We're thinking tonight again of the precious promises from the Bible.
This evening one which our Savior speaks in the eighteenth verse of the sixteenth chapter
of Matthew, he says, I say to you that you are Peter and upon this rock I will build
my church and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it.
The promise that Jesus gives us in this verse would be absolutely ludicrous if it were not
for the confession and the truthfulness of the confession that Peter spoke just before
it, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
For this promise claims that Jesus is going to build something brand new, a new entity,
a new congregation of people, a new spiritual house which would be divided ultimately in
time by the process of death so that one segment would reside on earth and another in heaven.
But he promises that he would build his church.
He says the gates of Hades shall not overpower it.
That is, even though death may come and claim a generation at a time, the church and the
construction of the church would go on and on and on until it was completed.
He says he is going to build a church whose life source, whose ethic, whose destiny, all
run counter to the prevailing nature of the environment where it is to be built.
Jesus is here promising to build, as it were, a colony in an alien atmosphere.
It's like building a colony of human beings on the planet Mars.
He is saying he is going to build something unique when all of the conditions around it
are totally incompatible with what he is going to do.
But he says, I will build my church.
It is to be constructed not of hammers and nails or brick or mortar.
It is to be constructed not by force of intimidation or the threat of sword, but he will build
his church fabricated by the implantation of truth in the hearts of people, and it's
then being quickened by the work of the Holy Spirit.
The church will be built despite the reality of death that removes one generation at a
time, despite the opposition of Satan and the powers of darkness, despite the hostility
of the world system and its citizens.
The church will be built.
There is nothing at all in heaven above or the earth below or hell beneath which can
prevent the ultimate completion and realization of God's purpose for this select entity
which Jesus calls here the church.
I will build my church, he says.
Because the building of the church is the promise of Jesus Christ in this age, we can
be assured that the church is important to Jesus.
What is Jesus building anyway, and what does it mean to him?
Well, I think the answer, the partial answer to that question, can be found by going to
the church epistle.
I refer to the book of Ephesians.
In the book of Ephesians, we have a number of metaphors of the church.
We're tonight going to simply pick out the three most obvious ones as we attempt to begin
an answer to this question, what is Jesus building anyway, and what does it mean to
him?
When he says, I will build my church, what does he mean?
Well, in the first place, we learn in chapter 2, verses 19 to 22, it means that he is building
his holy temple.
Verse 19, so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with
the saints and are of God's household, having been built upon the foundation of the apostles
and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being
fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built
together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.
What is the church?
What does it mean to Jesus?
Well, to Jesus, the church is his holy temple, a holy temple that is ordained for worship.
Just a word of background about this, of course we know the Jews that were in Ephesus understood
immediately the concept of a temple, because their whole faith revolved around that building
in Jerusalem, that temple that was built by Solomon and then later reconstructed after
the exile.
The temple that was enhanced by Herod by the time of our Lord and his apostles, a temple
that was a beautiful structure, a temple, a building in which God had said he would
dwell.
Sadly, hundreds of years before this, in the days of Ezekiel, the glory of God had
departed from that building because of the disobedience of his people.
But nonetheless, the temple was very important to them and to their faith, and it remains
so today to the Jewish people, although they have no temple existing at this moment.
They understood though when Paul was saying that the church is Christ's holy temple,
he was saying that Jesus Christ is building a place for his dwelling.
Now what about the Gentiles?
Well likewise they understood what a temple was all about, even though they may never
have seen the temple in Jerusalem.
For they also worshiped in temples, in their pagan religions, and in the city of Ephesus
there was one of the most magnificent of them all.
It was a huge building of marble and precious metals.
It had fountains and ponds and small lakes in conjunction with it, parks in conjunction
with it.
It was called the Temple of Diana, the Temple of Artemis.
It was a lewd and sensuous place where vile kinds of things occurred, but it was a part
of their pagan religion you see.
So when the apostle picks on this theme of a temple, they too understood at least that
a temple was where God met with people.
It was where God dwelt.
Here our Lord Jesus says that he is constructing a holy temple as he builds his church, a temple
that is ordained for worship.
The relationship between himself and the temple is very simple.
He is the chief cornerstone.
He is that critical piece without which the whole structure would collapse and be but
a pile of rubble.
He is the chief cornerstone.
And although Paul does not use the term here, Peter does employ it later in referring to
believers as living stones built upon that foundation of Jesus Christ.
No longer do God's people go to a temple to worship, but God's people now are the temple
of worship.
If this is true, there are certain implications that we need to take note of.
If it is true that the church is his holy temple, then it means that God personally
resides in the corporate or the collective assembly of his people.
We believe because the Bible teaches it that the body of the believer as an individual
is a temple of God and he indwells us.
But there is another marvelous aspect to this idea of a temple, and it is that when we come
together as a body of people, we are collectively a temple of God.
Just think of that.
When we come together in this place, God is here.
God resides in our midst, not in this building of cement block and steel and mortar.
