Walk Worthy
Three responses to the fullness of God
Family Matters · Part 5 · Ephesians 4
This past week, Andrew and I participated in a summit on human flourishing, built around one of the most ambitious research projects ever attempted on the question of what makes a human life go well. The Global Flourishing Study, led by researchers at Harvard and Baylor in partnership with Gallup, is following more than 200,000 people across 22 countries for five years, measuring happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial stability, and asking what actually causes people to flourish.
The early findings are staggering, and some of them are sobering. Young adults, ages 18 to 24, are reporting some of the lowest flourishing scores of any age group across the world. Wealth doesn't fix it; the study found that as nations grow richer, their citizens' sense of meaning and purpose often goes down, not up. But across cultures, two threads keep rising to the top: close relationships, and participation in religious community, which emerged as one of the strongest predictors of overall well-being anywhere on earth. The researchers summarized the heart of the data in a sentence I can't stop thinking about: human beings flourish where they are known and loved, and they wither where they are not.
One story from the research has stayed with me. Investigating surprisingly high levels of unhappiness at an elite private school in Silicon Valley, researchers interviewed students, and one young person described the feeling of being a cog in a personless system, an unimportant part of a machine that took no consideration of who they were. Every advantage money could buy, and the one thing missing was the one thing that matters: being known and loved.
Here's why I open there. Two of the world's great research universities spent years and tracked two hundred thousand lives to discover what Paul wrote to the Ephesians from a prison cell: fullness expresses itself in love, and people become whole inside a family where love is at work. Science is catching up to Ephesians 4. So let's walk into it.
Where We Left Off: the Letter Turns
Last week we stood at Ephesians 4:1 and named it for what it is: the moment of cruciality, the pivot on which the entire book turns. Everything Ephesians has built for three chapters comes to a hinge in a single word: therefore. "I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called." That "therefore" is carrying three chapters of grace on its back.
And you can measure the pivot in the grammar. Before 4:1, the verbs belong to God: he blessed, he chose, he predestined, he adopted, he redeemed, he made known the mystery, he made us alive, he raised us, he seated us, he created us, he brought us near, he made the two one, he is building us together, he strengthens us, he fills us. Read the first half of Ephesians looking only at who is doing the acting, and you'll discover that we are grammatically on the receiving end of almost every sentence. We are the blessed, the chosen, the adopted, the raised, the filled. Then you cross 4:1, and the verbs change hands: walk, be humble, bear with one another, keep the unity, speak the truth in love, put off, put on, be kind, forgive, imitate, walk in love, submit, honor, stand, pray. The first half is what God has done. The second half is what we do.
But here is the point I most want you to carry from the pivot into this chapter: the second half is not a second subject. It is a response. God never asks for the verbs of chapters 4 through 6 from people who haven't received the verbs of chapters 1 through 3. The walk flows out of the fullness, never in place of it. And Paul bakes that response grammar into the commands themselves. Look at how they're constructed: be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit, because there is one body and one Spirit, one God and Father of all. Forgive one another, "as God in Christ forgave you" (4:32). Walk in love, "as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us" (5:2). Imitate God, "as beloved children" (5:1). Every imperative in the second half reaches back and stands on an indicative from the first half. He put us in him. He gave us new life. He unveiled the mystery of the gospel. He brought us into the fullness of God that is characterized by love. Now we live like people to whom all of that has actually happened.
This is the difference between Ephesians and every religion of self-improvement. Religion runs the order backwards: do these things, and maybe God will accept you. Ephesians runs it the only direction grace can flow: God has already blessed, chosen, adopted, raised, seated, and filled you, therefore walk. Which means the second half of this book is not a burden laid on our shoulders. It is a description of what a filled person, a filled family, a filled house, gets to look like, in our homes, with our neighbors, in our natural family and our spiritual family.
And in Ephesians 4, Paul organizes that response into three overarching movements.
Response One: Walk Worthy by Pursuing Unity
"I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." (Ephesians 4:1–3, ESV)
Notice what "worthy" means here, because it is not what we'd expect. Paul doesn't define the worthy life by moral achievement or religious performance. He defines it immediately with four relational words: humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love. And I would dare say that this language of worthiness is what he continues to unpack through the rest of the chapter. If you want to be worthy of the calling, be united, in humility and in love, because God has already united you. Don't let any schism or division into what God has joined.
Then he grounds the command in a sevenfold reality:
"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all." (Ephesians 4:4–6)
Read that slowly. You are united to the God who is over everything, through everything, and in everything, and through him you are united to a purpose and a larger story than your own life. Unity is not something we manufacture; it is something we maintain. The worthy walk begins by refusing to break what God has made one.
Response Two: Operate in Your Gifts
But unity is not uniformity. Immediately after the seven "ones," Paul says, "But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift" (4:7). There is unity, and there is diversity: a whole distribution of gifts placed in the body by the ascended Christ, given so that the saints would be equipped for the work of ministry. I've taught through these gifts thoroughly in the Manifest book, so if you want to go deeper into the gifts of the Spirit described in Ephesians 4, that resource is there for you. But the principle is simple enough to preach in one line: you have been gifted, and your gift is not for you.
