Gifted on Purpose, for a Purpose — Ephesians 4:7–16 | Season 2, Episode 9

Have you ever wondered if your life actually matters? If you're really contributing anything — to the church, to the people around you, to what God is doing in the world?

Paul has an answer. And it's not vague encouragement. It's specific.

In this episode of the Set Free Stay Free Bible study podcast, host Matt Dawson digs into one of the most practically rich sections of Ephesians — chapter 4, verses 7 through 16. Christ himself, after descending to our lowly world and ascending to fill the entire universe, gave gifts to his people. Not just to pastors and leaders. To every single believer. And those gifts have a purpose: to equip the church, to help each other grow, and to move the whole body toward maturity in Christ.

Using the SOAP method (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer), Matt walks through all five of the Ephesians 4 ministerial gifts — apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor/shepherd, and teacher — breaking down what each one actually looks like in everyday church life. He connects this to his book Gifted: On Purpose for a Purpose and makes the case that most believers already have one of these gifts in their mix without even knowing it.

The goal of it all? A church that is healthy, growing, and full of love. And the warning Paul gives along the way is just as important: immaturity looks like being tossed around by every clever-sounding lie that feels like truth but isn't rooted in the word of God.

This Ephesians Bible study is for anyone who has wondered whether God has actually given them something to offer — and needs to hear that he has.

In this episode:

• Why Christ both descended and ascended — and what that has to do with your gifts
• A breakdown of all five Ephesians 4 ministerial gifts and what they look like in real life
• Why maturity in the church means speaking truth in love and growing more like Christ
• What immaturity actually looks like — and why it's dangerous
• How every part of the body working together produces health, growth, and love
• A closing prayer for the church to step into its gifts and grow toward Christlikeness

📖 Passage: Ephesians 4:7–16 (New Living Translation)

