry, don’t wear makeup, don’t dance, and make sure you are never seen breaking the Sabbath. That one was funny. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Ohhh, isn’t that the truth.
Nikki: So when I asked them what it meant to be “diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit,” it was stuff like “Don’t do anything someone else didn’t like.”
Colleen: Ah.
Nikki: Don’t question doctrine. If you do, keep it to yourself. Don’t make waves. Don’t bring it up in Sabbath school, with lots of exclamation marks. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: Think like an Adventist, dress like an Adventist, believe like an Adventist. Again, don’t question Ellen White ever. Another person said, “SDAs keep unity by compromising the truth. Unity in Adventism is uniformity. Do not ask questions.”
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: Another person, and this is the last one, said, “Obey additional information from the Spirit of Prophecy. If we did that, we could never go wrong, as God had revealed all the light we needed in all aspects of life, so read the Bible first, and if things were unclear, the Spirit of Prophecy would clarify everything and thus keep the unity.”
Colleen: Well, there you go. Unity of the spirit of Ellen.
Nikki: Yeah, it was all about pleasing the church. It was uniformity.
Colleen: How not surprising. I resonate with a lot of those.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting? Before we discuss it further, why don’t we read our passage, and then we will share some Ellen White quotes that we found that I think will help to lay a groundwork of where we came from as Adventists and how this passage is really saying something very, very different than we learned as Adventists. It’s been kind of shocking to me to juxtapose these things and to try to actually talk about the biblical meanings of these terms. So, Nikki, would you read chapter 4, verses 1-6, please?
Nikki: “Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you also were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”
Colleen: It’s a really beautiful passage if we look at it from the position of being born again.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But it was a very guilt-producing and sort of vague passage from a perspective of not knowing Jesus, of understanding a “church” which was really not part of the Body of Christ, and not even knowing that. You know, “What do you do with these words?” So, Nikki, you were sharing with me some passages that you found from Ellen White –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – where she talks about unity, and I have one here where she talks about faith, and I think that if we read these, we can see what was wrong and how this passage really means something different than we would have earlier thought. Would you mind sharing some of your findings?
Nikki: Sure. So, the first one was written in Testimonies for the Church. She said, “All believers should be wholehearted in their attachment to the church.” And I just want to say, before I go further, for those who don’t know Ellen White, when she’s talking about the church, she’s referring to Seventh-day Adventism.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: So, “All believers should be wholehearted in their attachment to the church. Its prosperity should be their first interest, and unless they feel under sacred obligations to make their connection with the church a benefit to it, in preference to themselves, it can do far better without them.” So this was all in, or get out.
Colleen: Yeah, no kidding! I remember I felt that way. I felt like if I was making the church look bad or my family look bad, it was like worse than zero. I was a negative drain. I was the ball and chain around the whole thing. I was the problem. There was no place to go. I had to make everybody look good.
Nikki: There’s a lot of pressure in a lot of her writings to, like someone said, prop up the image of the church. There’s this book called Homeward Bound Devotional, and this is the August entrance, and it’s called “The Influence of Perfect Harmony,” and it begins with a portion of Ephesians 4, verse 1 and verse 3: “I therefore beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” and then Ellen. She describes – and I don’t want to read the whole thing, because you know Ellen. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yes, I do!
Nikki: She’s wordy. [Laughter.] But she describes how God surrendered His Son and the agonies of the cross. So if He was willing to do this, then is there anything that we shouldn’t be willing to do. So she goes on now to use that argument to explain how we are supposed to live in unity in the church. And she says, “Dissensions, unhappy differences, and petty church trials dishonor our Redeemer. All these may be avoided if self is surrendered to God and the followers of Jesus obey the voice of the church. Unbelief suggests that individual independence increases our importance, that it is weak to yield our own ideas of what is right and proper to the verdict of the church; but to yield such feelings and views is unsafe and will bring us into anarchy and confusion. Christ saw that unity and Christian fellowship were necessary to the cause of God; therefore He enjoined it upon His disciples. And the history of Christianity from that time until now proves conclusively that in union only is there strength. Let individual judgment submit to the authority of the church.”
Colleen: Do you see what she did there?
Nikki: Yeah; don’t question Ellen.
