“As God’s prisoner, then, I beg you to live lives worthy of your high calling. Accept life with humility and patience, making allowances for one another because you love one another. Make it your aim to be one in the Spirit, and you will inevitably be at peace with one another.” (Ephesians 4: 1 – 3 Phillips)
The worthy life of a person called to “follow” Christ is a life of “love.” And for most of the rest of his letter Paul writes about virtually every aspect of our relationships with one another.
“Accept life with humility … .” This is personal. It’s about “me.” That Paul would begin with advice on how to relate to oneself is revealing. He obviously understands our propensity to be begin there. But he doesn’t condemn us for that. He instructs us. Our view of ourselves, he explains, must be humble. Humility, for Paul, was not about self-deprecation. He is not teaching us to “put ourselves down.” He is encouraging us to begin our living day-by-day with a “sane estimate of our own importance.” (Romans 12: 3) Wisely he reminds us that this must be done with “patience.” We’re not the center of the Universe, so demands we put on ourselves to live as though we were; driven to “change things we cannot as well as things we can,” will only frustrate us and those around us. At the same time we’re not insignificant. To be “patient” with ourselves is to be “gracious” with “me;” to “cut ‘me’ a little slack.”
If we learn to “make allowance” for ourselves, recognizing the “Grace” our Lord has shown us, we will find it more natural to offer the same to one another. It’s when our importance is properly measured that we can freely give way to others.
“Make it your aim,” is another way of saying, focus on what matters most. For Christ-followers “unity in the Spirit,” matters most. It is, after all, what Jesus prayed for on the night before He was crucified. (See John 17:11, 20 & 21.) The “Spirit of Truth” is “with” all of us. He is “in” all of us. It makes sense that He would be working to bring us together. So, as we submit to His influence, we’ll be drawn to each other. It even makes sense to our finite minds that His influence in one of us will have different emphases than in others of us. He is “infinite.” The mind of God knows no limits. It stands to reason, then, that I will know “the Truth,” more completely when I’m learning what He’s saying to you and others as well as to myself. This interdependence and mutual respect for one another as “the dwelling place of God in the Spirit,” will, inevitably lead to “peace.” We’re filled with the same “Spirit.” He’s guiding us. He is our “strength.” We’re finding a deep sense of security and certainty as we learn to trust Him. When we realize that this is a mutual experience within our Community we begin to feel safe with each other. We realize we’ve found not only a “person” we can count on. We’ve found “people a person can count on.”
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