🔍 Keywords: Ephesians Bible study, Bible study podcast, SOAP method Bible study, Christian Bible study, Scripture-first Bible study, Set Free Stay Free, Matt Dawson, walking through the Bible, Christian discipleship podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Well, welcome to the set free, stay free Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Matt Dawson. We are so glad you're here. This is a post-vacation uh mode. We're in a little bit of a different setup to get this out on time, but we are actually getting into episode nine. We've already done the first half of Ephesians in this season two. Uh, and I'm gonna go ahead, as I've usually done, I'm gonna start with this question, right? Okay, here we go. Have you ever wondered if your life matters and if you're actually contributing anything in your life? Does God have a purpose for your life? And we're getting into this point of Ephesians where Paul's gonna talk a little bit about some of the gifts, some of the spiritual gifts he's given everybody, not pastors, not just leaders, not just, you know, but but every believer. He's given us something to do and something for, as we've been talking about in the in the book of Ephesians, something for the church. And here's the purpose of why he's given us gifts to help us grow, to help the church do what God wants the church to do and to help us grow. We're actually, again, we're using the soap Bible study method to look through scripture, that's scripture, observation, application, prayer. And if you uh this is the first time hearing about that, I have a free resource I created for you. I know a lot of people struggle sometimes to just read the Bible and to get something out of it every single time and find a joy in reading it. So I created this resource for you and for others to be able to take any passage and quickly walk through it. So feel free to download that. The link's in the description, the QR code's here. And if you're listening to this through the podcast, if you just DM me or email me at info at mattdawson.tv, I will get you that resource, okay? As we dive in, we're looking in chapter four. And we are going to start after we started last week. If you listened to our last podcast, we started chapter four with the word therefore, meaning in light of everything that was talked about up to this point, therefore, and he gave us like, I think I read off like just four things that already sort of knock our socks off in terms of what does it look like to live the life God's calling us to live? Right. Now, just a quick recap. It was about being humble, being gentle, being patient, making allowances for other people's faults, like, you know, continuing to be unified with other believers. That's enough, right? Like, just we don't even need to go any further than chapter four in this. But I want to just kind of close with what we read last week, uh last episode, and then dive into this new section today. He says the reason we have been called to be lived to live the life worthy of the calling is he says this there is one body and one spirit that we've been called to, one glorious hope for the future. That's verse four. Five and six talk about it again. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God over one God and Father over all, who's in all, living through all. All right. Now I want to just pick up, we're gonna pick up in verse seven, and this is gonna be uh I'm gonna break it up into about three sections today. Okay. Verse seven. However, he has given each one of us a special gift through the generosity of Christ. That is why the scriptures say, when he ascended to the heights and he led a crowd of captives and gave gifts to his people. He says, Notice that it says he ascended, which clearly means that Christ had descended into our lowly world. And the same one who descended is the same one who ascends higher than all the heavens, so that he might fill the entire universe with himself. I love that this clarification is just the idea that, hey, Christ has given us these gifts, that he is the one who has ascended, and he kind of gives a quick clarification. Hey, in order to have ascended, he would have had to descend, because again, he's continuing to talk about this as one God, one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one Jesus, who descended to our lowly world and who has now ascended. And he goes on to say, he's ascended so far to fill the whole universe with himself. All right, and we're gonna go to verse 11. These are the gifts that Christ has given the church, the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and the teachers. Their responsibility, okay, is to equip God's people to do his work and to build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such faith and unity in our faith and knowledge of God's Son, and that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. Now, before we go on, because he's going to talk about this idea of maturity, I want to go back to just those gifts. And of course, if you're new around here or maybe just don't know who I am, I did, of course, just write a book, uh, Gifted on Purpose for a Purpose, talking specifically about spiritual gifts. The Ephesians 4 passage we're currently reading is a big part of this book in terms of what's called the ministerial gifts. Just to give a brief synopsis, you are given your gifts on purpose, as Paul has already said. We were given for a purpose, which he's going to continue to flesh out. But right now, because he's talking about the church, he's very specific. This is, remember at the end of chapter three, to him who can do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine, at his work, Christ's work through us, through the church. And so this purpose comes back to the purpose of the church, is for God to do his work through the church. And so I just want to come back to the fact that even these gifts, every single person that is a believer in Christ, listening to this right now, you have gifts given to you by the Holy Spirit. All right. There are classifications, there are manifestation gifts that show off the power of God and his testimony. There are uh motivational gifts uh that we motivate using one another, those outside of faith and uh inside the faith. These specific gifts are to motivate the church, right? It goes on to say the purpose of these five voicings, these five gifts: apostle, prophet, uh evangelist, teacher, shepherd, teacher, these are these gifts. They're not offices. Let me just go ahead and clarify that. It doesn't mean the pastor of the church, the evangelist that travels, uh, the teacher who teaches scripture alone, the shepherd or the shepherd pastor again, the apostles, which is only, if you were taking it just by the office, the apostles are 2,000 years old, the prophets, right? The those that we think of the office of prophets, like Old Testament. There's new people that call themselves prophets, but the reality is prophecy to prophesy is a gift of speaking the truth. And so these five gifts, all right, I'm gonna go through them really quickly. These five gifts are given to his people for the purpose to build up the church. The apostles are those that among us might have a voicing that are more risk takers. They are definitely frontline people, whether they're introverts or extroverts, they're the ones who