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This past Thursday marked forty days since Easter, making it Ascension Day, when the church celebrates Christ’s ascension to the throne of heaven. Ever wonder what is he doing up there? Lots of things, but I’ll mention one in particular: he is giving people gifts (sometimes called spiritual gifts) for the purpose of building up the church. Jesus is absolutely committed to the church.

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says: “When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men.” …It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.  (Ephesians 4:7-8, 11-16)

The ascended Christ has gifted every one of his people to serve his church. You, if you are Jesus’s person, have been given a gift and it is important to the church’s – and your – success that you use it. Your unique combination of personality, experience, and gift make your contribution irreplaceable. Other people may have more Bible knowledge than you, may be more outgoing, or more talented, but no one else can serve like you.

“Serve” is the operative word. Karen and I were in Israel in 2015, and we saw thousands of tourists there: people from just about every place in the world. You know how you can tell the tourists? They’re the ones sitting down. I never once saw a tourist serving meals or sweeping floors or taking out the trash.

It’s okay to be a tourist when you’re touring, but it’s not okay in the church. Yet church in America has become a kind of religious attraction featuring educational tours, entertainment tours, and self-help expeditions. But church members are not tourists.

The tourist mindset is all about self, but we connect to God best when we’re not thinking about ourselves. It’s a paradox: our needs are best met when we’re meeting the needs of others. We’re happiest when we’re not trying to be happy. In fact, just thinking about whether or not you’re happy will kill happiness every time. It’s only when we lose ourselves that we can be found. That’s the way it works. That’s who we are.

And God designed the Church to fit who we are. Or perhaps he designed us to fit how the Church is. The Church is not a stage on which professionals perform for tourists. The church not a cruise ship; it is more like a commercial fishing vessel. There are no passengers, just crew.

The journal Psychological Sciences published a study that suggests too much talent can actually hurt a sports team, especially in sports like soccer and basketball, which depend on teamwork. Franchises that spend tens of millions of dollars to stack their lineup with superstars usually don’t fare as well as teams that have only one or two star players. In basketball, for example, the number of assists and rebounds goes down as the number of superstar players goes up.

In reviewing that study, a writer for Scientific American concluded that successful teams have “a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual.”[1] That is certainly true of the Church. Our goal is beyond the reach of any one of us, no matter how talented we are. Paul writes about that goal in verse 13: It is to “reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

When the Church attains “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,” Christ will be operating through his global Church without limit to his power. Then the lion will lie down by the lamb, there will no longer be any curse, and God will be all and in all. But the Church will never reach “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,” on the strength of celebrity preachers or rock star worship leaders. It will take every one of us using our combined gifts. Every one of us, if we belong to Christ, has received a gift. That is Paul’s point in verse 7: “But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.”

Ancient Greek has different rules for sentence structure than modern English. In English, I might write, “John throws the ball” – subject-verb-object. That’s the way we like it. I would not write, “The ball John throws” – object-subject-verb – but in Greek (which can sound a lot like Star-Wars-Yoda-speech) that would be perfectly acceptable. In a Koine Greek sentence, any word can go almost anywhere, and word placement is used to adds emphasis. To place a word first in a sentence is like putting it in italics and bold print. Paul puts the word “one” at the beginning of verse 7. He wants to drive home the fact that the ascended Christ had given each and every one of us a gift for the sake of the Church.

And every one of those gifts is needed; God did not send the church spare parts. When I was in college, I bought a timer that plugged into a wall outlet, and then plugged my stereo into the timer, so that I could wake up to rock and roll. And that worked great, except for one thing. The timer developed a humming – almost a grinding – sound that drove my roommate crazy.

So, I took the timer apart, looking for whichever gear wasn’t meshing or whatever else might be wrong. But I didn’t find anything, so I decided to put it back together and hope that it would somehow work better. When I got done, I had two little pieces left over.

I looked at the pieces. I looked at the timer. I thought: “Maybe they’re not important.” So, I plugged the timer into the wall and flames shot out of the outlet. They melted the prongs on the plug, blackened the wall around the outlet, and probably blew out every fuse on my wing.

Who would have guessed? Those little pieces were important. And so are the gifts that God gave to each of us. You can say, “My gift is probably not important,” but Jesus gave that gift to you for a reason, and gave you to us for a reason. Without your gift in place, we could have a meltdown.

Now look at verse 11: “It was he” – the ascended Christ – “who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers…”

 In verse 7, Christ gives grace-gifts to each and every one of us for the sake of the Church. Verse 7 is about Christ gifting individuals with spiritual gifts. Verse 11 is about Christ gifting the Church with gifted individuals: apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor-teachers.

Why did Christ give these gift-people to the Church? Verse 12 tells us: “to prepare God’s people” – that’s you and me – “for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up…”

Let me read that to you again, but this time from the King James Version, which had a corner on the Protestant Bible reading market for hundreds of years: “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” I love the King James, but that translation has led to a centuries-long misunderstanding of these verses and an unbiblical paradigm for church ministry. It seems to be saying that God gave apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor/teachers to the church for three distinct purposes: (1) the perfecting of the saints; (2) the work of the ministry; and (3) the edifying of the body of Christ.

