Gifts From The Ascended Christ

“But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. (Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.) And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” —Ephesians 4:7–13

Our attention in these verses is especially drawn to the gifts that the ascended Christ has bestowed upon His church for its edification, its upbuilding. First observe that there are gifts for all—“Unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.” While there are certain outstanding gifts of what we might call a public character, yet it is blessed to realize that every member of the body of Christ has something which he may contribute to the blessing of the whole. No matter how feeble, how insignificant, how relatively unknown he may be, he has received something from the risen Lord for the help of all the rest.

Just as there are many members of our physical bodies that are unseen, that function without any outward evidence of their working and yet are very important in connection with the building of the body and the maintaining of it in health so every believer has his place to fill in the body of Christ. If he is not functioning according to the will of God, in some respect he affects the whole body for ill but if he is functioning according to the will of God, he affects the entire body of Christ for good. These gifts come from the ascended Lord.

In verse 8 we read, “Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.” Our blessed Lord chose apostles when He was here on Earth, but said that in the regeneration, that is, in the glorious millennium age, they should sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. As the ascended Christ, He has given apostles and prophets to His church but they are given from heaven. They included the same apostles that He chose on Earth, but it was after their enduement with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Spirit that He Himself sent, that they were looked upon as given to the church.

The passage here is quoted from the sixty-eighth Psalm. “Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive: thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them.” In the margin of our Authorized Bible, we have the suggestion that the expression “captivity captive” in Ephesians 4, might be rendered, “a multitude of captives.” That is an attempt to explain a rather peculiar phrase but when we realize that this is simply a translation of an expression in the sixty-eighth Psalm, we have to inquire whether it could be translated, “A multitude of captives,” and I think any Hebrew scholar would acknowledge that it could not. But that is not the only place this expression is found.

In the fifth chapter of the book of Judges, you have the same expression. Deborah is praising the Lord for the great victory over Canaan. In verse 12 we read, “Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, utter a song: arise, Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam.” What does the expression mean there? It could mean only one thing—“Lead captive him who held you captive.” That seems to be the meaning of Psalm 68 and also of this quotation in the epistle to the Ephesians.

In the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah we have a similar expression which would be an adequate interpretation of the term. We read, “And the people shall take them, and bring them to their place: and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord for servants and handmaids: and they shall take them captives, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors” (Isaiah 14:2). This surely makes the meaning clear. In our present passage, the teaching is this, that our blessed Lord in His triumph over death led captive him who had the power of death up to that time, that he might deliver those “who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:15). In other words, our mighty enemy, Satan, is now a conquered foe. He has been led captive at the chariot wheels of Christ, and our Lord has now ascended as man and taken His place upon the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, and there from His exalted seat in glory He gives these gifts to His church for its edification and blessing. We are reminded that He who has gone up higher than any other man ever went, once for our redemption went down lower than any other man has gone.

“Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things” (Ephesians 4:9–10). I wonder if our souls really take in the fact that He is a man like ourselves, only glorified, sinless, and holy sitting today upon the throne of God; that a man’s heart beats in His breast and that there are no sorrows that come to His people but what He enters sympathetically, compassionately into them and therefore, having not “an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are,” we “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:15-16).

“There’s a man in the glory I know very well,
I have known Him for years and His goodness can tell,
 One day in His mercy He knocked at my door,
And asking admittance knocked many times o’er,
But when I went to Him and stood face to face
And listened a while to His stories of grace,
How He suffered for sinners and put away sin,
I heartily, thankfully welcomed Him in.”

And now I have the blessed assurance from the Word of God that that Man sits there at the Father's right hand ever living to make intercession for His needy people as they go through this scene.

Go to Him in the hour of trial, tell not half the story but the whole and be assured that He will listen sympathetically and undertake for you according to the riches of His grace. He always has undertaken for His people in a marvelous way.

“He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” These are the gifts that Christ Himself has given. We have in the twelfth chapter for First Corinthians special operations of the Holy Spirit which were for the church in the beginning of its early conflict with heathenism, and in giving its chief testimony to Judaism. But here the gifts are for the edification, for the maintenance of the church given by the risen Christ to enable the church to carry the message to a lost world and to build up its individual members in the knowledge of Christ. The apostles and prophets laid the foundation. We read in Ephesians two, verse twenty, “And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.” You do not lay a foundation for a building every few stories, but the foundation is built once for all and then the superstructure is erected. Long ago, 1,900 years ago, the apostles and prophets fulfilled their ministry. We are not looking for new apostles and prophets.