are always thinking about what we could be doing, how we could be expanding the mission. They are usually the ones usually driving things. That's part of the apostolic gift, is those that kind of want to continue to press forward with an urgency of what's coming, with an urgency of what's next. That's kind of people with this apostolic gifting, right? There is the prophetic gifting, which quite frankly is a phenomenal gift. But those people who carry that, especially in the church, have an urgency of what is true, right? They have they have the urgency of making sure that God's truth is clear, crystal clear to everyone. Like they're they're the ones that are going to be in the church. Uh, how much scripture do we actually read on Sunday morning? How much scripture do we actually what are some of the things that we're saying to people? And is it found in scripture? Why? Because the truth of the word of God is the urgency in that voice. It's the urgency of that gift. The prophet that necess again, don't confuse this with future telling or special knowledge. Those are manifestation gifts, absolutely real. Uh, don't confuse prophecy with that, right? Some people talk about this prophetic gift and and it's all ooh, you know, and it's like, okay, look, I get it. But the prophetic gift, the prophetic gift according to scripture, is the urgency of speaking God's truth. That's it. And we have God's truth right here. Everyone that is a believer in Christ has the truth of the word of God. It is those with the gift of prophecy that have the urgency to make sure that it is front and center, crystal clear. Okay. The pastor and the shepherd are the heart. They have an urgency to care for God's people. They have an urgency to make sure no one's left behind. They have an urgency to make sure that people are shepherded well, that people are being discipled, that people are being cared for. And hear me say that doesn't mean immediately that's a woman or an introvert or those kinds of things. Like there are phenomenal shepherds, uh, under-shepherds that are considered pastors. They're also the pastor. But just because you're the pastor of the church doesn't mean you have a pastor necessarily a soul pastor shepherd gifting, right? You may be the pastor of the church and have a teacher gifting. You may be the pastor of the church and have an apostolic gifting. Doesn't make any difference leadership-wise, what your title is. There are people in the church who this is their gift. This is their gift is, and they find themselves oftentimes small group leaders, you know, people who are serving, people who are helping, because they want to care. And the urgency of caring being the hands and feet of Christ to care for others. That's a part of that gifting. All right, now the evangelists, right? They are the gift. Their gifting is the primary vocalization of the gospel. They want to make sure that the saving grace of God is constantly on display, being talked about, being shared, being proclaimed. Um, doesn't have it doesn't mean they don't care about scripture, doesn't mean they don't care about caring about people. It's just they have this heart, right? Oftentimes they will be people, yes, that are a little more vocal in sharing their faith, right? Like that Peter passage that says, share the hope that's within you. They find it a little, probably maybe a little easier. There are some people that struggle because they get nervous and they're fearful. And everyone is called to share their faith. But they're evangelists to help build up the church, help teach others how to do it, help model it. Again, there's just something natural. The Holy Spirit has deposited them there naturally want to share it with the church. And then you have the teacher. The teaching gift shows up in the motivational gifts, just like the prophetic gift shows up in all three. So the teaching gift for the church is to help take complexity and make it simple. That's a teaching gift. My wife has a teaching gift. She loves, she's always thinking about the biggest picture possible, always wants to make sure every I is dotted, every T is crossed. Okay, you that's not perfectionism. That is a giftedness that in the church is about trying to take the complexities of God and actually show them to people and make it simple. Now, if you look at all these, when it says that Christ gave these to the church, it is the person of Christ. When he was walking on this earth that embodied all of these gifts, right? Now, again, the gifts come from God, they're all one spirit, one God, they all come from him. But I just look at the example that we get, written example of Christ, and you see apostolic, prophet, prophetic, you know, uh Pastor Shepherd, Evangelist, teacher, you see all of it portrayed in the stories, in the gospels that we get of Christ, because this is what he gave the church. Now, don't miss the purpose. The purpose is to equip God's people to do the work of the church. That's what it said. Like the purpose of those gifts is to strengthen and grow, not just ourselves, but each other, as we're gonna see here in a minute, as we grow and mature, to hear the word, as we mature in our faith, as we mature in the Lord, we measure up to the standard of Christ. Like again, becoming more and more like Him. Let's follow along in verse 14 as we go to the end of this section, okay? He's following up on this word mature in Christ. He says, Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won't be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies. That sounds so clever. It says the lies are so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way, more and more like Christ, who is the head of the body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly, and as each part does its own special work, it helps in a way, it helps the other parts grow so that the whole body is healthy, growing, watch this, and full of love. All right, let's just break up that last section, right? He's talking about the gifts that have come through and through Christ for the church to equip the church, the goal, help each other grow, and we're gonna mature. He has to give the contrast, right? Immature. We're no longer gonna be immature like children. And what are immature children doing? Well, he goes on to say we're gonna just be flip-flopping back and forth. We don't actually have any conviction, we don't actually believe what's true. They said that's true, but they also said that's true, and I don't know which one I land on, you know. They're not gonna fall for lies. That sounds so clever. They sound like what is true. And listen, that is that is our enemy's greatest, like greatest weapon is to give us something that has a sliver of truth in it that sounds true. It it hits our feelings, but takes us away from God. It is not true, it is not actual truth, it's not based or rooted in the truth of the word of God. It just sounds true, it just feels true. Am I with me? So he says, that's like children don't know any better. And that's the part that, like, when you're when you're a parent and you look at your kids and you're, you know, it's there plenty, every parent does this. You know, you get to a point where you're kind of disciplined your kid or you're frustrated with your kid because they don't know any better. But they're also a kid. And part of our job as