Introduction

All right, very good morning to everyone in Gospel Light. And it's a great honor and privilege to be here. I'm Daniel, I've been serving alongside Pastor Yu Fei that you saw last week in the youth ministry for the past, I think about three years now. So, this will be my first time addressing the main congregation. I'm as nervous as you are so let's buckle up and hear God’s word together. Alright, so we will be back to our fourth session in the topic of one anothering and this week we will be looking at growing together. And we're looking at a more church context how we as a church can think together regarding God's word, encouraging one another, serving together and building each other up. So, for this week, we're looking at a topic of growing together our text is from Ephesians 4, verses 11 to 16.

I will start by showing you a very beautiful picture. And this grove, this beautiful scene that you see here is located in Utah USA. It comprises of about 40,000 trees of this variety called quaking Aspen's, and it's across this 40 over hectare land area. And by looking at this, what you may not realize is that all of these trees belong to the same organism. They are genetically identical, all 40,000 of them connected by the same root system underground. And together, this collection of trees is called Pendo. And Pendo is the largest organism on Earth by mass.

For us Christians, we are similar to Pendo. Because all of us are connected as the same spiritual body with our rootedness in Christ. And as a single body, we want to be a healthy body that is fit, strong and able to fend off the pressures of the world. So that we can carry out our Gospel Mission of leading life, people into life changing relationships in Christ Jesus. But if the body is weak, the growth is stunted, it's divided, then we will not be able to be effective in our mission. So I may not know much about growing healthy trees, but I know one thing or two about growing a healthy body. And so, in my younger days, I was involved in some body building training. I might have spent more time here than in class, but I learned many things regarding what it means, what is required to build a healthy body. You can see obviously, I'm not in that lifestyle anymore. But here are some of the principles that I learned. And I learned that firstly, you need to have an end goal. Alright, the most important thing is to have an end goal. So, I'm sure at the beginning of the year, every one of us had certain New Year's resolutions, and maybe some of them were related to health and fitness. where we looked at all the food that we eat over Christmas, and we think we need to shed some of that spare tire already, or may be to get fitter and stronger, and so on, right? And similar to that, as the saying goes, “if you fail to plan you plan to fail”.

The key to understanding our text today is knowing that Christ is our end goal. For every believer, we want to grow towards Christlikeness. And we will read from the verse in verse 13. “We all, as a church, are to attain to the unity of the faith, and to the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” So as the body of Christ, it is our goal, to resemble Christ in His fullness and perfection, we want to be united in our pursuit of him and represent Him to the world. So, when the church is displaying this unity, this picture of Christlikeness, then it will be clear to the world, the power and the reality of the gospel that transforms us. Conversely, if the church is divided amongst ourselves, we are fighting, we are only caring for the needs of ourselves, then all the world will see when they look at us, look at gospel light will be this jumbled mess. And maybe similar to the intro video that we saw, there is people fighting, there's disunity, and we will not be effective in what we need to do at all. So, coming back to role models and end goals, when we were young, I'm sure all of us had certain role models that we look up to, and aspire to be like, maybe they were our parents, maybe a sport superstar, maybe actor, celebrity or even a superhero, right. And what we did is that we wanted to emulate them, imitate them in everything that they did in life, so that we can be more like them. So, when I was training in bodybuilding, I would see what the professionals will do, I watched a lot of YouTube videos, and if they ate this food, I will eat this food, if they exercise in this way, I would do the same exercise. If they measure their progress in this way, I will use the same yardsticks to measure my progress and see if I'm on the right track. And I realized that there were principles to follow. So, to build a healthy body, you need to firstly look at the diet that you're eating, the routine exercise that you have, and what are the ways to measure your progress. So, in our text for today, Paul distills for us similar three principles for us to measure ourselves against and see if we are going towards Christ likeness.

And firstly, there will be to have the right diet, to get active and to check our progress.

