Ephesians 4:25—5:2
August 12, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
To keep me balanced and not become overwhelmed by the stresses in ministry, I play tennis regularly with Victor Low in Corte Madera. Since Victor is a very consistent player, he has helped me to practice my backhand to become better than any other time since I started playing decades ago. Maybe Victor regrets what he has done for me!
At the tennis courts, there’s a guy named Jeff who plays tennis but we discovered he plays trumpet with the SF Symphony. We saw him recently at a concert. He tells us that he practices before each performance.
If I was a very good tennis player like Michael Chang or Andy Murray, I might have won the French Open or being on the US Olympic tennis team in London. But I know that I don’t have the talent of that caliber. I am only a recreational player who can improve his backhand just by practicing and playing regularly with Victor Low.
The question for us today is does innate talent or ability matter more than anything else when it comes to success? When it comes down to it, what’s the real key to success? And wouldn’t we all want to say that we want to be successful in what we do?
These are the questions that author Malcolm Gladwell was pondering when he wrote his best-selling book Outliers in 2008. Gladwell wanted to understand the truth behind the myth of success, and his research aimed at discovering the secret behind successful people like The Beatles and Bill Gates. What he discovered was rather profound. Successful people, he discovered, are the product of two key factors, converging: potential and practice.
According to Gladwell, we usually want to know about successful people’s personalities, intelligence, lifestyles, special talents they may have been born with. In autobiographies of rich people and celebrities, we hear stories of people born in modest circumstances and by virtue of their own grit and natural talent, fight their way to greatness.
But those assumptions are wrong, according to Gladwell. In fact, he says, “People don’t rise from nothing. We owe something to parentage and patronage. There are benefits to hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow these successful people to learn and work and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forefathers and foremothers shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. In other words, it’s not enough to ask what successful people are like. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”
We have the old question—Are successful people born or made? The truth is that they’re both. Gladwell says that true geniuses are the result of an intersection of timing, talent and we might say, “tenacity.” But, he argues, they are also the product of a community of people who helped them along the way. No one truly makes it on his or her own.
Look at the poise and leadership gifts that Rachel Jensen and Melanie Ng possessed as Day Camp directors this year. It’s true that they have natural gifts and talents. But they also reflect the hidden advantages of coming from good families, the extraordinary opportunities of serving at FCBC, and the cultural legacies of valuing and celebrating our Asian American identity and heritage. They didn’t do this on their own; this community of people helped them along the way.
I didn’t just develop a strong backhand from reading Tennis Magazine. I benefited from the regular competitiveness and practice of playing tennis with Victor Low.
Practicing Our Faith
And we don’t practice our faith alone. In Ephesians, Paul offers essentially the same point made by Gladwell. If you are going to be a successful Christian, the potential for that success is found in a community of faith, where the teaching and practice of wise and faithful mentors nurture people to maturity.
In the previous verses to what our lesson is for today, Paul reminds the Ephesians that they had been taught the “truth that is in Jesus” by himself and others. That “truth” results in putting away the pagan life they had previously been taught, and instead being “renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (4:20-24).
The community of faith, in other words, provides the patronage and spiritual parentage that shapes people into the likeness of God. We cannot be successful Christians on our own—it takes a community to make us so. As Paul puts it in 4:25, “we are members of one another,” which means we’re always interconnected as parts of the body of Christ.
I really believe that one of the reasons why our church continues to be vital and faithful is largely due to ministries like Youth Camp. For almost an entire week this year, junior high and senior high youth are connected as members of one another. They become successful in their Christian life because they grow from the patronage and parentage of this church that shapes them into the likeness of Christ.
At Commitment Night on Thursday, there were many youth who made their first profession of faith. They committed to pursue their faith journey when they get back to their church. Many youth renewed their faith and rededicated themselves to be more faithful and loyal to Christ.
Practice Being Christian
But here’s the thing: All the training and nurturing and Thursday Night Commitments in the world can’t make us into successful Christians if we don’t practice what we’ve learned and embody what we’ve been taught. Gladwell argues that what we do with the abundance of nurture we receive is also a critical factor in success. Pure talent, background and advantage are not enough to make someone successful. Nurture and education are only a framework upon which success might be built. What makes the difference between potential and success, says Gladwell, is practice—about 10,000 hours.
Gladwell has this 10,000 rule that applies to success. The Beatles, for example, were a struggling high school rock band that had already been together for three days in 1960 when they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany, where the music scene was very different and more demanding. John Lennon described the difference Hamburg made for the band: “In Liverpool, we’d only one hour sessions, and we’d just do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”
Eight hours a night, seven days a week. By the time The Beatles had their first real commercial success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times. Most bands don’t perform 1,200 times in their whole careers. Phillip Norman, the band’s biographer, said this: “They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back they sounded like no one else.” Playing eight hours a night was the making of them.
It took Mozart 20 years of composing before he produced his greatest work. It took Bobby Fischer 10 years to become a chess master. Bill Gates programmed computers virtually nonstop for seven consecutive years as a high school and college student. The gold medalists at the Olympics trained, disciplined themselves, and practiced for 4 years before climbing up on the medal platform. After 2 times a week for 14 years of hitting my backhand, it’s pretty good now.
