From One to Many

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning, Thrive. It's great having you here on this day, our last day in the sermon series called Shift, where our goal has been to make a real shift in our attitudes, our actions, and our lives for the sake of the gospel. First of all, I want to say Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. I hope you have a blessed day and that all of you today are enjoying it. So I don't know where you're at today, but I'll tell you something I want to share with you. We're going to be doing a talk right now about the shift from the one to the many. What I mean by that is from one person doing ministry to the many of us doing ministry together. I don't know if you realize this about me, but when I was young, I never intended to be a pastor. In fact, when I went to college, I did not go into a Christian college to become a pastor. I didn't want anything to do with being a pastor. My intent was to be a high school teacher for biology and art, but that shifted at my time in the college. Now, one of the reasons why I didn't want to be a pastor, well, there are two reasons. The pastors that I grew up with were really nice, but they were a little stuffy, reserved, and everyone kind of put them on a pedestal. I did not like that idea myself. And secondly, probably more importantly, is that a lot of people that I grew up with that went to church, talked about ministry, talked about the church, and always, if the pastor did something, well, that's the pastor's job. It was kind of the excuse of why I personally am not a Christian witness, why I don't do ministry. No, that's for the professionals, for the pastors to do. And church turned into where the pastor did the ministry, and the members received the ministry, and everybody seemed happy but me. I was not happy with that arrangement. It didn't make any sense to me. And in fact, if you look at the New Testament, you won't find that that is the model of ministry at all. It's not about one person doing ministry, but it's about the many doing ministry together and everyone being a minister. In the Old Testament, there may have been a priesthood set aside and a high priest that did certain rites and activities that no one else did, and he did it on behalf of the many. But in the New Testament, the idea of priesthood shifted, and Peter says in 1 Peter, his first letter that you all together are a royal priesthood. Everyone is a priest, not just one, not just a few, not just a select few. Everyone is a priest. Everyone is a minister. Everyone is called. Everyone is that priesthood together. So that's the shift we are looking at. And the shift we are looking at is going to be focused, we're going to focus on Ephesians chapter four, verses 11 to 16, where Paul writes, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, but by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes, rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, making the body grow as it builds itself up in love. So today, for our last in the series of shift, we're going to look at the shift from the one to the many, and we're going to look at just two phrases as the main point right out of this text, and they are, and He gave, talking about Jesus when He ascended on high, and secondly, until we attain the whole purpose of why He gave these gifts. So first of all, and He gave, and this comes from that first verse that I read, and He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, the teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up of the body. So in other words, Paul would say God so loved the world so much that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life, and God then also gives beyond the Son every member of the Christian church in ministry for the sake of the world. I don't know if anybody's ever asked you this, are you a gifted person? Probably your first response is, oh, well, you know, and some kind of modest response, not really that gifted. You know, it'd be rude for somebody to say, oh, of course I'm gifted, but that is what the Bible says, and what this passage is saying, there is no one within the Christian church that is not gifted by the Holy Spirit and is not gifted for ministry. So often we think being gifted means that you a...