Colleen: She – oh, my goodness! And if we questioned Ellen or if we had an independent thought and wondered how this jibed with the Bible or anything like that, we were worse than nothing. We were the problem.
Nikki: Yeah, she basically says that this behavior suggests unbelief. You’re not even a believer. If we weren’t loyal to the Adventist teaching without question, we were unbelievers. No wonder that she also said later that if we begin to question the Testimonies, ultimately we question the Bible and we leave the faith. There was a quote that I found in Christian experience and teachings of Ellen G. White where she says a similar thing. “Though we have an individual work and an individual responsibility before God, we are not to follow our own independent judgment, regardless of the opinions and feelings of our brethren, for this course would lead to disorder in the church.” And again, the church is Adventism.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: She never used the term “the church” to mean the universal church. Adventism was the church. So she’s very clear that we’re not to have independent thought, independent questions or ideas that don’t pass the muster of whoever the brethren are. And she went on to say, “If hearts are teachable, there will be no divisions among us.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Well, that isn’t even normal human life. So she says, “Some are inclined to be disorderly and are drifting away from the great landmarks of the faith.” Well, now, she doesn’t mean the biblical gospel when she says “the faith” either. She means Adventism. “But God is moving upon His ministers to be one in doctrine and in spirit.” This uniformity idea, that the people that you questioned in that former Adventist group?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This thing that they expressed? That was the typical understanding we had of unity. It was consistency to Adventism, and don’t you dare question, and don’t you dare bring up anything contrary to the norm.
Nikki: And what’s interesting to me is that all the answers I received were not explained in the context of Ellen White and what they learned from her. It was all culturally taught to us. So you don’t even have to read Ellen to absorb what she expected of you, because it was generationally passed down.
Colleen: You know, that’s a really important point, Nikki. I really believe that an Adventist can grow up Adventist and, if it were possible, never crack open an Ellen White book, but that person, that Adventist, would still think like an Adventist.
Nikki: Yeah, there’s a family resemblance, um-hmm.
Colleen: Yes. You don’t have to read her to have her ideas firmly implanted in your brain.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Now, I found one more quote here that I want to read because I think it helps us understand how she relates to this idea of “one faith, one baptism.” This passage in Ephesians is so powerful, but to us, if we had read this as Adventists, it would have just seemed a little confusing, a little vague, a little metaphorical, and a little impossible, and here’s why. Her definitions are different.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So, Nikki, as a Christian, what do you think, what do you understand the meaning of “faith” to be? When we say, “There’s one faith,” what’s “faith,” as a Christian?
Nikki: That’s the gospel. That’s Jude verse 3, it was the faith handed down once for all, for all the saints. I did not quote that right, but that’s Jude, verse 3.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: It’s the gospel.
Colleen: And the faith that we have is the faith that God gives us, like Ephesians 2:8-9, that we are saved by grace, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God so that no one may boast. The faith we have is in the Lord Jesus and in the gospel, and Jude defines that gospel as the faith once delivered to the saints.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s a biblical definition of faith, and most people who are Christians would kind of just know that. But as Adventists, we would hear the word “faith,” and we wouldn’t know that. This is what Adventists would think of faith, and it’s the way Ellen defined it. Now, listen to how she establishes Adventist faith. This is from Christ in His Sanctuary: “We are to be established in the faith, in the light of the truth given us in our early experience.” Now, when she’s writing about early experience, the light of the truth given us, she’s referring not to Christians but to the early Adventists. She’s referring to herself and James and Joseph Bates and the founders of Adventism. She goes on, “At that time [in the early experience], one error after another pressed in upon us.” Well, Nikki, right there, when the church was founded, did they have to wade through one error after another to figure out what was true?
Nikki: You mean the original church.
Colleen: The original church, I’m sorry. Yes, the apostles. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] No, we see in Scripture that the Holy Spirit led them all into all truth. He reminded them of the things that they heard from Jesus while they walked with Him and He taught them and gave them Scripture.
