TEXT: Ephesians 6:21-24

SUBJECT: Ephesians #14: Practice What You Preach

Practice what you preach!

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard these words, but I’ve never gotten used to them. Not that I mind saying them to other people, of course, or of hearing them said to others; but I’ve never gotten used to hearing them said to me.

They need to be said to me, from time to time, and not only to me. Followers of Christ are not allowed to preach one thing and practice another. We must not sing the praises of godliness in the home while at the same time browbeating our wives and ignoring our kids. But we do these things, don’t we? Or, if not these things, things like them. We gossip about people who gossip, and how wicked they are to do it!

In the Resurrection, we will be what we ought to be, but not before. We walk through this life on feet of clay. With Paul, the most mature believers say—

We haven’t and we’re not!

Still, we ought to practice what we preach, admit it when we don’t, and pray for the grace of God to do better next time.

In the last words of his letter to the Ephesians, Paul sets a very fine example for them and for us too. From word one, he has urged us to praise God for uniting the Church, and to do everything we can to keep it united. The key verse is 4:3—

Having argued for this from the start, wouldn’t it be disappointing if he closed in a less than gracious manner? Thankfully, he doesn’t. The man who preaches and prays and suffers for Unity lives for it in the small things of life. This is what we have in the last four verses. No deep theology here; no heavy commands; no mysterious revelations. Just a man who loves Christ and His Church.

In vv.21-22, Paul touches on some personal matters; in the last two verses, he blesses his old friends in Ephesus and all who belong to Christ.

Ephesians is a strongly doctrinal Letter and somewhat impersonal. It is this way—I believe—because Paul wants it copied and passed around to other churches. But, being the dear man he is, Paul has to say something personal. Here’s what it is—

Paul assumes the church in Ephesus is interested in what how he is and what he’s up to. Was he right? Of course he was, because they knew him, they loved him, and they loved the Lord he was working for.

Like you and me, the people back then had their own lives to live. They had jobs to work, bills to pay and families to take care of; they worried about their health, kept up on politics, and planned their vacations. They were as busy as we are. But the busyness of life did not make them forget Paul or Christ’s cause in the world.

I wonder if you can say that about yourself? Is ‘church’ something you schedule on Sundays between 11:00 and noon (like a TV show), or is it a big part of your life? Do you care about your brothers and sisters-in-Christ? Care enough about them to wonder how they’re doing? Care enough about them to call them on the phone or to meet them for lunch or to invite them over to dinner, or to pray for them when you go to bed?

The Apostles’ Creed says—

Whatever else ‘communion’ means, it means ‘a common life’. The church is a family, and just as you don’t forget how many children you have or your wife’s name (I hope!), neither can you live as though the church is a ‘them’. It isn’t a ‘them’, it’s an ‘us’.

The Lord wants us to know each other, to care for each other, and to love each other. When we do, the Church will be unified.

‘Knowing each other’ is a two-way street. If you want to know others, you have to be interested in them; and, if you want them to know you, you have to be open to them. Some of us are better in getting to know others than in allowing them to know us.

Paul, however, is not this way. His friend Tychicus is being sent to tell them how he is. When you consider how slow travel was in those days, and how expensive, he must have had more to say than, He’s doing fine, thanks. I believe he spent hours or days filling them in on how things were with the Apostle. Including some personal things, like his health (which was often shaky), and his state of mind (which must have been oppressed somewhat, being in prison as he was).

We have to be careful here, I know. In the age of Reality TV and the celebrity of men like Jerry Springer, Geraldo, and Maury Povich, it’s possible to be too open, to run amok telling private matters.

But if that’s one temptation, it’s not the only one. We can also be too private, keeping things so close to the vest that others never get to know us.

The problem with undue privacy is it keeps others from helping you and you from helping others. If you never let your needs be known, how can anyone help you meet them? And, if you let on as though you have no needs, why would a person who does go to you for understanding and help?

I don’t know how much you should tell about yourself, when to tell it and to whom. But the Lord does know. Ask Him for the wisdom to know when it is—

True openness is only workable in the Church (I mean, among believers) because we know two things other people don’t: All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and, when we repent and trust Christ, our sins are forgiven and forgotten.

This means, you can tell others you’re struggling in some area of life without being looked down on, for the ones you tell are struggling just as badly as you are.

It also means that when you repent of your sins, we forgive you and do not hold them against you.

The Lord wants us to be open to others and open ourselves to them. When we do, the Church will be unified.

Paul would like nothing better than to come to Ephesus himself, but because he is in jail, he does the next best thing: he sends Tychicus, a man who knows him well and will give them a full report on how he is.