What would it take for you to be truly great at something? About 10,000 hours.
10,000 hours of Practice
The disciples of Jesus followed him around for three years, and if you do the math, that comes to more than 10,000 hours of practical experience in discipleship. Are you ready to practice your faith for 10,000 hours?
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he seems to be offering them a practice schedule of things they should be working on if they’re going to be successful disciples themselves.
First, Paul say, disciples should practice telling the truth to one another. I know none of you have ever lied to me. Truth telling is the glue that holds a community together and enables people to deal honestly and forthrightly with each other. Falsehood or lying, on the other hand, creates a constant cloud of suspicion and secrecy. To exaggerate the point, imagine if we went around lying to each other. We would never know what is the truth that we can rely on to mature as a community of disciples. Rather, we would always be second-guessing who’s telling the truth! Practicing telling the truth in love and after 10,000 hours of doing so we will have a healthy community.
Coupled with truth telling is secondly, the practice of dealing honestly with anger (4:26).
Paul is saying that all of us do get angry one time or another but it’s what we do with our anger that counts. Anger is often the byproduct of a failure to deal openly and honestly in the community and makes “room for the devil” to exploit the lies we believe about others and ourselves. Practicing the principle of dealing with your anger quickly and thoughtfully before the sun goes down leads to a greater sense of self-control, enables forgiveness of others and the self, and leads to the restoration of community. Don’t you remember in marriage counseling that if you are angry at each other that we make up before going to bed? Work for 10,000 intentional hours of controlling anger and you’ll be a different person altogether.
Paul urges the Ephesians to practice seeing their work as an opportunity for service to those in need (v. 28). We might not be thieves embezzling from our companies but sometimes we take a little longer time for lunch or on a break; thus we are stealing time from our employers and coworkers by doing less than our best. We spend more time at work than we spend at home. We spend more time at school than at home. When we are practicing disciples, all those work hours and school hours—no matter what we do—can be seen as a means toward the goal of advancing God’s kingdom.
Paul tells us that we need to practice our speech as well. Loose talk and evil talk seems to be the norm in our culture, and it’s easy for even Christians to get caught up in it. Just watch some of the politically charged TV shows that come on every night by people who claim to follow Christ during this year’s presidential campaigning. But what would happen if, instead, we practiced saying nothing but “words that give grace to those who hear?” (v.29). Successful disciples engage in the daily practice of disciplining our speech to reflect the building up of others rather than tearing them down. Practice that for 10,000 hours (which equals roughly 416 days—more than a year) and you’ll sound like a successful person!
Paul warns against grieving the Holy Spirit, which seems to be another way of saying we violate our baptism and our role in building up the community in holiness. Look at Ephesians 4:5-6. We are called to “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” This means that if baptism is the mark of the Holy Spirit on us, then we need to be reminded daily that our conduct and thought should reflect the Spirit’s presence in our lives. We can’t merely settle for the privilege of grace we receive in baptism, we have to practice it and demonstrate it every day.
Performing Everyday
In verses 31-32, Paul sums up his argument by saying that if we’re really practicing Christians, then things like bitterness, wrath, anger, arguments, slander and malice will eventually be “put away” and replaced with kindness, tenderheartedness and forgiveness. That will only happen through the discipline of practice.
I can learn a lot about playing tennis, proper stance, strokes, the best equipment and so forth but if I don’t go out on the tennis court and play with intensity against Victor, I wouldn’t have a backhand today.
Practice is like performing and it reveals everything we are able to show that we know. In the first time, we might perform badly. The first time when I was out on the tennis court, most of the balls went out of the court—I thought I hit a homerun! An Olympic athlete can break world records around the practice track but unless she breaks the record at the Olympics, it doesn’t count—practice leads to performance! When we practice what we believe by performing our discipleship in the world, we begin to become transformed into what we are doing.
Practice by itself is a dream of perfection. Our friend Jeff, the trumpet player must have practiced throughout his life and then finally to perform as a member of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Only performing as Christians can turn practice into shared life where our own time may join with others, becoming truly a community of successful Christians. Practice makes us better.
The true gauge of success for Christians, according to Paul, is that their character mirrors God in a way that a child mirrors a parent. The ultimate example of that kind of success is Jesus—“Be imitators of God, beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (5:1-2).
Think about this: Jesus spent 30 years or so practicing on his own before he launched his public ministry, which is far more than 10,000 hours. Even as Jesus had the privilege of being God’s own Son, and was born with a divine nature, the Son of God knew that the success of his earthly ministry depended on years of practice.
If we are going to successfully follow Jesus, we’re going to need to invest in two things: (1.) live in a community of faith like FCBC, and (2.) take time to practice our faith. Practice makes us better.
Let us pray.
Dear God, thank you for the gifts and talents that you have blessed each and every one of us with. But lead us also to become disciplined to practice our life of discipleship in order to become truly your witnessing people. May we become kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven us. Lord, we promise to practice our faith that will lead us to be imitators of Christ. Amen.