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The Church is a Place of Growth and UnityEphesians 4:1-16The Holy Trinity and the New BirthIn our reading from the Book of Ephesians there is quite a remarkable passage which describes the church:‘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 and in all.’Ephesians 4:4-6Let me translate that for you: God is inside of every believer in the Christian Church.But Paul’s language is more specific. He says that the Holy Trinity is inside every believer: ‘one Spirit’, ‘one Lord’ – that is kyrios, the word Paul uses for Jesus – ‘one God and Father of all’. In the Holy Trinity, we share together ‘one body’, ‘one hope’, ‘one faith’, ‘one baptism’.That is quite an amazing thought: God the Holy Trinity is in each believer in the Christian Church and we share all of these things together.The very next verse, however, introduces something new. ‘But’, Paul says, ‘grace was given to each one of us…’ (v.7) What follows is a typically complex series of interlocking thoughts that takes a while to arrive at its conclusion. But skipping a few bits out, Paul eventually gets to the point: The grace that was given to each - what is it for? ‘…until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood…so that we may no longer be children’ (vv.13-14).In other words, Paul is saying that, although we have the Holy Trinity inside us, when we become believers and join the Christian Church, we do so as babies. We starting a new life, and starting a new life always involves infancy.Let’s be clear about this: this new life that we are called to is a great miracle, a work of new creation, which we celebrate and in which we rejoice but, just as we rejoice when a new baby is born in the world, we would not be right to want infancy and childhood to last forever. Physical human life as well as spiritual human life involves a process of growth from infancy to childhood to mature adulthood.From Childishness to MaturityLet’s think about what this involves. Paul puts it negatively to begin with: ‘…so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning in deceitful schemes’ (v.14). We can observe several things about spiritual childishness here.Firstly, the type of spiritual immaturity of which Paul speaks involves emotional and psychological instability. Somebody who is like this is very driven by their emotions. They lack self-control. They find it difficult to follow through with anything because they are constantly being led by their feelings. They are always being ‘tossed to and fro by every wind’, every little thing, event, or comment. They are oversensitive and take offence very easily.Secondly, children have a very short attention span. They can only concentrate on something for a few seconds at a time. In the spiritual realm this means being credulous due to a lack of knowledge and discernment: every new idea that presents itself to the spiritually immature believer gets a hearing and has the potential for great influence which may harm the believer. In our day, I would suggest that that involves allows the prevailing ideology of the culture, as purveyed by mainstream media outlets such as the BBC, to take precedence over the Christian worldview that is held out in Scripture and the teaching of the Church.Sometimes I have a joke with my children and tell them something that is obviously not true. The other day I told them that the goats in a TV programme I had been watching about a real-life farm had their own sheds in which they were developing nuclear weapons. Now, I had to tell my kids that this was a joke and they got it because children have a great sense of humour, but there was a sense in which they really believed me for a time. Why? Because they have little knowledge of the world and not ver