Rev. Nicole Unice: Hi, everyone. I'm so glad to be with you guys.
Rev. Nicole Unice: My name is Nicole Younis. I'm part of the teaching team here at Ward, but I live my normal Monday through Saturday in Richmond, Virginia with my family. So I am from the South, and I want you to know how many of you like to act surprised by the weather when I come. Like, you apologize for your weather. And you've done it this morning, actually, multiple of you, and you're like, oh my gosh, it's so cold this morning.
Guys, I have caught on. I'm not sure if you're fooling me or yourselves, but I think this is how it always is. I have caught on. And thank goodness, I am not here for the weather. I am here for you, the people, and I'm so glad to be with you.
And I am strengthening my inner hardiness as pastor Scott likes to says. He says that you Michiganders are very hearty. And so I myself am getting more hearty as I spend time with you. So thank you for the weather. And thank you also for your great sense of your own agency that you could somehow control the weather.
I think that makes God laugh. I think he's happy with us this morning. So we're gonna be, in Ephesians this morning. I'm so glad to get to be with you guys. And, I was here right before Christmas, so it's been about a month.
And so I think about you when I'm gone and I think about, how it feels like like a world has gone by in this last month. We just started. We're still in January 2026. And yet the news feed and the news cycle and everything that surrounds us. I don't know that there's been a time in my own life where I've recognized how hard it is to have hope for the future.
I'm raising children. They're young adults now and I think about them and I think about their future and it is very easy to lose hope. It's very easy to be discouraged by what we see around us and I think that January is a perfect time as a church to remember what we're about. I think it's important that we do the work of saying, wait a second, let's just let's just take a moment. Let's take a few minutes to remember what we're actually about, which is beyond this age, beyond this generation.
We are part of something beautiful, mysterious, majestic that God is building, that is his kingdom, and we need the reminders. We need the encouragement that we can find. It's very easy in turbulence in our world, whether that turbulence is in your own personal life or in the community around you. It's very easy to want to withdraw and to isolate. It's easy to want to surround yourself with your rituals and your people and your things and your comforts to kind of just close off to the rest of the world and say, I'm just going to kind of make it through.
We're just gonna make it through together. And God's called us to something so much more than that. He's called us to so much more capability within ourselves. He's called us to so much more giving and gifting within ourselves. And I think particularly in a time like this, it is a time that we want to recommit to what we really believe.
We don't wanna assume that we know what we believe. We wanna commit to what we believe and understand what God has to say to us. So the topic of our morning is supposed to be spiritual gifts and it will be. But I found it very difficult to prepare a message on spiritual gifts without zooming out first and asking the question before we think about our own lives individually, which is very much how our culture is now wired, You think about your own life individually. So before we do that, I think it's very important that we zoom out and ask the question, what about our lives collectively?
What does it actually mean to be a church together? And and you might think about that, you might talk about it in your family or your small group. We can assume that we all believe the same things, but it might be good to stop and ask the question, what are we doing here? Are we are we just like a collection of people who live in this zip code and for whom this church is convenient? And we just it we just kind of come together on Sunday morning or are we a congregation?
A congregation, the definition of congregation is a people gathered for a purpose. Generally, understand that that purpose is worship, but worship means more than what we're doing right now. Worship means how we live our lives Monday through Saturday. Are we a collection or are we a congregation? I think in January is a great chance to ask these questions and one of the places that I think is very, very great to look at is the book of Ephesians.
If you need a place to be reading right now this week, the book of Ephesians is short. It's just six chapters. It's easy to get through, but it's great encouragement and vision for what it means to be the church together. Not a collection, but a group gathered for a purpose. So this morning, I wanna talk about who we are as a church, what that looks like in our real life, and then how each of us can be a part of it.
We heard a little passage from Ephesians this morning. A reminder for you if you haven't read Ephesians in a while, Ephesians was written as a letter from the apostle Paul to the church at Ephesus. It was meant to be circulated. It was meant to be something that people read in their homes or in their smaller groups. It doesn't really address kind of one controversy like many of Paul's books, Paul's letters do, but it does address a vision for this new reality that is the church.
Now imagine how different it would have felt to be a person who begins to understand the way of Jesus. And you may have come to understand the way of Jesus from the Jewish faith or as Paul really speaks about in Ephesians, you may be a Gentile. A Gentile is anyone who was not raised in the Jewish tradition. That's probably most of us. And what Paul is saying is that, hey, these things that you understand in the Jewish tradition, they are now they are now an invitation to the world, to these gentiles and these people with whom you disagree, with whom look very different than you and act very different than you and have lived very different than you.