We know nothing about the man except what Paul tells us. He is, a beloved brother, a faithful minister, and ‘in the Lord’. Every word is golden:

First, he’s a brother. Though the name is Gentile and Paul is a Jew, he is closer to Paul than his nearest kin. Because, whatever their human heredity, they are in God’s Family, a family that is forever.

He is a beloved brother, loved by Paul and the whole church. I’m sure this has something to do with the man’s personality and character, but mostly, I suspect, it has to do with his share in Christ. Tychicus might have been a dull man with a slow mind and boring personality, but so what? If he is loved by God and Christ, the Church loves him too!

He is a faithful minister. Today, minister usually means, ‘pastor’; but in the New Testament it means servants of any kind, as long as they serve Christ. Whatever he did for the church, he did faithfully, and Paul trusted him enough to carry an important message to the believers in Ephesus.

Best of all, the man is in the Lord. This means he is united to Christ through faith, and whatever his weaknesses were, they were nothing compared to this! It is easy to think of our brethren as lazy, unreliable, stingy, too talkative, too driven, and so on. And they are some of these things. But for all this, they’re also in Christ. Keeping that in mind puts their faults in perspective, and increases our respect for them and our love.

What Paul says about his friend is a key to Church Unity. He spoke well of the man and he trusted him. As long as you’re suspicious of other people and feel no one but you can be counted on, you’ll never praise them and the church will never be unified. Which the Lord wants it to be.

Paul’s motive for sending the man to Ephesus was not only to inform them of his affairs, but also to—

‘Comfort’ is an interesting choice of words, for remember, Paul was in prison at the time, and what Tychicus said about him must have caused the people no little pain. ‘Well, Paul’s looking awfully pale nowadays, the prison food is making him skinnier, hardly anyone comes to visit him, and the guards are pretty rough’.

If he was telling the truth, Tychicus must have been saying some of these things. But this is not all he was saying, not by a longshot!

He was also telling them, ‘The Lord has never been nearer to Paul—he told me to tell you that! He’s not afraid of what the Romans can do to him or what the Jews accuse him of. He knows God has justified him and that the worst thing man can do to him is make him more like Christ in His sufferings and then send him to the Lord!

If the words were Tychicus’s, they’d ring harsh and unfeeling. But, of course, they’re not his words. Paul himself was saying things like these! And so the people, worried sick about their friend, are now rejoicing! For, with Christ by his side, even a Roman jail is a precinct of heaven!

These are the personal things Paul wanted to say, and both what he said and how he said them unified the church. If you want to join him in this good work, then do what he did here and now.

Be interested your brethren.

Be open to them.

Speak highly of them.

Trust them.

Aim to comfort them.

These are not the marks of a church going to pieces, but rather, of a church coming together as the Body of Christ.

In the last two verses, Paul pronounces a blessing, two in fact—

The first blessing, it seems, is for the Church in Ephesus. Paul wishes them three things: peace, love, and faith. The ‘peace’ he speaks of is peace with God, peace with each other, and peace with themselves. The ‘love’ is God’s love for them, their love for God, and their love for each other. The ‘faith’ means both a stronger trust in Christ and more loyalty to Him.

The second blessing is for all who love Christ in Ephesus or anywhere else. To them, and us, he offers, Grace, which means the favor of God in body and souls, now and forever.

All these blessings come equally from God and Christ, because though Christ is human, He is also Divine, and this means the source of all blessings, no less than His Father.

Paul was a man steeped in the Scriptures and history of Israel. He knew the right to bless God’s People was given, first to the priesthood. After offering sacrifices, Aaron and his kin were to come out of the Holy Place and assure Israel that God had accepted the offering and would bless them. In this role, the priests were like prophets—speaking God’s Infallible Word to the people. The blessings of God were pronounced by the priests.

And not only them, for God willed them to be a Kingdom of Priests, and some good men, Boaz for example, used the sacred blessings in everyday life. He and others were right to do that, for—

And not just the Tabernacle or the Temple or Jerusalem.

Most Israelites did not do this, of course, because their mouths were full of bitterness and cursing. How could they be otherwise? Until their own sins were forgiven, they couldn’t forgive others.

But then, by the death of Jesus Christ, the New Covenant was ratified and its blessings flowed to everyone who believed, chief of which was the forgiveness of sins. Being forgiven himself Paul was transformed; the man who used to curse the church, started to bless the Church.

He is not alone, for we too have been forgiven much, and so we too can forgive much, and instead of harboring hard thoughts about each other and saying cruel things against each other, we can pronounce all the blessings of God on our brothers and sisters-in Christ.

By doing this, we become what God has always willed us to be, both parts of the church and also builders of the church. My dad has built a dozen church buildings over the years, and that’s a good thing to do. But how much better is it to build the Church itself and to keep it in good repair?

This is what the Lord calls us to do. Let’s get at it—