But God arrives here when you and I arrive, and he leaves here when you and I leave, because
we are his temple, his dwelling place.
That's a very significant thought.
It's a brand new thought that is brought to us in the pages of the New Testament, that
God does not dwell in a building made with hands, but he dwells in a building made of
people who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
Paul speaks about this again to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 3, and I just would like
you to turn there and look at a couple of verses with me as he tells us what this means
in this context.
He talks about himself being a wise master builder and the foundation that he has laid
at Corinth.
But then he goes on to say in verse 16, Do you not know that you are a temple of God?
He's talking to them now as a body of people, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you.
If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is
holy and that is what you are.
Because God resides in us, this assembly of God's people must be respected.
The writer of the Hebrews, for example, says that we are not to forsake the assembling
of ourselves together as the manner of some is, but we are to be faithful in coming together
because as we meet we become the temple of God.
And now in Corinthians the apostle says that we must be careful not to in any way defile
the temple of God by ungodly attitudes or actions within the church that would cause
the church to be damaged.
God forbid that any of us should do anything that would tear down what Jesus Christ is
building up, that's the point.
And there is even the strong warning to us here that if any of us engages in that kind
of activity, that we bring ourselves under the direct judgment of God, for if we destroy
the temple, God will destroy us.
That is a serious charge, a serious warning.
Jesus Christ said, I will build my church.
The church to him is a holy temple.
It is not common.
It is not ordinary.
It is not to be taken lightly what he is building.
It's a holy temple, ordained for worship.
And as a part of that temple, I must respect it.
I must treat it with caution, with care, with consideration, because it is the Lord's holy
temple.
Now in Ephesians, if you'll turn to chapter 4 with me, we'll see that there is a second
metaphor, another common one that we find not only in Ephesians, but in other parts
of the New Testament.
In fact, this is the most common one in Ephesians.
It's the overarching metaphor or picture of the church.
When we think about what Jesus Christ is building and what it means to him, we need to understand
that he is building his spiritual body.
Chapter 4, look in verse 4 where it simply says, there is one body and one spirit.
For time's sake, let's go on down to verse 11.
And he, Jesus, gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some
as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the
building up of the body of Christ.
What is he building?
What is Jesus building?
He is building his spiritual body.
He speaks about the fact that we will someday all attain to the unity of the faith and of
the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs
to the fullness of Christ.
He speaks then again in verse 15 of the fact that Jesus Christ is the head.
He says in verse 16 then, from whom the whole body being fitted and held together by that
which every joint supplies according to the proper working of each individual part causes
the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
What is Jesus building as he builds the church?
He is building his spiritual body which is organized for service.
The Holy Temple is ordained for worship.
The spiritual body is organized for service.
Now a word of background about this idea of the body.
We realize of course that the knowledge of medicine and anatomy in that day as Paul wrote
this was not developed as it is today.
The famous Greek doctor, Dr. Galen, had not even lived at this point.
I am his namesake.
I asked my mother one time if she had ever heard of him.
She said no and I am kind of grateful that I wasn't named after him because he did rather
strange things.
In order to learn about the body he would dig up cadavers from graveyards and he would
dissect them to try to figure out how the body worked.
There were those who said he was crazy.
I just like to think he was ahead of his time but that is the kind of a guy he was.
He had not even lived at this point.
They did not know a lot about the body as to how it worked but the body was very important
to these Greeks and Romans because they were very much into athletics.
The Olympic games were played throughout the Roman Empire.
In their major cities and including Ephesus they had buildings that were called gymnasiums
where there was exercise and there were games held.
They were very much into body building and to their frame of mind the human body as it
was fully developed was a beautiful work of art.
They captured that in some of the statues and so on from that day.
To them the athletic coordination of the body was something to behold.
These were familiar thoughts to them, not anatomy and physiology but athletics and athletic
coordination.
These were popular ideas and I believe that Paul was building on that idea from their
background.
He tells us here that Jesus is building a spiritual body.
Jesus is in the body building too.
The body that he is building is organized for service, it's coordinated.
He expresses the relationship of Jesus to what he is building by the term head and members.
Jesus Christ is the head, that part of the body that is responsible for all of its direction
and for its coordination.
The members, us, are attached to the head to carry out the will of the head.
The body is to express the life of the head.
Now there are certain implications in all of this if that's what Jesus is doing.
For just as with the living body there is accountability, intentionality and adaptability
so there is in the spiritual body.
Think about the fact that a physical body has accountability.
This body, this hand rather attached to this body can do something.
It can do something to damage itself and when it does the rest of my body will hold it accountable.
The body that you and I live in is a body that is accountable to itself.
The same is true spiritually.
For example right here in this context he tells us in verse 7 for example that grace
is given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.
Every member is gifted to serve says Paul.
That's an important concept.
Every member is gifted to serve, no exceptions to that.
Furthermore every member is expected to serve as he tells us in verse 16 for example we
are fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies according to the proper
working of each individual part.