You are now going to be brought together, and you're gonna be brought together into this thing that is called the church. This way that God has decided that he will express himself in the world. And so Paul is giving us this vision and the practicals on what that's going to look like. Anyone here really love, to take pictures when you see something beautiful? Anybody take pictures?
You gotta get your phone out when you see something beautiful. Thank you for humoring me and raising your hand. I hope it's all of you. All of us need a little bit of a beautiful picture on our phone. You know what I'm saying?
I love taking pictures of sunrises and sunsets. I took this picture. This is one of my favorite pictures I have of a sunset, and those are that's my daughter and her friend. The water was actually the tide was going out, so they're so they're out there dancing. It looks magical and wonderful, but I'm telling you, this picture is trash compared to what it actually looks like in person.
You ever get that frustration where you're like, I'm trying to show you something beautiful, and I recognize that here on my phone or up on the screen, it's not nearly as beautiful as it was when we were there. It just it's magical. You can't capture the light and the colors and the moment exactly as you wish that you could. You know that feeling when you see something beautiful. And when I read Ephesians, particularly the passage that we just read, and we read how Paul is trying to describe what has happened when God has called his church, it's as if he's tripping over metaphors in order to try to describe how beautiful this new thing is.
And he can't just use one metaphor, he just mixes metaphors time after time. So if you are a high school junior in the room right now and you're writing essays right now in your in your junior year of high school and your teacher condemns you for mixed metaphor, tell her that the apostle Paul did it first because it's everywhere. Be like, listen, I've learned from the best and I'm about to metaphors. So Paul in this passage that we just read uses so many metaphors in a row. Look at how many he says.
He says, you are citizens. You are a family. You are a house. You are a temple. You are a dwelling.
He says all of this in two sentences trying to describe this thing that has happened. He uses all of these different phrases about what it looks like to be grouped together, to live together, to have purpose together. He wants us to understand how great this thing is that has happened. But often is the case that when we read the bible, we do have to realize that we're listening to what was said to the original hearers of the word and we have to sometimes build a bridge over to our culture. And in order to do so, we have to recognize some of our own tendencies, some of our own baggage that we may bring to the passage.
And one of those things that really stood out to me in preparing this message was this idea that for us often citizenship and family lineage, family of origin, a lot of times we may sort of unconsciously associate those things with problems rather than privileges. We may find ourselves particularly now in an age where it's so easy to be cynical about institutions, about groupings, about communities, about politics, about the world. It's so easy to not recognize that we can bring our own stuff even into a passage like this without even knowing it. But that is not how the original listeners would have heard these words used, these metaphors that Paul is describing. Citizenship would have been a huge deal to the people who were hearing this letter for the first time.
In the Greco Roman world, citizenship carried enormous weight. To be a Roman citizen was to have legal protection and social standing and a sense of identity. Everyone hearing this letter would have been acutely aware of the great privileges that Rome offered its own citizens and to the detriment of those who were not citizens. And so when Paul uses citizenship, he's saying, I want you to imagine how much better citizenship in heaven is compared to your understanding of citizenship, which would have already felt really good. What we're talking about here is Paul saying, you're leveling up in God.
You are leveling up in Christ in beautiful ways, and citizenship doesn't cover it. So he's gotta use all of these other words, these connected metaphors to try to describe what it means to be the church. He starts with citizenship and then he moves to family. In order to understand this understanding of family that Paul gives us, I want us to zip back to Ephesians one for a moment, just a little bit back in the letter. And earlier in the letter, the apostle Paul again is just tripping over himself to describe the goodness of God, the kindness of God, and what actually has happened when we say yes to Jesus.
Here's what he says in Ephesians one verse five. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his son and forgave our sins.
Amen. He has showered his kindness on us along with all wisdom and understanding. This passage just drips with the richness of God's character toward us, his kindness toward us, his grace toward us, that God decided in advance that you would be a part of his family and that he did it through the kindness of himself, not through anything that you could do. Here in this passage, we have God meeting all of our deepest needs of humanity. God says, I know exactly what you need.
I know that you need freedom that comes with forgiveness. I know that you need belonging. I know that you need purpose. The word used here that puts us into the family, the Ephesians two family, the word used here for adoption is a legal word. It's a technical word that Paul uses.