1st Principle for Growing Together: Start with the Right Diet

Now, the very first principle we look at today is to start with the right diet. As the saying goes you are what you eat and it actually carries a lot of truth. If today you're not able to maybe have much routine exercise in your life, but if you're watching your diet carefully, there's still some kind of health benefits that you can get from that. And when we apply that to our children we understand this easily when we grow up when you have young kids you will spend all the money in the world to get the best baby formula, the DHA three omega three plus so that the IQ can go up and the immunity gau gau (means enough in Hokkien) okay and especially when we come to the next milestone: PSLE. And if you start to see end of the year all your advertisements or bus stops, they will have those advertisements where the brand essence of chicken and then you drink this and then you will come to the top three PSLE scorer. I have tried and not achieved that. But we understand that a diet is very important. And conversely, a bad diet can easily sabotage your health goals. So here are some examples right, of the common snacks and food that we enjoy on a day-to-day basis. And using a bowl of white rice because we're all Asian, a bowl of white rice as our standard. You can guess the number of calories in the common snacks that we consume. So on a on a Friday night and we are sitting on the sofa eating our chips, a whole bag of chips. That's about five bowls of rice for you. The Old Chang Kee at the MRT, when you on the way home and you buy a curry puff, that's already 180 calories a piece. And later in the year when Durian season hits, I'm sure I know that there are many durian fanatics out here. Every single seed is 100 calories. Not per durian but per seed. Alright. And for the bubble tea lovers, that every day you must have your fix. That's about 300 calories a cup. And so, what you might not realize is that all these things when you're not aware and intentional about it, it adds up.

Now when we come back to the spiritual principle, we have to ask ourselves, what are the spiritual teachings that we are consuming, that we are constantly being exposed to that influence us without us realizing it. So, let's come back to our text and see what is the spiritual influence and diet that God has in store for us. Verse 11, he gave the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers now, who are all these people. These people represent the ministry of the Word of God, to the church. So, they range from the apostles and prophets in time past who received the revelations from God, and that forms our New Testament Bible today. And they range from those people to even the shepherds, teachers, pastors who lead and guide our church right now. So, these people, God has given them to the church to equip the church with the word and allow by that to grow the church to maturity.

Diet of the Word

In other words, the word has to be the primary spiritual diet of the church. Peter, in 1 Peter 2:2, he likens the word to this pure spiritual milk that nourishes a baby. And by this milk, the baby will grow up to salvation, to maturity. So, over the years, the topic of church growth has been a common topic amongst Christians, Christian leaders, Christian pastors, and there are all kinds of methods and material out there in how people think you should grow at church. And I've seen quite a few, from exciting programs, to attractive outreach events, to great discipleship platforms, to even celebrity endorsement. But all of this will fail, if we do not realize that the word is the primary spiritual diet to grow the church. You see, even if a church is growing in numbers, it might not necessarily be real spiritual growth. Because if we are focused on attracting and retaining numbers, then we will be distracted from our real end goal of going towards Christlikeness. All we'll do is think how can we get more people? How can we attract more people? How can we keep the people who are here? But we wouldn't be thinking about growing together to spiritual maturity. And I'm not saying that Christian material, Christian books are bad, you don't go take all your Christian books and go burn them in the pile now. But if we liken the Word of God, to the real nutrition, the real proper three meals that we are getting, then the rest is simply supplements like vitamins, and a body has to receive the proper nutrition first, it does not grow healthily by just eating vitamins alone.

So, a church that grows based on the faithful teaching of the Word will definitely grow healthily. And while I would like to add to that by saying that we also as the body of Christ, should be careful on where we are getting this nutrition from. You see, the word needs to be handled faithfully and skillfully so that we can be equipped for the work of the ministry. So, while the central message of salvation is simple enough to understand, we understand that Christ died for sinners, he rose again and by that by his blood, we are saved. But the implications of that in Gospel living, how that applies to every area of our life, that takes some interpretation, does take some skill in understanding and role modeling. So the word needs to be carefully interpreted so that the church is not led astray. The same ingredients that can be used to make any dish, you can make a healthy or unhealthy meal with the same ingredients. And so, teachers need to be faithful to how God intended the church to grow: what was the original message that's in the word that God wanted the church to learn and not a message that the preacher wanted to tell the people.

Now when I was an intern in Gospel Light some years ago, we used to have this session every week where the two of us interns, we would have weekly Bible study and sort of a mini sermon preparation session with Pastor Jason. And so, every week we will study a text, and we will take turns to present it like a mini sermon, and Pastor Jason will give his feedback afterward. So, he used to give this analogy he likened preparing a sermon, to preparing a meal in that the Bible is the raw ingredients, and the preachers have to study it, dissect it, prepare it and present it in such a way that is both nutritious and appealing to the congregation. And sort of feedback sessions were like episodes of Hell's Kitchen and we present and I'll get this the most often and he will scream at us, He will shout at us says, “Stop your nonsense. Get out of the room!” He'll take our notes, he will tear it to shreds. Your Sermon is so raw, it sounds like Greek.

I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. It's more like Heaven's kitchen. Okay, so Pastor Jason is very nice, he is able to communicate the truth in love. He wants to make sure that what we're doing is to present and preach in a way that's faithful to the text. So as the body we need to be discerning what we're receiving from our teachers don't just take things blindly from myself from, from PJ from whichever speaker, but do our best to look through the text and see and discern is this really what the Word of God is saying? So, we have to “take care that we're not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose our own stability” (2 Peter 3:17). Let's be mindful of where we're getting our spiritual nutrition from. In summary, the word has to be our primary spiritual diet that we grow from, as it is being taught faithfully by faithful leaders.