Colleen: Yes! And then the Holy Spirit came upon them in Acts 2. This is not the same picture. So she’s saying at the time of the founding of Adventism, “…one error after another pressed in upon us. Ministers and doctors brought in new doctrines.” Isn’t that interesting? Only the ministers and the doctors are really counting here? They counted at the beginning, and today they are still the ones who count. “We would search the Scriptures with much prayer, and the Holy Spirit would bring the truth to our minds. Sometimes whole nights would be devoted to searching the Scriptures and earnestly asking God for guidance. Companies of devoted men and women assembled for this purpose. The power of God would come upon me, and I was enabled clearly to define what is truth and what is error. As the points of our faith were thus established, our feet were placed upon a solid foundation. We accepted the truth point by point under the demonstration of the Holy Spirit. I would be taken off in vision, and explanations would be given me. I was given illustrations of heavenly things and of the sanctuary so that we were placed where light was shining on us in clear, distinct rays. I know that the sanctuary question stands in righteousness and truth, just as we have held it for so many years.” And there you have it.
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: The Adventist faith is Adventism as Ellen had it revealed by some spirit.
Nikki: There are so many red flags in that passage, and praise God for Scripture because, thanks to Ephesians, they wave wildly as we listen to that quote –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – where she says that they were “establishing points of the faith” and that as they did that, “a foundation was being laid under her feet.” What did we study out of Ephesians? There is one foundation. Jesus is the cornerstone, and the prophets and apostles are the foundation, and all the rest of us, we are the church being built up by God. And she’s creating a new foundation, with new points of faith. She doesn’t even understand it unless she gets whipped up into vision by some spirit. This is a new Pentecost; this is a false Pentecost for a false region with a false gospel and a false foundation.
Colleen: And a false prophet.
Nikki: And a false prophet. Yeah.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: That’s very sad.
Colleen: You know, it’s horrifying when I realize the farther I get from Adventism, the more desperately hopeless and dark I see it to be. It was a false religion. It had a false gospel, a false Jesus, and we were in such utter deception. It’s just a miracle of God that He opened Scripture to us and pulled us to Himself. That was His doing.
Nikki: And it was a carefully crafted false religion, and it’s interesting how it can take these doctrines of demons that are being built up by unborn-again, unregenerate people, and it can create this system that secularizes and uses Scripture to create a club, if you will, that raises generation after generation after generation of people who believe they are Christian, who believe they are living out their Christian values and walking in this faith and have no understanding that they are not on solid ground and that they need to evaluate this and they need to leave.
Colleen: And with Ellen’s instructions about having independent thoughts –
Nikki: Yeah, you don’t question.
Colleen: – and the danger of questioning, it’s very hard for a lot of Adventists to question. I don’t even know how many times in the past I’ve heard people say, “Well, brighter minds than mine have figured this out. I don’t understand it, but maybe when I retire I’ll look closer at it,” because, you know, when you retire, then you don’t stand to lose your job.
Nikki: Weren’t we all told that there was going to be a time when we’d be deceived and pulled away from the Sabbath? And so there was an element of belief perseverance, like even if it looks like it’s all wrong, I’m not going to give it up because I don’t want to be rejected.
Colleen: That was a common feeling, I think, among most people that I knew as an Adventist. Well, when we look at this passage in Ephesians 4, it’s so striking to me that it’s not vague, and it’s not hard to understand when you understand what Jesus has already done. This is an interesting shift in the book of Ephesians. The first three chapters of Ephesians are theological, and this book follows the pattern of most of Paul’s epistles. He leads with the teaching of what is true about the New Covenant, and he ends with application for people who are already born again. I heard one commentator say that among theologians sometimes, this first doctrinal section is called the “credenda.” A credenda means the doctrines to be believed and the articles of faith. And the second part is the “agenda” [” ə-‘gen-də,”]. In normal terms we would call this word “ə-‘jen-də,” but it’s a Latin pronunciation, and it literally means “things to be considered or things to be done. So the credenda of what we believe establishes the groundwork for the agenda, which is how we live, and the first part is what we have otherwise called the “indicatives.” And the “agenda” is the imperatives, and the indicatives have to come first. The doctrines come first, the truth comes first, and when we trust and believe, then we can do the things that flow out of that new birth. In the first verse, there are several things here that are quite interesting. First of all, Paul starts with his famous, “therefore.” What does he mean when he says “therefore”?
Nikki: For all the things that came before, for that reason.
Colleen: Exactly. And what does Paul tell us in this verse about himself before he implores the Ephesians to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called”? “Therefore,” and how does he identify himself?