And again, it doesn't fully capture everything that it means to be part of God's dwelling place, it's piece. An And this legal technical term of adoption was about when a family did not have an heir to take over the family, they could adopt in technically someone who would take on the privileges and responsibilities of that family. That means that family's property, the family business, the family line, someone would come in and become as if they were an heir. And Paul uses this language to describe what has happened to us. He describes the kind of adoption that happens when a family brings in this heir and the privilege of the family and the responsibilities of the family.
Adoption isn't just about what happens between the parent and the child. Adoption is also what happens in the family. It's about what happens in the siblings. I grew up in an adoptive family. My youngest brother, when I was about seven, we adopted him from Korea when he was around two.
We didn't know exactly how old he was because he had no family, no records, and was found by policemen on the street in Seoul, Korea brought to an orphanage. We picked his birthday and we picked his name. And I tell you guys this because there's one thing to understand, and adoption is complicated, obviously. It's one thing to understand adoption in your head. It's a different thing to understand it in your heart.
And I'm here to tell you that as a child who has an adoptive brother and a biological brother, there has never been a difference to me between those brothers. As a sister to those brothers, they are both brothers to me just the same. And when I think about God using this adoptive language for us, he's not just saying that he's conferring privileges upon us in a father child relationship, but that he's actually changing the status of our relationship with one another. That he says that when you become part of my dwelling place, not only are you experiencing the riches of my grace, but the responsibilities to one another. That now and imagine how just radical this was at the time that it was heard, and I I I'm telling you, I still think it's radical today that God is saying that you are not defined by your status, by your zip code, by your race, by your class, by your gender.
You're actually primarily identified as brothers and sisters in Christ. And then I'm calling you not only to the riches of my grace and the kindness, God says, but that that kindness and grace would define how you act with one another, that we become family. And you know what? Family irritates each other, and family doesn't always get along. And sometimes your brother really bothers you, but if somebody else talks about your brother, you say, don't talk about my brother that way.
I can talk about my brother that way, but you can't. When we're in the family, things change. It changes who we are. Our primary allegiance then becomes to this family, brothers and sisters near and far. The capital c church, but also the congregation that we're called to, the local expression that God has called us to.
It changes. To be in the family means that we're conferring all the riches, but all the responsibilities of that status upon ourselves. And this is where our gifting now becomes important. Who we are means we're now placed in this family, and we want to understand the riches, and we want to understand the responsibilities. That's a good place to start.
When we talk about what does it mean that we're here, we're a collection of people, or are we a congregation? Here's what this looks like when we talk about riches. First, one of the riches that God gives us is he says that we are gifted. He calls us all gifted. You are not gifted because your second grade teacher put you through an inventory.
Do they do that here? It's a real big deal in Richmond, Virginia. They love gifted. They love to talk about gifted. Everyone here is gifted.
Every single one of us is gifted and and here's how I know that. First Corinthians twelve one, it says about spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, using that family language, about spiritual gifts, I do not want you to be uninformed. Meaning I don't want you to be ignorant. I want you to be in the know. I want you to understand what it looks like to know the riches of God's family.
When you say yes to Christ, you are given spiritual gifts. The word gift there used in first Corinthian is actually the word charisma. That's a straight Greek word. We use charisma now to talk about the x factor that someone might have, that glow or that spark, that gift that they have. But the original language for charisma is used here to describe spiritual gifts and the word itself, charis, means grace and the m a at the end of grace means the results of.
So a spiritual gift is the results of grace. What do we understand and know about grace? Well, grace is the unmerited, unearned, undeserved gift of salvation. When we say yes to Jesus, we are given the all sufficient gift of charisma, the results of grace. What's beautiful about this to me is it means that we are both simultaneously humbled.
We are all placed on the same level playing field because none of us have earned the gift of grace. We are all in the same place no matter what the world might say about our gifts or our achievements or our capabilities. We are simultaneously humbled by our unearned gift of salvation and we are simultaneously uplifted because God says, I have great things for you to do. I have given you great capabilities. I am gifting you with a way that you were designed to build the church, my church, the kingdom of heaven.
I've given you that thing and I've gifted it to you. This is the incredible reality of the gospel. It is the great leveler of people. It says no matter who you are, no matter what you bring, no matter what the world says or does not say about your gifts, you are redefined now in Christ. You are redefined by the results of grace that he has given to your life and the very specific and unique way that he has called you to use those gifts.