2nd Principle for Growing Together: Get Active! (Ephesians 4:12)

Now, the second principle that we have is to get active. In recent years, I think one of the most successful initiatives from the government to get Singaporeans active has to be this national step challenge, right? Because if you use information or scare tactics, and like warn people, obesity is bad, diabetes is bad, no one listens. But the moment you introduce vouchers, wah then everyone you see all the Uncle, Auntie, they will wear their step tracker and get your 10,000 steps right so you can get your shopping and grocery voucher. Now, I hope that we don't need to incentivize gospel lighters to get involved in ministry in a similar way. But you see, just as the body requires active exercise to grow, the spiritual body also requires active engagement, as we live out our faith in order to grow.

In verse 12, he says, to equip the saints for the word of the Ministry for the building of the Body of Christ. Now, if you gloss over the text too fast reading from verse 11 to 12, some of us might have the wrong impression, that it is the previous leaders, the apostles, prophets, shepherds, teachers, who equip the saints, who do the work of the ministry, who built the body. And it's the leaders who do all of the work. So, all that we need to do as the body is to happily come on the Sunday mornings, and listen to the word be encouraged, be fed, be blessed. And then we go home happy. And then we watch, we watch the show, and then we are entertained. Now that can’t be further from the truth, because it is the saints who are to do the work of the ministry.

And understand in today's day and age, it's even easier to fall into that trap in thinking that all we need to do is just to come in and listen to the Word and be blessed. Because in time in COVID times, you don't even need to come here physically, we start streaming our services online, you can wake up in the comfort of your home, tuning, not even at 9, but because it's recorded, at anytime you want and then just watch the sermon, eat your breakfast at the same time and after that one hour, it is done. And I think it's a pity that if your Christian experience has just been shrunk down to that one hour a week, and that's all you have, regarding church and how you live out your spiritual life. But you see, it is the saints who are to do the work of the ministry, the leaders mentioned before, their job is to equip, equip the saints for the work. Now who are the saints? That's you and me. Sometimes we think of saints, we think of all the statues in the Catholic churches, the St. Peter's in everything, but here, it just means the holy ones. And for every child of God, we are the holy ones bought by the blood of Christ, we are the saints.

So, all of us, every believer, is supposed to get actively involved in the life of the church. As we listen to the Word, we allow that to transform our lives and we go out loving one another, serving one another, putting our hand to the plow and getting involved in the work of ministry. Because besides being equipped by the leaders, the fact is that every single one of us has been also supernaturally equipped by God for the work he calls us to do. Earlier in verse 7, it says that “grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift” (Ephesians 4:7). What that means is that God has given every single believer a spiritual gift in order to serve the body with there are many lists in the New Testament that detail the different areas of gifting. And we're not going to go into that here otherwise it will be a whole new sermon series. But everyone has received a gift so that is not just to benefit ourselves, but for the common good. That means if you are not involved in serving and giving, then what you're doing is actually preventing the body from benefiting from the gift that you have been given with.

You see, building muscle requires both the surplus diet and the active exercise. And if you're only piling on the food, and not putting in the work, all that you will do is get fat. And I'm sure maybe you've heard before, there are people who abuse the work bulking, where is used as a bodybuilding term where they will eat a lot, they will train a lot to put on their muscle, and only afterwards, they will slim down to get ready for the competition. But many of us, we just want to forever be in that bulking phase where we just eat and eat and eat, and not put in the work and exercise and live that out. And all we're doing is we're getting fat, we're getting slow, we're getting lethargic.

If we use another analogy, it's like the Dead Sea. Right, so the Dead Sea is dead, because there's nothing that can grow in it. The reason is that there is inflow into the Dead Sea, where fresh water comes in by the streams and rivers from a higher elevation. And he flows down into this basin, where the body of water collects. However, because it's already so low, there's nowhere else for the water to flow out. And what happens after a long period of time is that the sun evaporates the water and the salt in the sea, the salt content in the sea continues to rise, so much so that there's no life that can grow in it. What I am saying is that if there is inflow, there has to be outflow in order for life to flourish.