A young Mormon elder came to me one time and said, “What church do you belong to?” I knew at once what he had in mind and so I replied, “I belong to the one true church that has apostles and prophets in it.”

“Oh,” he said, “then you must be a latter day saint.”

“No. I am a former day saint.”

“But ours is the only church that has apostles and prophets.”

“I do not think so. The church that I belong to is building upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets and although they themselves have passed off the scene long ago, they are still members of this church for it does not exist only on Earth. They are part of the host though they have passed the flood and are in the presence of God. They are still members of the church.”

“But we have apostles and prophets in our day.”

“But, you see,” I said, “the apostles and prophets were to lay the foundation, and if I understand the Word of God aright, this blessed temple of the living God, this wonderful church He is erecting, has been building for 1,900 years and it is now just about completed, and you do not put a foundation on the roof. It is away down there 1,900 stories below and the temple has been rising upon that foundation all through the years. We are now just putting the finishing touches on the roof. We are gathering in poor sinners, just one and another here and there. They are not coming in large numbers these days but those that are coming are being builded in upon the roof and it will not be long until it will all be complete and then we will all go to heaven.”

And now the other gifts are very manifest today. What is the evangelist? He is the bearer of glad tidings. The ministry of the evangelist is particularly to the world outside. If God gifts a man as an evangelist, He fills his heart with fervent love for a lost world, gives him the ability to proclaim the Gospel in freshness and power. What a marvelous gift is that of the evangelist! We do not all have it in the way we should like to have it. It is a privilege to try to teach the Word to seek to build up the saints, but when I think of the mighty men that God has qualified and sent forth as evangelists to win the lost, I covet such a gift. If you are a young preacher and have the evangelistic gift, thank God for it, cherish it, do not despise it. Do not say, “I wish I could teach the Bible like certain men, exhort like some of these wonderful men of God, explain the Scripture in the way that some can.” It is very good if God gifts you for that but I would rather be used of God to win poor sinners to Christ than even to teach and instruct Christians. Somebody at one time reproved old Duncan Matheson for preaching the Gospel at a great conference of believers, and said, “You kept all those people sitting here for an hour listening to what they already know when they came to hear a wonderful unfolding of new truth.”

“Why,” he said, “were there no sinners here today?”

“Oh, there may have been a few.”

“Very well, that is all right, then I did not make a mistake because, you know, if people are Christians, they will manage to wiggle away to heaven some way if they never learn another thing but poor sinners will have to be saved or be in hell.”

Never forget that. And if you are a poor sinner today, you are Christless, lost, hopeless. Let me impress it upon you. It must be Christ or hell, and to neglect the one is but to choose the other. I wish I could sound that out in a way that dying men would hear and hearing would believe and flee from the wrath to come. That is the special province of the evangelist. He goes out into the world and wins souls for Christ and then the Spirit of God brings them into the church of God.

And then we read that He gave some, pastors. The word means “shepherds.” A true pastor is a shepherd who has a heart for the sheep of Christ’s flock. When our blessed Lord challenged Peter with the words, “lovest thou Me more than these?” and after Peter earnestly confessed, “O Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love thee,” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep, feed my lambs, shepherd my sheep,” and in that He constituted Peter a pastor of His flock. What a blessed gift that is! The evangelist finds them as lost sheep wandering in the wilderness and brings them into the flock and then the pastor seeks to lead them into the green pastures of God’s Word, to minister to them when they are sick, to be with them when they are dying, to point them to the cross in the hour when faith may be weak, to enter into their sorrows, and that is what constitutes the work of a real pastor. No theological seminary, no college or university can make a pastor. It is the Holy Spirit of God alone who gives a man a pastor’s heart and fills him with yearning love for the people of God.