Every single one of our gifts is given so that we might be built up in love. Now you may ask, well, what are spiritual gifts? Well, there's not one master list of spiritual gifts and oftentimes churches kind of vacillate wildly on spiritual gifts. We sort of over index on them or we kind of forget them all together and leave them out. There are buckets and categories of spiritual gifts that you can find in the New Testament.
Some of those are leadership gifts, word gifts, meaning encouragement, teaching, preaching, prophecy. There's support gifts, helping gifts, mercy gifts. There's gifts that express God's power. There's gifts that show us how we express God's grace in the world, things like mercy and giving. How we understand our gifts is a lifelong journey.
I wanna give you a couple of practical ways you can do that if you haven't experienced this before, and this is a little inventory that you can take on your own life. But let me tell you, God is not waiting for you to figure out some sort of specific mission statement for your life before he's asking you to be a part of his mission. So don't don't, misinterpret what I'm giving you right now as a thing to say, if you can't, you have to figure this out first before God wants to use you. That is we figure out what how God wants to use us by saying yes to what he needs us to do and what he's calling us to do. But here's a few ways that you might kind of hone in on what that gifting looks like.
The first thing is I think I have a little picture for you guys, a little diagram. Think about your inner experience. Inner experience is how you come alive, how you might feel joy, how you experience something, moment with someone or a way that you've served before or something that you've been called to do and you feel deep joy. You feel like you're exactly where you're supposed to be. Some leadership gurus like to call this a flow state.
You're just absolutely lost in the moment, loving what you're doing. And and you might love what you're doing when you're, like, administrating a spreadsheet. I know that's true for some of you, shockingly, but it's true. You might love that spreadsheet. You might love setting a beautiful table.
You might just love listening. I have a friend who's just one of the deepest listeners I've ever met. What a gift it is to be a person who is a deep well of nonjudgmental, compassionate, attentive listening. So don't get caught up in what the world says a gift looks like. Ask yourself, when do I feel like I'm in my flow when I'm experiencing my purpose?
Another way that you might experience your gifting is with outward confirmation. This is what others notice in us. It's a true gift. You don't need the gift of encouragement to be a person who notices other things in people. Oftentimes our gifting is so natural to us that we can we can actually minimize its impact because it doesn't feel hard for us to do and we sometimes need someone else to notice that thing in us.
We might need someone else who says, man, I see how you give and it's beautiful and it's it's it's special. It's not like everybody else has that or I I see how you care for children and it is beautiful. I see how you connect. That's not how everyone is. We call out with one another that outward confirmation of a gift.
And the final thing that I like to always include that that often is not included when we talk about gifting, calling, spiritual gifts is timing. You know seasons of life change and perhaps the particular circumstances of our struggles change. Perhaps we're experiencing an illness or we're caregivers but God will never stop inviting us to express our gifts even if how we express them looks different. Timing is an important part of how that gift might look. It may be a very outward expression at a season in your life, but there may be times where that gifting is a very inward expression.
The riches of God's goodness is that we are gifted and the second thing is that we are called. Ephesians goes on and after Paul expresses all of the ways that he's trying to use every metaphor he knows to say this is what it looks like to be the church. He then turns his attention and says in Ephesians four, so I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you've received. That word's simply invitation, that you're invited, that God is constantly inviting us to be a part of what he is doing in the world. We get to participate with what God is already up to around us.
We get to participate with what God's already doing in our family, in our workplace, in our school, in our community. He is already doing his business. It's really just about if we wanna be a part of it. Calling is about being invited in to what God is already doing because we are all gifted and we are all called. The riches of God's goodness is that we are gifted and called.
The responsibilities of that position is understanding that we are needed. The exact you, the you you are right now, not the you that you wish you were, not the you that you think you'll be after you complete your resolutions. I'm talking about the you you are right now. The real you, the whole you, the weak you, the broken you, the confused you, the real you is needed. It's vital to the way God is expressed right here in this congregation.
The world loves to talk about gifts and gifting, But Jesus says, I don't give as the world gives. And understanding our gifting is gonna look very different in different seasons and different places. But God says, every single person is gifted and called to express who God is in the world. I've made a friend here at Ward over the years as I get to come be with you. Her name's Laurie, and Laurie has a son.
Some of you may know Laurie. Laurie has a son named Sammy. Sammy is 19 years old. He has profound nonverbal autism and two forms of epilepsy that were diagnosed at age five and at age 10. Sammy will require care for his whole life.