So as a church we need to reflect and to ask ourselves, have we been giving and serving and loving each other and living out our faith, as God has caused to do? Or have we become lethargic and slow? Because I'm sure that week after week what is being presented here by Pastor Jason and the rest of the shepherds is the good nutrition, is the good stuff. Right? But have we just been content with sitting and listening and not moving? And getting involved in the work after that? Are we dead seas? Or are we people who have just been content with eating and not exercising? And maybe you might be thinking, hey, this is COVID season, it's different from before, the ways I can serve and get involved in ministry have been limited and some of the things we can't do any more. And I totally understand that. Or maybe you feel that I can’t preach like Pastor Jason, I can't sing like Shane. I can’t organize things like someone else. But I'm sure there's still many areas that we can look out for to get involved in ministry. Maybe it's in your CG. So, you can assist a CG leader in how you can take care of a fellow CG member, maybe something simple like giving an encouraging text or motivation through the week. Maybe it's something simple like getting involved in the children ministry to teach our kids. Maybe get involved in the youth ministry because we always need older laborers and mentors for our young people or even parents to come and support what the ministry is doing and how we can grow our next generation together. Maybe it's in sharing your faith to a fellow coworker, or even your family members that you meet every day. Maybe it's to get involved in the ushering team or the people who help out with those safe distance measures because as COVID comes, then all those needs increase.

So, there are still many avenues and ways for us to get involved in ministry. I think it comes down to whether we want to be open to them or not, to open our eyes to be aware of the needs, to ask around us, our leaders and see where we can get involved to help. And don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that anyone of us is indispensable for whatever work that God calls us to do. I'm sure at the end of the day, he will raise up the right people for the job. But imagine, imagine with me as we think about gospel, like the power and impact that this church can have, if every single one of us is getting involved, is contributing to what the church efforts are doing, is reaching out and ministering to the people around us in our Punggol community. And I'm sure that there'll be a lot more power and impact as everyone of us really puts our hand to the plow and gets involved in the life of the church.

If you see someone with a fit and large body, you would expect that they can move a large amount of weight. And I think God has really blessed us over the years, this 30 over years as Gospel Light has grown, from strength to strength. And so, if you look at Gospel Light today, we are not a small church, we are a large church. And my question to you will be, as you look at how this church has grown, and the size that we've become, are we pooling the weight appropriate to our size. So, it's only when all the saints are eating right, with the right spiritual diet that is focused on the Word and been taught faithfully, when we are exercising and living our faith, that we are able to build up the body of Christ and move towards our end goal, if you remember, of maturity in Christ likeness.

3rd Principle for Growing Together: Check your Results (Ephesians 4:14-16)

Last but not least, the third principle we'll be looking at today is to check your results. As with every endeavor, we need ways to measure our progress. And in the secular world, this can be quite easy, right? It's very black and white. If you are a student, every term test, every year, how are your results improving? If your aim was to lose weight, then is your weight dropping on the scale. If your aim is to get stronger, or the weights you move getting bigger? Or if you run a business, how is your net profit increasing over the years? Now, spiritual maturity is not so simple to track. And there's no black and white kind of numbers we can use to measure but Paul gives us some marks of maturity that we can measure ourselves against. And there are four of them, let me share very quickly.

4 Marks of maturity

1. 1. Doctrinal discernment

Number one, is to have doctrinal discernment. So, it means that we will no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine. (Ephesians 4:14) You see, we live in a day and age of information where in the palm of your hand, you hold access to all the information in this world from across all time.

For example, if you Google, how to lose belly fat, you're going to see 83 million results of differing advice. And it takes some discernment, to know what works and what doesn't. And the spiritual sense is equally easy to find false teaching and false doctrine if you search up on the internet. And only when you are familiar with the Word, being equipped with the Word, will you be able to discern what really is God's message and what isn't. And really today it’s getting harder and harder to figure out and we really need to be watchful over what we're reading. I was researching earlier this week on some topics as we prepare material for our youth ministry. And I was looking at what the Bible says about marriage. And it's quite shocking to read up as you search on Google and almost half of the links as you click through them, have an entirely wrong representation of what marriage should be between a man and a woman. And there'll be websites and there'll be writers and authors who propose very different thinking. And if we're not discerning, and we think that this sounds Christian enough, there are some verses there, we might think that that is the way to go. And so, as we are equipped with the word, we will slowly mature, and we'll be able to sieve out these things and realize that this is not what God has intended. So, a mature and healthy church that is properly equipped, will have this spiritual discernment, and not be led astray.

1. 2. Truth Balanced with Love

A second mark is that of being able to communicate truth balanced with love. And it becomes a hard balance to draw, right? Because in this culture today, it increasingly rejects objective truth, then when you want to bring in truth to a discussion, you might be labeled as bigoted or unloving. However, true love, according to God's standard must always be based on his standards of right and wrong. You see, God's word has to be the ultimate authority in our lives, where God decides what is morally right or wrong, acceptable, holy, unholy, and a mature church will not compromise in this area of truth.