parents is to raise them up, is to equip them, right? And so he says, here's the way the body works that the way the body works is because Christ is the head of the body, he has given these gifts to us to help us equip the church. That's us, the body of Christ, to equip the church to continue to grow so that we will mature, right? And immaturity looks like this, looks like children who don't know any better. And that's not what the church should represent, right? The church has everybody in it, obviously, everybody's at a different point in growth in their life, but he wants it to say, he said, What's the evidence? What's the fruit of a maturing body of Christ? He says they speak the truth in love, they grow more and more, right, to look more like Christ, who's the head. So there's the sanctification of growing up in the church, right? They're growing to look more and more like Christ. And I love this picture of unity because we already talked about unity in the uh first few few chapters. This picture of unity is that the body works together. Not everybody is look, not everybody's got the uh prophetic voice or the apostolic voice, or the the you know, not everybody is functioning in the same way because we're all different parts of the bodies, but they all work together, right? That's the picture of a healthy church, of a healthy, unified church. He makes the whole body fit together. And when all of us are doing our own special pieces of the work, is that it helps the other parts grow, right? Because that's part of what we're doing. We're equipping and growing. And I love those last three characteristics, if you will. Healthy and growing and full of love. There's a dad of children, man, that's that's a that's a goal for all of my kids to be healthy, to be growing, maturing, and to exhibit and express love as a pastor of a church, right? That's my greatest desire. If I could see any fruit in our church, is our church healthy and growing, right? Of people maturing, and is the greatest of these three, faith, open, love, is the greatest one, which is love being expressed in all the things that we say and do, and all the ways in which we live. Is it growing in love? And so I want to close out this part because this is a big section of Ephesians 4. Again, don't miss the way he started it. He started it individually. Like, what does it look like to be humble and gentle and patient and unified and making allowance for each other's faults? And most of us are just like, that's a tough list, right? He says, Yeah, but it comes because of who God is, because of through Christ who is in all, working in all, through all, for all. Again, the end of chapter three, power of Christ at work within you, right? So he's just basically like, This is this is available to you. Then he says, Now there's these gifts that are given to you. And I believe this is true. If you haven't taken the spiritual assessment yet, all right, you can go to mattdawson.tv slash your spiritual gifts. That's it. Mattdawson.tv, your spiritual gifts. You can take an assessment and learn what your spiritual gifts are. And I guarantee you, if you look at your top five gifts, for most people, now usually sometimes it's most people. Some people you have to look at their top six or seven. Almost everybody has a ministerial gifting in their mix. Right? Why? Because you're a part of the church, you're a part of the the body of Christ, and God has given you something, He's deposited by the Holy Spirit something in you to be used in the church, to help the church grow, to equip the people of the church for the work that God's called us to, to be, to live the life worthy of our calling and to mature as we grow more and more like Christ, and to not be immature. Again, that's gotta look at that warning. Don't that's what we're kind of fighting against. With all that said, I want to just continue to ask, do you really feel like you have a purpose? All right, like I wrote this book on purpose for purpose, to just highlight spiritual gifts. I mean, there's so much more in terms of what God has deposited in this, but just spiritual gifts-wise, you already have a purpose. And if you're a part of the church, you're part of the body of Christ, you have a purpose in the church as well. All right, and I hope you're connected to a local church. No matter where you're listening or watching this, uh I want to if do everything I can to convince you that God has gifted you on purpose for a purpose. And when I read this list, when I read that this this through Christ through the church, doing immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. That again at the end of chapter three. I look at this list, I'm so encouraged by what I see in the local church. I'm encouraged by what I see in terms of the gifts being used in the church. There's a lot of things that people get upset about. The churches aren't doing this, the churches aren't doing this. I I see that meme that shows up every once in a while. That if the churches in America got a letter from Paul, we'd all be like, you know, whatever. Listen, would we be reprimanded by some things? Absolutely, I'm almost positive. Are there so many amazing things happening in the church of Jesus Christ, even in the West? Absolutely. Why? Because people are gifted and they're using what God has given them to help them grow, to help them mature, to help them equip the saints, help them equip the body of believers to live the life and the to be worthy of the life and worthy of the calling he has placed on us. As a matter of fact, he goes on in the next episode. What does looking like child what is living like children of light look like? That's what he gets into here in the next part. But we're gonna pray. You can go to the next episode. What does it look like to live as children of light, to be the people that God's called us to be? Let's pray to apply what we've observed today. Father God, I thank you so much for your word. Thank you for the way in which it challenges us. And I'm just so encouraged by just the giftings that you give the church, those five things. All of them benefit the church, God, but those five things are being used, even at our church, to equip the saints, to move us into maturity, to help us grow, and that the sign of that growth is to be healthy, growing, and full of love. And God, may that be that be the desire of everyone's hearts right now, that you take this word today and that you challenge us where we need to step into using our gift, where we need to continue to be encouraged to grow and to encourage others to grow. Why? So that we can all be, as the as the parts of the body fit together, we can all be healthy and growing and full of love. And God, we're so, so grateful that your word brings us to us in your name of Jesus. Amen. Thank you guys again for listening. I want you to encourage you to continue to like and uh comment on the YouTube video. If you are listening to us, please rate and review the podcast. It does help us uh get into in front of more people. And I do want to encourage you, if you haven't, you know, maybe read the book or connected, there's other videos on my channel about spiritual gifts and about using your spiritual gifts and understanding your spiritual gifts. Please go. These resources are for you. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.