And as I've gotten to know Laurie and Sammy over the years and as I was preparing this message, God just laid it on my heart and I reached out to Laurie and I said, Laurie, would you be willing to tell your congregation about Sammy's spiritual gifts? And this is what she wrote. Laurie said, I like to tell people when they ask me about Sammy that he's the happiest person I've ever met. From the time he was a baby and all throughout his 19, he wakes up laughing and smiling and goes to bed laughing and smiling. He is always happy.
It is hard to have a bad attitude when you are around Sammy. He is very patient. If we plan to do something, he is content to listen to music while he waits for us to leave. He doesn't get his feathers ruffled. If we're at the grocery store waiting in the car, as long as the music keeps playing, he could be there all day.
She said Sammy likes to be with his people. She wrote, one thing that has caused me great sorrow through my life and all the challenges that have come with this diagnosis, the doctor's appointments, the caregiving, is that when we received the diagnosis of nonverbal autism, our son could not tell us how he felt. We did not know if he had a good day or a bad day at school. We did not know basic things, like if he was hungry or had to go to the bathroom. We did not know if he was in pain because he could not tell us.
We did not know if he had a friend. I wanted to know if Sammy felt emotions. Did he feel love? Did he love me? These were thoughts that often stayed with me.
When Sammy was five years old, he was in a special autism preschool. One day, had to pick him up early, and I stood in the doorway as to not interrupt the reading time. And the teacher motioned for me to come in, so I crouched down right next to Sammy, and he turned his face toward mine, and he put his little hands on my cheeks, and he said, oh, heart. And then he put his head on my shoulder as if he was relieved. The strange thing that happened that during this interaction, the teachers were glancing back and forth at each other with a funny look on their faith face.
And one of them exclaimed, oh, so you are heart. I didn't know what they were talking about, and I asked what they meant. She explained that sometimes throughout the day, Sammy would mutter to himself, oh, heart, oh, heart, with tears in his eyes, and they wondered who heart was. So now they told me it made sense. They said, now we know that he's missing you.
At that moment, I knew I didn't have to wonder anymore if Sammy felt feelings or if he loved me or if he was capable of love. God gave me a great gift by allowing me to hear this from his teachers, but the other gift is that it showed me on a deep level that Sammy looked at me as important. He knew that I loved him, and he reciprocated that love. It is such a good feeling to have someone want your company and want to be near you and be with you. Although he cannot converse with me, I know he loves being with me and I love being with him.
So the spiritual gift may be the ability to just be and just exude friendliness. I'm not sure what you would call that, but it's a wonderful feeling. Sammy enjoys the simple things in life. He's content with music, with being around people, with food, with going to his school, with swinging on a swing in the park, sitting on the beach playing in the sand, or eating a meal with family and friends. Laurie said, whenever life gets too exhausting, too sad, or too much, I think about how Sammy expressed that he needed me, and I felt like I needed him too.
God says that we are all gifted and that we are all here to express his grace and his kindness in the world, whether that looks like a way that you give that or a way that you receive it. God says that we are all capable of bringing his love and his compassion and his patience and his goodness to a broken world that is desperately looking for freedom and belonging and purpose. You may be asking, but I'm overwhelmed, but I'm not sure where to start, but what can I really do? And what I would say is something that I've heard pastor Andy Stanley say that I just appreciate so much. It's always stuck with me since the day I heard him teach this message.
And he said, do for one what you wish you could do for everyone. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, when something rises up in you, as you look at your news feed or you experience the world or you think about need or you pass someone on the street, whenever that sense of mercy or justice or care wells up in you, just ask the question, what can I do for one that I wish I could do for everyone? And today's the day that you can start. You don't need to know exactly what you're gifted to do to start being a part of what God is doing. And I tell you, out of the abundance of God's riches, you will be repaid so much more deeply than you could ever give.
You can never out give our good God. You can never outgive the way that he wants to give to you, the enjoyment that he feels when you are living in your gift and serving for his good. Let's pray together. Father, as we clear the decks and think about what it means to be a congregation, to step into this mysterious, majestic, beautiful thing that you call the church, Would you help us, Lord, to lay aside cynicism, to lay aside discouragement, and to ask the question, what can I do to express your love? What can I do to express your kindness and goodness?
How can I live with my brothers and sisters to be a dwelling in your spirit in one small or big way that you might be calling me to do so, Lord? Would you help us not to wait but to act? In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.