It can be also equally easy to go to the other extreme right and we take on this stand of truth, and we are not compromising, and we are hard on those who don't understand and have different convictions from us. And we can be also unloving in the sense that we want to bash somebody with truth. And what might happen is that we hurt and distance people who are maybe slightly less mature, maybe they are seeking. And we want to avoid that because we're here to build each other up not to drag people down and find faults with mistake. So, as we mature, we will be a people who speak truth in love, we will be able to bear each other's burdens, be able to restore people in a spirit of gentleness. Not only will we want to demonstrate this loving truth with each other as believers, but I'm very sure that mature believers will also want to represent truth to the world in a loving way. That means you evangelize, we learn how to share the gospel to the unchurched around us but in a wise and loving manner that they're able to accept and we would know that if people reject us, it's not because they're rejecting you, but rejecting the gospel. So, one more thing, maybe Yu Fei has shared this in the past week, as well, but “people won't care what you know, until you know that you care”. Matured believers as another mark of maturity will be able to communicate truth in love.

1. 3. Growing toward Christlikeness

Now, a third mark, would be that of growing towards Christlikeness, in every way. As what Pastor Jason famously says, is not about 100%, sinless perfection, but sincere progression. So, none of us will be fully perfect in this life. But there should be an obvious and eventually progress to holiness and maturity, as we grow in our faith.

May I point out that it is not just growing in Christlikeness, but in every way. So Christian growth is not like this buffet spread where you can just choose the parts that you want to grow and reject those that you don't want. Like, we look at the fruits of the Spirit, for example. And we think that oh, love, okay, I want some love. It's nice to be a loving person, oh, joy, like, I really need more joy and happiness in my life. And we take more of that, then patience, you know how difficult my children are, patience may be later, right. And Christian growth doesn't work that way, we have to grow in every single way, as the Spirit leads us, such that “we are all being transformed into the same image of Christ from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18), as the Spirit of God who lives in us, grows us and convicts us of all the different ways that we need to grow. You see, we're not going towards the image that we want. But we are growing towards the image of Christ. So, brothers and sisters, let's be sensitive to the spirit in how he's leading us to grow towards Christlikeness. So, if we're feeding on the right diet, getting involved in ministry, and measuring our progress, it is inevitable, it is sure that we will grow towards Christlikeness, as the spirit grows us and transforms us.

1. 4. Ever Member Contributing

Now the last mark that we can look at is every member of the body will be contributing towards the growth of the whole. As we mature together, individual believers would find the unique place in ministry that you fit into in the picture in the body of Christ, to discover your spiritual gifting. As you get equipped by the Word, as you live it out and find a place that you can contribute, then you'll see as a church, more and more people will get involved. And what we'll look for is this sweet unity, where we're all serving each other, loving each other, encouraging each other. And as what was shared last week, we are stirring up one another, towards love and good works. And so, as we conclude, let's be reminded that building up this spiritual body, towards Christlikeness has always been God's goal.

You see, numbers growth is not everything either, because a large church is not necessarily a healthy church. But real spiritual maturity comes in when we are having the right spiritual diet of being focused on the Word, all of us getting active and involved in the life of the ministry. And we constantly check our results, our maturity and not to find fault with one another, but that we can bear each other's burdens and encourage each other towards Christlikeness, to the point that we would mature to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So that's growing together, and I pray that all of us as we look in this year ahead, we'll be able to as a church progress from one degree of joy to another towards that image of God.

Prayer

Let’s bow for a word of prayer. God, we thank You for Your word in this series of one-anothering. As we have learned and grown from various speakers, will you continue to refine us and sharpen us? And keep us actively thinking how we as a body of Christ can be growing together towards Christlikeness, that as we mature, we will continue to encourage one another, build each other up, know you more intimately, and be able to fend off and discern false teaching and false doctrine so that we can come to resemble you more and more, that we will be a great testimony as well to the communities around us, the unchurched around us, and testify that your gospel does indeed transform and is powerful. So, God, I pray that you continue to be with us as we learn and grow in this series for the coming weeks as well. We ask for your grace and your guidance as we look to the year ahead, we pray and ask, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Thank you for watching. Remember to subscribe for our latest updates. You may also want to tune in to our Facebook Live sessions every Sunday morning at 9am for our worship services, we hope you will be part of a faithful, Bible-believing gospel community that you may be loved and cared for and discipled therein. And we hope that these messages, these resources that we put up will serve as spiritual vitamin supplements to our spiritual diet. God bless.