Look at what the gifts are for:
"...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." (Ephesians 4:13)
There it is again: fullness. The word we traced to the summit of chapter 3 reappears, and now we learn how the church actually matures into it: a unified family using a diversity of gifts. When we operate in our gifts, we are "no longer children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes" (4:14). Instead:
"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, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love." (Ephesians 4:15–16)
Every joint. Each part working properly. The body building itself up in love. Once again, the apex of Paul's whole vision of life in God is that there is a fullness, and the fullness expresses itself in love. And this is exactly what the flourishing researchers stumbled onto with their two hundred thousand interviews: a community where every person is joined, needed, and working from what they were made to do is the environment where human beings thrive. There are few things more satisfying in this life than using what you were created to do, and feeling that you are living worthy of what God has called you to. The gifts aren't just how the church gets work done. They are how people in the church get known.
Response Three: Put Off, Be Renewed, Put on
The third response reaches into the deepest place: identity in practice. Paul says we can no longer live the way we once did, in the futility of mind and darkened understanding of our former life (4:17–18). Instead:
"Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." (Ephesians 4:22–24)
Now, how do we actually do that? Here is the key to the whole second half of the chapter: faith expressing itself through acts of loving obedience. Transformation is not passive; you don't drift into the new self. But neither is it external action devoid of true faith in the heart; you can't behave your way into holiness. It is faith-filled actions, defined by love, that renew and transform the inner person. The doing and the believing work together, and the current that runs through both of them is love.
This is Not a New Rulebook
Then comes the list, and I want you to read it as what it is:
"Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up... And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." (Ephesians 4:25–32)
Hear me carefully: this is not the same as the Ten Commandments. This is not a law. It is a description of what putting off the old self and putting on the new self looks like: faith-filled actions flowing in love. We choose not to steal, not because there is a rule that says don't steal, but because we are choosing to put on the new self, to be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and to stay in unbroken fellowship with the Holy Spirit rather than grieve him. That one phrase, "do not grieve the Holy Spirit," is the relational center of the entire list. Any time this passage starts to feel like a moral code, look at the verses that precede it. This is not a list of rules to be obeyed. It is a worthy lifestyle to be embraced, and there is a clear progression into it: understand your unity with the cosmic God of all creation who fills everything, receive the gifts Jesus has supernaturally distributed to build up the body, and then make the daily choice to embrace the new life, renewed internally as you act externally in faith and love.
And picture what a home characterized by this list actually feels like: honest speech, anger that resolves before sundown, generous work, words that build up, kindness, tenderness, forgiveness given the way Christ gave it. That is not a household keeping rules. That is a household where people are known and loved. Paul wrote the flourishing study's conclusion two thousand years early, and he wrote it as a family portrait.
The Chapter Break Paul Never Made
One last observation, and it's my favorite. I would dare say the men who divided the chapters got this one wrong. I understand why they broke where they did, but chapter 4 doesn't really end at verse 32 with "forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." The culminating thought lands one verse later:
"Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." (Ephesians 5:1–2)
There is the crescendo again, right on schedule: Paul finishing his instructions where he always finishes them, at love. He is echoing the heart of what Jesus taught, that we resemble our Father in heaven, children taking after their Dad. And in the renewal-of-the-mind language and the sacrifice language, you can hear him mirroring his own words in Romans 12:1–2: present your bodies as a living sacrifice, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Both letters even pivot on the same Greek verb: the "I urge you" of Romans 12:1 and the "I urge you" of Ephesians 4:1 are the same word, parakalo, each standing on a "therefore" that carries chapters of grace. The call to imitate God as beloved children and to walk in love is the therefore, the result, of the renewed life: a life that has been unified, equipped, and has made the choice to put on the new man in Christ.
It is mystical, but the results are intensely practical. You talk differently. Your emotions run differently. The way you work is different. Your level of honesty is different. And the reason is not that you found a better rulebook. The reason is that you are in fellowship with Someone, the Holy Spirit of God, and you do not want to grieve him.
The Call
Guard the unity. Pick the relationship where schism is creeping in, at home or in the church family, and this week bring humility, gentleness, and patience to it. Bear with them in love. That is the worthy walk.
Work your gift. You were given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift. Find the place where your part of the body is meant to be working, and work it. The body only builds itself up in love when each part is working properly.
Choose one faith-filled act of love. Not a rule to keep, a renewal to embrace: one act of honesty, one generous piece of work, one word that builds someone up, one forgiveness released the way Christ released yours.
Keep the fellowship sweet. Live this week conscious of the Seal within you. Before the old self reaches for bitterness or corrupt talk, remember who you would grieve, and choose the new self instead.
Two hundred thousand people, twenty-two countries, and the world's best researchers have confirmed it: human beings flourish where they are known and loved. Your Father has known you and loved you from before the foundation of the world. Now build the household where everyone else gets to find out what that feels like.
Source: The Global Flourishing Study, a five-year longitudinal study of more than 200,000 participants across 22 countries, conducted by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, in partnership with Gallup and the Center for Open Science. Initial findings published as "The Global Flourishing Study: Study Profile and Initial Results on Flourishing," Nature Mental Health (2025). More at globalflourishingstudy.com.