Ephesians 4: Tossed To and Fro and the Gift of Stability
Short answer: To be tossed to and fro means to be carried around by every wind of teaching, and Ephesians 4:11-16 answers it not by telling you to try harder but by describing what the risen Christ gives. He gave some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers, and he keeps giving them, so that the body is built up until it is no longer tossed around and instead grows into Christ, who is the head. The remedy is corporate, ordinary, and ongoing: gifted teachers, sound doctrine, honest speech, and love, in a body where every joint supplies something. Stability in this passage is a gift received in community, not a mood you manufacture alone.
The Problem Paul Names: Carried Around by Every Wind
Ephesians 4 turns a corner before it reaches the famous verses. Paul has spent three chapters on what God has done in Christ, and then he says to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with humility and gentleness and patience. The tossed-to-and-fro language appears in that second half, and that placement matters. Stability is not the foundation of the Christian life; it is the fruit of it. You do not steady yourself in order to be accepted. You are accepted, and the steadying follows. Read the verses as commands to be executed by willpower and you will miss the shape of the letter, which is grace first and then a walk that matches it.
When Paul says in Ephesians 4:14 that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, he is not scolding curiosity. He is describing a real hazard. A child is not wicked for being small; a child is simply easy to move. The image is of a boat on open water, pushed by whatever wind is blowing that week. Paul names the mechanism later in the same sentence: the sleight of men, in craftiness, after the wiles of error. There are winds that are not accidental, and there are hands that steer them. Some false teaching is deliberate, and some is just careless repetition, but both move the unanchored.
Notice that the danger is described as a body problem, not merely a head problem. The winds are called winds of doctrine, so ideas are involved. But the goal is that we grow up in all things into him who is the head, even Christ. Doctrine and maturity are not rivals in this passage; they are the same road. You cannot despise teaching and still obey a text whose answer to instability is that Christ gave teachers. Nor can you collect teaching as a hobby and remain a child. The point is to be built up into a person who can tell the difference and who is joined to others who can help.
There is a tenderness in how Paul frames this. He uses children as a picture of vulnerability, not of shame. A child on a boat is in danger because of the sea, not because of a defect. Many believers carry quiet embarrassment about having been moved, maybe by a persuasive speaker, a viral video, a crisis, or a season of doubt. Ephesians 4 does not treat that as a scandal. It treats it as the very reason Christ gave gifts to his church. The instability is real, and the supply for it is also real. The passage is not a rebuke to the shaken; it is an explanation of why help exists.
Christ Gives Teachers So the Body Stops Drifting
The list in Ephesians 4:11 is worth reading slowly. He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, shepherds and teachers. Every item on that list is a gift from the ascended Christ, not a career someone seized. The subject of the sentence is Christ. Whatever else we say about the church's instability, the first thing to say is that the remedy has already been given by the one who is head over all things for the church. This is not a problem he left us to solve on our own. He supplies people, and he supplies them on purpose, for the building up of the body.
That word building up runs through the whole passage. The gifts exist for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith. Stability, in other words, has a direction. It is not merely the absence of wobbling. It is movement toward maturity, toward a knowledge of the Son of God, toward a full-grown man. A body that is only calm has not arrived. A body that is calm, taught, honest, and loving has begun to arrive. The goal is described in relational terms, not merely intellectual ones, which keeps doctrine from becoming a weapon and keeps love from becoming vague.
Teachers in this passage are not lecturers who hand out information and leave. The word shepherds sits beside teachers, and the two are joined, so that the picture is of people who both feed and protect. A shepherd knows the flock and knows the wolves. That means faithful teaching is not only the delivery of accurate content; it includes warning, repetition, patience, and knowing when someone is drifting. This is one reason the tossed-to-and-fro life is hard to heal alone. A distant teacher cannot see you drifting, and a classroom is not a pasture. God ordinarily uses people who know you well enough to notice.