And then the next is that of the teacher. What is the difference between the pastor and the teacher? In the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians we read, “For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:8). We may say that the pastor has in a peculiar sense the word of wisdom, the teacher the word of knowledge. It is the special province of the teacher to open up the truth of God’s Word in a clear orderly way so that people may grasp it and profit by it, that they may understand the divine plan and thus apply the truth to their own needs, and it is the responsibility of the pastor to press the truth home upon the conscience in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Do you ever remember an experience such as this? Maybe it was a time in your life when you were going through some special trial and perplexity, and you say, “I must find my way down to the place where the people of God are gathered.” You entered in with a heavy burden. The meeting went on and someone stood up to expound the Word of God, and you were edified. He took a certain portion of Scripture and made it clear and beautiful and it did you good but as you left the place you said, “Well, it didn’t touch my case at all. I have no more light upon my trouble than I had when I came in. I am glad I came for I was blessed. I shall always understand that portion of Scripture better than I have in the past. It was indeed good to be there.” But you went away with the trouble, with the burden, with the perplexity. On another occasion, you slipped down again and this time someone read a portion of Scripture and as he began to expound it you said, “Why he seems to know exactly what I am going through. He seems to understand exactly what my trouble is. This is just what I need,” and as the Word was unfolded your soul was stirred and your heart blessed and you went away saying, “Blessed Lord, I thank Thee that Thou hast given such gifts to Thy people; I thank Three that through the opening up of Thy Truth my perplexity has been removed.” You were listening to the teacher in the first case and in the second to the pastor. One had the word of knowledge and the other the word of wisdom. What is wisdom? It is knowledge applied to meeting a distinct and definite case.

Look at verse 12. Why did He give apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers? “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” Now, just as you have it punctuated in our Authorized Version what would you understand the work of these special gifts to be? Would you not take it that their ministry was threefold, that the Lord had given pastors and teachers for three purposes, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, and for the edifying of the body of Christ? And what would that conclusion lead you to? That the work of perfecting the saints and the work of the ministry and the edifying of the body belongs entirely to those who have been set apart in a special way as pastors and teachers. That is the conclusion many have come to, and people are quite content to depend upon the man in the pulpit and say, “Don’t we engage him to do the work of the ministry; isn’t he to do the work of edifying the body of Christ?” But there are no punctuation marks in the original text, they have simply been put there by editors. I am going to take the liberty of removing these commas. Go back to verse eleven, “He gave some apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors, and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints for the work of the ministry for the edifying of the body of Christ.” Do you see any difference? It is not that the pastors and teachers are a kind of close corporation whose business it is to do all these things. But when God gifts a man as a preacher or a teacher he is to exercise that gift for the perfecting, the developing of the saints in order that they might do the work of the ministry and thus edify the body of Christ. This is an altogether different thing. A dear young fellow came to me and said, “Art any of your sermons copyrighted?”

“No, indeed they are not,” I said.

“I am glad to hear it because I heard you a week ago and went out and preached your sermon at a mission. I wondered whether I had any right to do it.”

I said, “If something gripped your soul that you can pass on to somebody else and make it a blessing to them, I thank God for it. If you get a convert, you will be the father and I will be the grandfather.”

I read in Moody’s life story that years ago, he would go on Sunday mornings to hear the different preachers of the day and then in the afternoon and evening he would be out in the missions and on the street corners preaching. He would come back and say to one of these ministers, “Doctor, I preached your sermon five times last week and won about forty souls,” and the preacher would look at him in a queer way for he had probably never seen a soul saved for weeks or months. The blessed risen Lord gives some the gift of apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers but it is in order that all may profit thereby, for it is for the perfecting of the saints for the work of the ministry and for the edifying of the body of Christ. Do not be content to come to meeting and just be a spiritual sponge. Fill up and then let the blessed Lord do some squeezing. Give it out to somebody else and then you will be carrying out the true principle of New Testament ministry.

How long will this go on? “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” What does that mean? It means until at last, the entire church will be gathered home to heaven and Christ will be fully displayed in every one of us. What is the fullness of Christ? We read in chapter one verse twenty-three, “Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” Christ is the Head up there in glory, we are the members of His body and constitute His completeness as the one new man. When at last we have gone home to heaven our day of toiling over, and we are in all perfection like Himself, then this kind of ministry will be ended. There will be no room for the pastor, for the teacher, for the evangelist in heaven for there we will all praise alike the name of our blessed Lord Jesus.