Nikki: “I, the prisoner of the Lord.” He’s highlighting the fact that he is in prison for the gospel. He has already walked in a manner worthy of the calling, hasn’t he? He’s done the work that God’s given him to do.
Colleen: And it’s interesting too that he’s letting these people know, these people who are so dear to him. They’re like his children in the Lord, and yet he’s letting them know that his apostleship and his commitment to teaching them the gospel has cost him something, and he’s letting them know it’s cost him something. He’s not pretending it’s been a walk in the park. He’s letting them share in his hardship too. Then he says, he implores them, to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called.” What is the calling with which they have been called, that they’re supposed to honor in the way they walk?
Nikki: Well, this is the effectual calling of God. This is not, “Hey, you’re invited to be a part of this.” [Laughter.] This is the fact that God called us to Himself, He called us to life, and He called us to live that life in Him, in His Son, and we’re to walk worthy of that, and it encompasses so many things, including our unity –
Colleen: That’s so true.
Nikki: – which we’ll get into.
Colleen: Exactly. And this calling is also displaying, as we learned in the previous chapter, displaying the wisdom and glory of God, who has made us, the Jews and the Gentiles, the near and the far, one new man in Christ. Our calling is to allow the glory of God to be revealed through us in unity with the rest of the believers, and like you said, it’s not something to which we’re just asked to join. It’s something the Lord does in us, and He places us in Himself.
Nikki: And the call to be worthy of it is because we already have it. This is not working for salvation, this working from salvation. This is responding to and honoring what God has already done in saving us and saving those He’s united us to.
Colleen: That is so true. And you know, I know from experience that sometimes we don’t feel completely equal with the other people in the Body of Christ we may associate with. Sometimes new believers, especially people who leave a cult or a false religion, sometimes can feel a little bit at odds with a church full of lifetime Christians. But if we’re born again, we are one Body, and we’re obligated to learn to serve alongside each other, loving one another in the Lord for the Lord’s glory. But I just know, Nikki, that sometimes we’ve talked about the fact that being former Adventists, even in a really good church, where Bible teaching is of paramount, prime importance, it can still feel sometimes like we’re in a category of our own.
Nikki: Well, yeah. I mean, I feel like that’s a part of just life on this side of glory. We have so many things that put distance between us, even though we’re united in Christ, and the spiritual reality is unshakable and cannot be undone, we do struggle with that. And I think that’s why Paul is calling us to – in verse 2 he tells us how to behave with one another in the middle of that.
Colleen: And what does he say?
Nikki: Well, he says to “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, be diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” That’s verse 2 and 3, and you know, I was looking at those words. I always like to look up those words: What does this mean? What is he asking me to do? [Laughter.] And “humility” basically means comparing yourself to the Lord, not to the people around you. And when we do that, we’re all knocked down to an even playing field, and our behavior toward each other lines up with what we know is true about ourselves. We have been saved by grace, and none of us is more worthy than the other to be in the Body of Christ, and so if we can all walk in humility, whether we’ve been a believer for our entire lives, as long as we can remember, or brand new to the faith, the ground at the cross is level, like they say. Being humble means living in complete dependence on the Lord, not relying on our flesh in any way, and this makes me think of something you’ve often said to me, Colleen, when I’ve come to you for guidance on how to get through a tough situation in a relationship, whether at home or in the church, and you have often told me – I know I’ve said it here before – that we love others for Jesus. We look past their shoulder, and we see Him, and we respond to them knowing who we are in Christ and what Christ has called us to, and if they’re saved too, they are in Christ, and that is humility. That, and it’s the gentleness too, which is also meekness. It’s expressing power with gentleness. You know, it takes will. This is not passive. This is not just the fruit of the Spirit, this is us engaging our obedience and submitting to Scripture. It’s decisional.
Colleen: And it is related to the fruit of the Spirit. We can’t even engage our wills to pursue this kind of humility without being born again and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. It is Spirit-driven and Spirit-generated, but God is asking us, as born-again believers, to trust Him and to allow Him to show us our true place in the Body. I know over the years there have been so many times – you know, once again, understanding how to live in a community of believers has been an interesting journey for me because I grew up and spent over 40 years in the Adventist system, which was not a community of believers, and you kind of had to fight through things by your own wits and your own talent. You know, you have to shine, you had to make sure if you wanted to achieve a certain goal that you worked hard and placed yourself in the right places so you’d get there. And in the Body of Christ, it’s not like that. And learning to give up those kinds of pointed determinations to get to a certain position has been a learning experience for me, and I’ve had to learn that the Lord Jesus decides what my work is. He decides what I will do and what I’m equipped to do, and He will bring it to pass if I trust Him instead of worrying about people sidelining me or not understanding me or whatever. He knows who I am and has my future in His hands, and He will reveal it to me as I go along, as I trust Him.