Hebrews 13:9 says, Don't be carried away by various and strange teachings, for it is good that the heart be established by grace, not by food, through which those who were so occupied were not benefited. The two parts hang together. The heart is established by grace, and grace produces a settled center that can resist novelty. The danger is not only false teaching; it is any teaching that displaces grace as the ground of the heart. A person can be technically correct and still be driven, anxious, and easily tipped, because the center is no longer grace. That is a searching test for teachers and for listeners alike.
Speak the Truth in Love Is the Unnoticed Command
The most quoted phrase in Ephesians 4:15 is usually rendered as speaking the truth in love. The Greek behind it carries the sense of doing truth, or being true, and the rest of the verse explains the direction: that we may grow up in all things into him who is the head, even Christ. So truth in this passage is not a bludgeon and love is not a fog. Both are instruments of growth. A church that prizes accuracy but not love will produce a stiff, suspicious, brittle kind of correctness. A church that prizes warmth but not truth will produce exactly the windblown children Paul describes. The verse refuses to choose between the two because Christ himself is both.
Notice who is commanded here. Speaking the truth in love is not addressed only to the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers. Every member of the body is implicated, because every member has something to contribute and something to say. The gifts given in verse eleven are not the only gifts at work. Verses fifteen and sixteen say the whole body, joined and knit together through that which every joint supplies, according to the working in due measure of each individual part, makes the body increase. If you have ever thought that your words to a struggling friend do not matter, this text says otherwise. Stability is built one honest, loving sentence at a time.
Adults speak plainly. That is one mark of maturity. Children repeat, exaggerate, hide, and shift with the room. A grown believer can say, I was wrong. I do not know. That teaching bothered me, and here is why. The tossed-to-and-fro life is often sustained by vagueness, because vagueness cannot be examined. Speaking the truth in love makes the body able to test what it hears, and testing is precisely what the next verse and the rest of Scripture commend. Paul does not want a quiet church; he wants a truthful one, where candor and kindness are not enemies. That is a culture, and cultures are built slowly by ordinary people who tell the truth and stay in the room.
It is worth saying plainly: this is slow work, and it usually looks unimpressive. A long pastorate, a Sunday class that keeps meeting, a friend who asks the follow-up question, a parent who reads the Bible aloud and answers the hard question honestly. None of that trends. All of it builds. The winds of doctrine have always been loud, and they were loud in the first century too, when news travelled by ship and rumor moved faster than correction. Paul's answer was not an emergency broadcast; it was a body, with gifts, truth, and love, growing up together over time. That is still the ordinary way God keeps his people from being carried away.
Testing Everything Without Becoming Skeptical
Acts 17:10-11 tells of the brothers sending Paul and Silas away by night to Beroea, where they went into the Jewish synagogue, and the Beroeans are commended because they received the word with all readiness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. That is the balance Ephesians 4 needs. Readiness of mind, not suspicion. Daily examination, not passivity. The Bereans were not cynical, and they were not gullible. They checked. This is the posture a believer needs when the wind picks up: not a closed heart, and not an open one either, but a heart with a Bible open in front of it, willing to be persuaded and willing to be corrected.
Notice that the Bereans examined the Scriptures, not the personality of the preacher. This is important for our moment. We are unusually exposed to voices whose credentials we cannot verify, whose contexts we do not know, and whose clips have been edited for effect. That is not a reason to withdraw from teaching, because Christ gave teachers. It is a reason to hold up what we hear against the whole of Scripture, in context, patiently. A single verse deployed alone can make almost anything sound plausible. A text read in its paragraph, in its book, in its place in the story, is far harder to bend. The daily habit is the antidote to the wind.
There is a difference between testing and quarrelling, and Scripture warns about both errors. Some people test everything and receive nothing, and their hearts harden into a permanent no. Others receive everything and test nothing, and they are carried about. The Berean pattern is to receive with readiness and then examine. Practically, this means you can listen to a sermon or read a book without first deciding whether you will accept it. You hear, you weigh, you keep what is good, and you hold your conclusions with the humility that says you may yet be corrected. That is not unbelief. It is the kind of faith that wants to be built on something solid, and it honors the God who gave us a book to be read closely.