That fit perfectly with the church paradigm of the day: the gifted individuals of verse 11 are clergy and everyone else is laity. And it provided the clergy with a job description: whip the saints into shape (the perfecting of the saints), do the ministry (things like preaching, teaching, and visiting the sick), and build up the Church. Church clergy are active: they do the work. Church members are passive: they get worked on

So, the clergy has three responsibilities: perfect the saints, do the work of the ministry, and build up the Body of Christ. But in the original language, there are prepositions at the beginning of each of those three clauses, and the first is different from the other two. That’s important. That first preposition indicates that Christ gave the Church apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors/teachers for a purpose: to prepare (NIV) or equip (NASB) or perfect (KJV) the saints for (same word in English, different word in Greek) “the work of the ministry.” It’s the saints who do the ministry.

Now by “saints,” we are not talking about Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, or one of the other great people the Catholic Church has canonized. For Paul, the saints are simply the people who belong to God – that is, everyone who has faith in Jesus. The saints, in other words, are us: ordinary men, women, and children. The saints go to work every day. They get married and they get the flu. They make RVs and they make babies. They have migraines and they have a sweet tooth. The saints are us.

The word translated as prepare or equip is the noun form of a verb that is used thirteen times in the New Testament and is translated by the NIV in eight different ways. Its basic idea is to get something into working order. For example, the first time the verb appears, it is used of the commercial fishermen getting their nets in order for another night of fishing. There were holes that needed to be closed, knots that needed to be retied, snarls that needed to be untangled. They were getting the nets into ship-shape, which is to say they were mending, restoring, and getting them ready for use.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus says, “The student who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” The word translated fully trained is the same verb. The disciple is, in other words, someone who is being restored, mended, equipped, and got ready to be like his teacher.

The noun form of the word (which is what we have here), was used in medical parlance for putting a patient back together after an injury. Maybe your bones need to be set. You need to learn to walk again. If that is going to happen, you will need to be restored, mended, and got ready.

That is what the gift-people of verse 11 do for the gifted people of verse 12: Restore them, train them, and get them ready. How do they do that? In many ways. They pray. They preach God’s word. They teach. And because the saints often bear wounds, they mend. And the gift-people of verse 11 help the gifted people of verse 12 – the saints – find ways to use the gifts Christ gave them.

They get them ready for (there is that change of preposition) works of service. Paul’s ministry model was very different from the one that has dominated the western Church, in which the clergy does the work, and the members pay them to do it. In Paul’s model, the clergy’s job (though clergy is not even a biblical term) is to get each and every church member restored, mended and ready to minister. That’s the model. Every person using the gift God gave him or her. The pastors and teachers of verse 11 can preach spellbinding sermons and be on-call around the clock, but they fail at their job unless they are readying church’s members for, and releasing them to do, ministry.

When the gift-people of verse 11 prepare the gifted people of verse 12 to do the ministry, the Body of Christ is built up (this is verse 13) “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

When the church is moving toward that goal instead of some other goal – higher attendance, bigger media footprint, larger endowment – people grow personally and spiritually. Respect for one another soars. Miracles take place. The world takes notice. And this happens because every Church member is engaged, using the gifts that Christ gave him or her. “The whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Verse 16).

If you’re hearing this and thinking, “I should find out how Christ has gifted me and do something about it,” I couldn’t agree more. You absolutely need to find your spiritual gift and use it.

I’m not going to walk that back a bit. But I want to add this: we don’t usually find our spiritual gift by looking for it. We find it by seeing what needs to be done, and doing it. When we see a need – and it’s often one that others overlook – and get busy meeting it, that’s when we are most likely to discover how God has gifted us.

Let me illustrate that point with a story from World War II. When the Americans thought the war was all but over, Germany sent 200,000 troops and hundreds of tanks west and overran the American defenses. It is known as the Battle of the Bulge, and it was costly. The U.S. suffered 80,000 casualties and 19,000 deaths.

In the chaos, American commanders asked for volunteers to try to stop the German tanks that were wreaking havoc on them. A 19-year-old draftee from Baltimore named Albert Darago said he would go. His superiors gave him a bazooka – he had never held one and hardly knew which end was which – and sent him down a hill under heavy German fire. Albert snuck up behind some bushes and found himself a short distance from four tanks. He aimed at one of the tank’s rear engines, as he was told, pulled the trigger, and to his surprise, scored a direct hit.

When he got back to his own lines, his commander asked him to go again. And he did. Another direct hit. Seventy years later, when The Washington Post interviewed Albert for a commemorative piece on the battle, he said: “It was something that had to be done and we did it. I never considered myself brave. Somebody had to do it, and I was there.”[2]

Albert could have been talking about the way people find their spiritual gift: “Somebody had to do it, and I was there.” Spiritual gift inventories can be helpful, but only if we’re there,caring, involved, and willing to make sacrifices. In the process of doing what needs to be done, we discover our gifts. We also discover what we’re not gifted at, which is very helpful. Most importantly, we discover that God will work through us.

But discovering a spiritual gift, like most other discoveries, happens over time, after multiple trials, and not a few missteps. And we probably won’t find it sitting in our Lazy Boy; we’ll find at the church’s point of need.

One last thing: I’ve spent many hours preparing this sermon, translating the Greek text, looking for main points, choosing helpful illustrations. But what you do in the next moment is more important than what I did over the last week. If you decide to find and use your spiritual gift, your life will change for the better, you will grow in the knowledge of God, and our church will benefit. But it is your decision.

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[1] Roderick I. Swaab, “The Too-Much Talent Effect,” Psychological Science (6-27-14); Cindi May, “The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent,” Scientific American (10-14-14)

[2] Adapted from Michael E. Ruane, “In 1944 Battle of the bulge, Albert Darago, then 19, took on a German tank by himself,” The Washington Post (12-15-14)