Nikki: That’s so interesting. And as you trust Him with His plans for you, that is going to have a direct impact on your ability to relate with the people around you. The other thing that I enjoyed learning was this word for “patience,” it actually means “long passion.” It’s not just not having strong feelings or keeping them aside, it’s in the face of having strong feelings, choosing to control them and not just releasing them on the people around you, and so [laughter] –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – that also, obviously, is going to have a positive impact on your relationships with people as you learn to be “long passion,” and you know, for those of us who’ve left Adventism and who have that apologetic streak that I don’t think any of us ask for –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – it was just something that we were kind of born again into –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – coming out of our background, but we very often have very strong emotions as we see error taught, as we see people struggling with the trauma of having been in Adventism or raised inside Adventism, and so the call here is that we are to be patient with one another, even in the midst of that –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – in the Body of Christ. And you know, this last one, “bearing with one another in love,” I do like the fact that the word “bearing” just assumes that it isn’t easy. That is something that, as I have walked with the Lord, I have learned doesn’t always look how the world thinks it looks. Bearing with one another in love doesn’t mean enabling other people in their own personal reality. It means putting up with them, even when it’s hard, with a preferential love because of who they are in Christ, who you are in Christ, and you know, I can’t prove this, but I think sometimes this forebearing can look like removing yourself from a situation where your presence there in that relationship or in that dynamic is causing a certain element of chaos, emotional or otherwise. And so, I don’t think that we’re always able to resolve everything in the Body of Christ. We’re not always going to see eye-to-eye, but we are to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. That doesn’t mean that we maintain the unity of the Spirit. God did this. We can’t undo what God did. But it means because we’re unified in the Spirit that we keep that in the bonds of peace, that that’s our priority, that we don’t hurt the gospel. If there is definite sin that needs to be called out, that’s not what I’m referring to.
Colleen: In fact, I’ll tell you what I thought of while you were talking. This business of bearing with one another, or in my particular version of the NASB it says, “showing tolerance,” it does not mean what the world means with tolerance, which is, “Your idea is just as good as mine. We all can have our own beliefs and they’re all equally valid.” No, the Bible tells us we have to contend for the faith which was once delivered to the saints, as you mentioned earlier from Jude. But in the Body we show tolerance in terms of bearing up with one another’s shortcomings because we’re one in the Spirit, and what I thought of was – I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m going to use my relationship with my mother, who left Adventism in her 70s, and she was truly born again. She truly did believe and trust Jesus with her sin. But she was a very unexamined Christian. She had a lot of issues in her life that she didn’t really want to look at or face, and there were a lot of ways in which she was emotionally difficult and sometimes even damaging, and there were ways in which we had to set boundaries with her, just to keep ourselves and the work that we do safe from the chaos that she could cause. And yet I knew she was my sister in the Lord, in spite of all that. So I had to keep a certain physical distance and a certain emotional caution to keep us safe, to keep the work we do safe, to keep the people in our lives safe, but when I was with her as she was dying, I looked at her and knew she was going to be with the Lord, and I knew I would have eternity with her, and all of this misunderstanding would be set right. And that’s a different thing from looking at somebody and knowing they’re an unbeliever. Being able to stay a little bit distant, to have an arm’s length between her reactions and my work, was a way of protecting both her and me, and it was a way of bearing with her. But she was my sister in the Lord, and there was unity in the Lord whenever we were able to talk about the Lord, and I know I will see her in the kingdom, so what you said makes a lot of sense to me. There are situations in which sometimes we have to put distance, but we still love the brothers and sisters in the Lord with this kind of love because this is the unity that the Lord created between us. We are in Him, made alive by His Spirit, and His Spirit has created that unity, no matter what our flesh may do.
