Lead a Life Worthy of the Calling

By Elaine Poproski

“I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”

These are the opening words of Ephesians 4 and they’re the words we’ll be exploring, in one way or another, over at least the next 6 Sundays. They’re the Apostle Paul’s words and they’re written to followers of Jesus in the expectation that their faith in Jesus will have an outward expression. In a different book of the New Testament, a guy named James, who may have been Jesus’ brother, famously wrote, “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:18). He’s getting at the same thing Paul was saying.

The entirety of the first three chapters of Ephesians is a reminder of what God did through Jesus. Too often we reduce the gospel – the Good News – to a message of salvation from sin and therefore hell. We keep it all about me and God. While this is certainly part of the Good News, it’s so far from the whole story. Yes, through Jesus’ death and resurrection human beings have been reconciled to God. And that’s amazing and worth shouting from the rooftops. But that’s not all He did. God also reconciled human beings to each other. People groups that are vastly different in any and all ways imaginable, have become, in Paul’s words, “one new humanity” (Eph. 2:15). The dividing walls, the hostilities between us, have been demolished, put to death, made inconsequential to the extent that they don’t even exist anymore. The last three chapters of Ephesians spell out what that reality looks like in day-to-day life. And that’s what we’ll be exploring through the coming weeks together.

As you prepare for Sunday, I want to assure you that even though these passages of Ephesians we’ll be reading are about how God expects us to live our lives, they aren’t about making us feel guilty that as hard as we try, we just can’t be as perfect as the Bible expects us to be. In fact, as you read the passages on your own and consider the words that I will preach, I hope you will discover that while God has expectations and standards, He also provides everything we need to meet those expectations and standards. So, as you prepare for Sunday, I invite you to spend some time remembering the opening words of Ephesians. Set some time aside to read through Ephesians 1–3. Read it out loud. Listen to someone else read the words out loud. Remember the extraordinariness of God’s actions through Christ as well as His on-going action through His Holy Spirit.