James 1:5-8 says, If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But it continues with a warning about the double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. The connection to our topic is direct. The unstable person James describes is not unstable because he asked; he is unstable because he asks and does not really expect a settled answer from God. The remedy is to come to God as a generous giver of wisdom, not as one who must be coaxed. Where doctrine divides and honest believers disagree, we can still ask, and we can trust that God gives more readily than we assume.
Winds That Blow in a Modern Congregation
Winds of doctrine rarely announce themselves. They arrive as improvements. Some bring a new revelation that claims to go beyond Scripture, and it moves a person quickly because novelty feels like depth. Some bring a moral teaching that is simply the mood of the surrounding culture, dressed in Christian vocabulary, and it is very hard to resist because it comes with approval attached. Some bring a personality, so that a teacher becomes the anchor rather than Christ. Some bring fear or panic, and there is a whole industry of Christian anxiety that keeps people scrolling for the next alarming update. Each of these can toss a person who has no steady diet of Scripture and no one close enough to say, wait, let us look at that again.
2 Timothy 4:3-4 describes a different kind of wind, one that comes from within the audience. The time will come, Paul says, when they will not listen to the sound doctrine, but having itching ears, will heap up for themselves teachers after their own lusts, and will turn away their ears from the truth, and turn aside to fables. The phrase itching ears is uncomfortable because it locates the problem in the listener, not only the speaker. Teachers who tell people what they want are a market response. If we value being confirmed over being corrected, we will eventually get the teaching we have chosen. A stable heart is willing to hear what it did not want to hear, and to thank God for the person who said it.
This is a strong argument for covenanting with a local church and staying there through dry seasons. The winds hit hardest in isolation, where no one can see our patterns and where every voice we hear is one we selected ourselves. A congregation gives you people who are not chosen by your preferences, teaching that does not adjust to your mood, and a history you cannot rewrite. That is not glamorous, but it is stabilizing. Paul's vision in Ephesians 4 is a body where every joint supplies something, which means the members need each other. If you cannot be corrected by anyone, you are already being carried about, even if the wind happens to be blowing your direction for now.
Colossians 2:6-8 says, As therefore you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, even as you were taught, abounding in it in thanksgiving. Here is another layer: watch that no one makes a prey of you through philosophy and empty deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elemental spirits of the world, and not after Christ. The order matters. You received Christ; now walk in him. Rootedness is not a technique you add to the gospel. It is what happens when the gospel you first received keeps being taught to you and keeps being thanked for. Thanksgiving is part of stability, because a grateful heart is harder to tilt than a merely informed one.
What Stability Actually Looks Like Over Time
Stability in this passage is not the same as certainty about everything. Paul says we grow toward the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, which implies progress, and progress implies that we are not there yet. A steady believer can say, I do not know the answer to that, and I am not going anywhere. That is a kind of settledness that no argument can supply, because it rests on Christ rather than on having resolved every question. In the meantime, we hold convictions where Scripture speaks clearly and we hold charity where it does not, and we refuse to pretend that the difference is larger or smaller than it is.
Nor is stability the same as never changing your mind. The Bereans listened and examined, which means their convictions were open to Scripture. A person who has never revised a belief may simply have never studied. The heart settled in grace is free to be corrected, because being wrong about a secondary matter does not threaten the center. This is liberating. If your standing depends on never being wrong about anything, every new idea is a threat, and you will either reject all teaching or be tossed by all of it. If your standing is by grace, you can learn, change, and keep going, and the body can grow because you are teachable.
There is a pastoral dimension here that deserves naming. Some people have been tossed not by doctrine but by suffering, and the winds of grief can be stronger than any lecture. Psalmists testify that God can handle the honest complaint, and the body is meant to be the place where the wobbling are held. A stable church is not one where no one cries and no one doubts; it is one where the crying and doubting are welcome and where truth is still spoken. If Ephesians 4 tells us anything, it tells us that the gifts of Christ are for the weak, because a child on open water is precisely who needs a shepherd and a teacher and a body.