Nikki: Yeah, and I love what you said there. When anytime you guys would talk about the Lord, you would sense that unity and that joy, and so even where we may not have the relationships that we long to have with people, you bring up the gospel, you bring up the hope we have, and all of that seems to just kind of fade away for a time.
Colleen: It’s a very interesting thing. And you know what? I can’t explain this to somebody who’s never experienced it. It’s something that is unique in the Body of Christ because we’re made one in Christ with the unity of the Spirit, who joins us. Well then we look at verse 4: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you also you were called in one hope of your calling,” and 5, “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and 6, “one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.” So, Nikki, would you talk a bit about the one Body and one Spirit and one hope.
Nikki: Yeah. So I have a quote here from Precept Austin that I really liked when I was looking into this, and I looked at it one piece at a time, one Body, one Spirit. I wanted to understand what Paul was getting at here. And he says, “There is one Body, which Ephesians teaches is eternal in calling, heavenly in conception, divine in creation, and supernatural in constitution.” I’m going to stop that quote just quickly to say, this is why unity of the Spirit does not mean conformity to any church’s agenda, plan, vision, or ideas, because this Body that we’re united in was divinely created. He goes on and says, “The living members of this Body have been called out of every kindred, tongue, people, and nation. They differ in nationality, color, language, education, training, ability, temperament, and outlook. Through the human blood running in their veins, they’ve inherited dislikes, prejudices, and animosities that separate them as far as the east is from the west, but through the blood of the Savior and the baptism of the Spirit, they are united to Christ as living members of His Body.” And that there is the gospel that we need to throw far and wide into our culture today.
Colleen: When we understand who we are by nature, dead in sin, children of wrath, as Ephesians 2:1-3 explains, when we understand that, and when we understand what Jesus did in becoming a man, a sinless man, who took our sin into Himself, our imputed sin, and died to be a propitiation for us to His Father and ours, when we understand that, then we understand that there’s only one way people can have resolution between themselves, and that is in Christ. We can’t redefine our sin. We can’t redefine our flaws. We can’t fix our differences. Only Jesus can. And our sin is the same, and our solution is the same. There’s no difference between any person, who we are by nature and who we are in Christ.
Nikki: And in the Body of Christ, we can’t make our primary identity our nationality, our color, our education – the doctors and pastors – our ability, or even our temperament. There are so many temperament tests out there that people take and click off with. None of this stuff is what defines us now. We’re defined by the blood of our Savior, and we’re united in Christ. There is no business for believers to be separating for any of those other reasons and creating rank in the church.
Colleen: We were called in one hope, and that hope is found in Christ.
Nikki: The other phrase I looked up was the “one Spirit,” and this is definitely something that people have come to different conclusions about, but this is referring to the Holy Spirit. It’s clear that this is referring to the Holy Spirit, and it does not mean uniformity, it doesn’t mean one mind, one set of beliefs, one way of thought, as we were taught in Adventism. It wasn’t just carrying the message of a particular group. This is the Holy Spirit. That one Spirit is the Holy Spirit, and one commentator by the name of Hodge said, “As the human body is one because pervaded by one soul, so the Body of Christ is one because it is pervaded by one in the same Spirit, who dwelling in all is a common principle of life. This is the Holy Spirit who gives every one of us life, no matter our walk or our background. This is the one who unites us and who places us into this Body of Christ.”
Colleen: That’s actually really, really interesting because that explains what Paul means when he talks about the one baptism too: One Lord, one faith, one baptism.
Nikki: Yeah, well, and it’s interesting because he does say “just as,” so he’s comparing them, he’s saying: You are one just as much as there’s one hope of your calling and one Lord and one faith. It’s the same. You can’t have more than one Lord, more than one God, more than one Father, so we are one Body in the one Spirit, and as much as all that other is immutable by us, so are these things.
Colleen: That’s such a great point. And what is the hope of our calling?