So pray for the long, slow work. Ask God for wisdom, and expect him to give it. Sit under faithful teaching and let it be regular, not dramatic. Find people who will tell you the truth and forgive you when you need it. Speak plainly with kindness, and receive correction with thanksgiving, which Colossians 2:6-8 ties to being established. And keep your eyes on the head of the body, because Paul's hope for the tossed believer is not a stronger grip on a set of opinions but growth into a person, the one in whom all things hold together. That is a stability that the next wind cannot take away.
Biblical fidelity check
What Ephesians 4:11-16 establishes is clear enough. Christ, who ascended, gives certain people to his church, including shepherds and teachers. Those gifts serve the equip-the-saints work of ministry and the building up of the body, and their aim is that believers stop being children carried by every wind of doctrine, grow up into Christ, and hold together in truthful love. What the passage does not establish is also clear. It does not promise that a person who joins a church will never be confused, never hear a false claim, or never disagree with another believer. It does not say that teachers replace the Bible, that a congregation is infallible, that maturity arrives quickly, or that everyone's growth looks the same. It also does not tell us the mechanism or the precise timing of how the gifts operate today, which is a question faithful Christians have answered in different ways for a long time.
A common misreading turns the passage into a call for passive dependence on experts: listen to the gifted teachers, let them decide what you think, and drift along behind them. That misreading is wrong because the same body that receives teachers is also pictured as joined and knit together, with every joint supplying something, and because Scripture elsewhere commends the Bereans for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether the teaching was so, as Acts 17:10-11 records. Christ-given teachers are meant to make a church able to test and to grow, not to keep it dependent on them. The opposite misreading is just as wrong: treating all teaching with suspicion and calling it discernment. Paul's remedy for the winds is not less teaching but Christ's own gift of it, received with a heart settled by grace.
Other passages that speak to Ephesians 4:11-16
If you want to trace the themes of Ephesians 4:11-16 through the pastoral letters, these studies are useful companions: What Does 1 Timothy 1:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, which anchors the trustworthy saying that Christ came to save sinners, the message the whole body is built on; 1 Timothy 1: Grace, Mercy, and Sound Doctrine, which shows why sound doctrine is a matter of love rather than a hobby; 1 Timothy 3: Overseers and Servants in God's House, which describes the character of the shepherds Christ gives; and 1 Timothy 4: Guarding Faith and Godliness, which pairs careful teaching with the discipline required to remain steady.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to be tossed to and fro?
Paul uses the image in Ephesians 4:14 of children on open water, driven by changing winds of doctrine and by the craftiness of people who steer error. It describes instability, not just ignorance. The person is moved from one position to another by whatever teaching or personality is most persuasive at the moment. The opposite is not stubbornness but growth into Christ as head, in a body where truth is spoken in love and every part supplies something. The passage treats this instability as a real danger and as the reason Christ gave shepherds and teachers to his church.
Is it wrong to listen to many different teachers?
No, but it matters how you listen. Acts 17:10-11 commends the Bereans for receiving the word with readiness of mind while examining the Scriptures daily to see whether those things were so. That pattern is neither suspicious nor passive. You can hear many teachers and still be steady if you are testing what you hear against the whole counsel of Scripture and staying rooted in a local body where someone knows you. What Ephesians 4 warns against is being carried about by every wind, which happens when novelty, personality, or approval replaces the settled center of grace and the steady diet of God's word.
Does this passage mean I need a church to grow?
Ephesians 4 describes growth as a body reality. Christ gives gifted people to the church, the body is joined and knit together, and every joint supplies something as each part works in due measure. The passage simply does not picture a believer growing to maturity alone. That does not mean every congregation is healthy, and faithful Christians have made different decisions about where and how to belong. It does mean the ordinary means Christ appointed for stability include teaching, shared truth-telling, and love among members. If you have been drifting, a place where someone can see you and speak honestly into your life is a gift.