Nikki: That’s everything we’ve been called to. It’s everything that’s coming when the Lord returns. It’s everything that’s ahead for us. It’s all of the eternal truths that we’ve been given, the promises we’ve been given in Scripture, and it’s interesting because, you know, I didn’t learn this song in Adventism, but you know, their song “We Have This Hope.” In the Bible hope isn’t a wish, and in Adventism that hope really is a wish because they don’t know if they’re saved. They don’t know if they’ll pass the Investigative Judgment or if they’ll be strong enough during the persecution when they’re asked to die for the Sabbath. They don’t know. There’s a lot of fear. But in the Bible, hope is defined as a desire for some future good that is expected.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s a confident expectancy, and we even see that in Ephesians. In chapter 1, verse 18, Paul prayed that the church would come to know what is the hope of their calling. Not that they would come to wish for something in particular, but that they would know what they could expect.
Colleen: So when I look ahead, as I’ve indicated just in reference to my mother, I know I will be with her in the kingdom because we can know we are saved.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And what does it mean to be in the kingdom? Well, it means we will be changed. We will be resurrected as Jesus was when He came out of the tomb. We will have glorified bodies. We will know as we are known, as Paul tells us. We will have eternity with our Lord.
Nikki: Yeah, and this is the common hope, this is what the gospel is all about. And so whether you live here in the United States or you live on the other side of the world, if you know the Lord, if you know the gospel and you’ve trusted Him and you’re born again, we share this. And so all of the different things that separate us here on this side of things are insignificant. This is where we are united, and it’s for this purpose that we love well and that we treat each other in these ways, and that this unity that we cannot undo is to be kept carefully by us.
Colleen: And it’s our one Lord who gives us this, our one faith, our trust in Jesus, in the gospel of His salvation, and the one baptism of being placed into this Body, this Body that is beyond our lifetime, that started before we were born and is continuing after we die, this one baptism places us into this Body of Christ. And we all have one God and Father who is over all and through all and in all. Now, Nikki, how is this not pantheism or panentheism?
Nikki: Well, first, do you want to tell them what those things are? [Laughter.]
Colleen: I had to actually look it up to try to get the right words to describe it, and according to Merriam-Webster, pantheism and panentheism are close, but they’re not the same. Pantheism is the belief that God is equal to the universe, its physical matter and the forces that govern it. This idea is found in ancient books of Hinduism and many works of Greek philosophers, and actually, it’s a great part of much of the modern New Age movement, that God is equal to the universe. Panentheism says this, it’s the doctrine that God includes the world as a part, though not the whole of His being. God is in everything and everything is in God. He’s neither separate from creation nor limited to it. This is not a biblical idea, but it is an idea that’s actually, unfortunately, quite prevalent in a lot of contemplative Christianity. God is separate from us. He is over us, He is through all, He is in all whom He saves. His Spirit indwells us. He is sovereign over everything, and everything He has created is for His purposes, and He’s in charge, but He’s not defined by His creation, and we are not defined as being Him.
Nikki: God through all is talking about His sovereign, pervading action. It’s Him accomplishing His purposes and using anything and everything according to His well. It makes me think of the birds that brought food to Elijah. God wasn’t in them, but He used them. He parted the waters of the Red Sea. He wasn’t in them, but He worked through them. The heart of the king is like water in God’s hands. He sets up kingdoms, and He takes them down. He works in all of His creation to accomplish His purposes, and that in all, in the context of Ephesians, it makes me think of what Paul has just said at the end of the last chapter, that this being placed in Christ, one new man, is for all believers, Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free, He is in all who believe in Him.
Colleen: Absolutely. If you do not know that God has made you alive through Christ, if you do not know that the Holy Spirit has sealed you, has given you a new heart and a new Spirit, if you are not able to call God your Father and know that He is over all and through all and in all, then you need to consider again what Jesus did, how He took a human body as God the Son and became the Son of Man. He took our imputed sin into Himself and nailed it to the cross, fulfilling the curse of the law. He came out of the tomb on the third day and broke the curse of the law, and when we understand what He did in fulfilling the law and trust Him, the hold and the curse of the law against us is broken, and we become alive in Jesus, and we urge you to really consider what the real Jesus has done for you and trust Him so that you too will experience being baptized into the Body of Christ and know that God is your Father.
Nikki: If you have comments or questions for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails, with new online articles and other ministry news. Don’t forget to sign up for this year’s FAF Conference, convening online only. Registration is free but necessary so we can get you set up with all the materials you’ll need. Just write to the formeradventist@gmail.com address and be sure to include your mailing address. Last, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us next week as we continue our walk through Ephesians chapter 4.
Colleen: We’ll see you then.
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