So every member is gifted to serve and every member in the spiritual body of Christ is
expected to serve.
Just like those members in your physical body.
They're all expected to participate in expressing your life.
Furthermore he tells us that every member in the spiritual body is united to serve.
Verse 13 the first part, till we all attain to the unity of the faith.
Back in the first few verses of the chapter he tells us how that unity is attained.
It is through humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance of one another in love.
Being diligent to preserve the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.
It is the responsibility of the Holy Spirit to produce unity but it's the believers,
the members responsibility to preserve the unity in the church.
It's not God's, it's ours.
And he can produce it but we must preserve it by the attitudes and actions that conform
to what he talks about in these verses.
The human body is a body of accountability and so is the spiritual body.
We are gifted to serve, we are expected to serve, God has united us in the body to serve
so let's serve.
That's the point.
Jesus Christ is building a spiritual body, his own spiritual body.
A physical body has intentionality, it has a purpose.
Your body is a vehicle for carrying out your decisions and your desires because you're
the head.
You make the decisions, it does what you want it to do most of the time.
That changes as you get older.
But the idea is that the body has some intention to it, there's a purpose to it, there's
a function for it.
The same is true of the spiritual body.
It's to carry out the purpose of the head.
And to bring that down to a local church, the job that you and I have is to find out
what Jesus Christ, our head, wants us to be about and get doing it.
The mission that he's given to us in the world.
We are not here by accident, we are here by intention, by design.
There's a function for us to fulfill.
The human body is not only one of accountability and one of intentionality, but it's one of
adaptability.
The body can make amazing adaptations.
When we moved here, we moved from Dallas, Texas where it was in the 70s and the 80s
in January of 81, to the Twin Cities where it was a little lower than that.
But we existed because our body adapted to it.
Our blood began to adapt to the situation here and our skin, I guess, got thicker or
whatever, and we lived through that first winter.
I'm glad it was a mild one.
The body is adaptable and so must the spiritual body be.
We must acclimate ourselves to our circumstances.
In the way that we carry out what God's called us to do, we have to be flexible.
This brings us back to the terms that we used earlier in the year, form and function.
You remember that?
As a church, we need to decide what our functions are, what God's called us to do so that we
can carry out the mission He's given us.
But in the way that we carry that out, we have to be adaptable.
We have to be flexible.
We have to use the methods that work in our day.
It's easy for us as a body to begin to get arthritis the older we get.
We complain about little extra movements.
I'm getting a little bit of arthritis and a couple of joints in my hands.
These joints don't particularly like some of the movements that I make anymore.
That's kind of the way we get as the body of Christ if we're not careful.
We get arthritic.
What I've got is called degenerative arthritis.
It's not rheumatoid, thankfully.
That's the kind of arthritis the body of Christ sometimes gets.
Disnerative arthritis.
Things are done a little differently.
There's an ouch and an oh and a gripe and a complaint.
These things ought not to be.
The body of Jesus Christ has to be adaptable if it's going to carry out the function,
the purpose given to it by its head, Jesus Christ.
We can say this very clearly that a body that does not express what the head wants is a
body that is diseased or disabled.
We have examples of that just right within our own church of people who are very much
alive and whose head is all together.
Yet the head, because of disease or because of damage to a spinal column, the body does
not do any longer what the head tells it to do.
That is so tragic when it happens spiritually.
When the spiritual body that Jesus is building no longer responds to the head, oh, may God
help us to be a healthy body as a church.
What is Jesus doing?
He is building his church.
When he does that, he is building a holy temple that is ordained for worship.
God resides in our midst.
As he builds his church, he is building his spiritual body that is organized for service
to carry out his purpose in the world, calling others to be saved, to come out of darkness
into light, to find eternal life in Christ as he is building the church finally.
He is building and putting together his chosen bride.
That's the third picture we want to look at in chapter 5.
I'll just read a couple of verses in this chapter.
Verse 25 says, Husbands, love your wives.
Jesus Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify
her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present
to himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but
that she should be holy and blameless.
The church is Jesus' chosen bride, originated for union.
That's the purpose of it.
Just as marriage is to bring together a man and a woman into oneness, these two become
one flesh.
So Jesus Christ is building a romance partner, his bride, his chosen bride, which is originated
in his holy design for union with himself.
It might be helpful just to remember briefly the background, the oriental background of
this concept.
Marriages in that day were arranged, you recall, and dowries were paid by the bridegroom to
the bride's father.
In order that the bridegroom might receive the bride, notice what the dowry price was
here in this case.
He gave himself up.
He gave himself up for her.
That was the dowry price that we might be brought into this union with him.
This relationship with him is expressed in this case not as a cornerstone and a living
stone.
It's expressed here not as the head and the member, but here it's expressed as the bridegroom
or the husband and the bride or the wife.
We have the initiator and we have the responder.
That's the relationship in this blessed union.
If in fact this is what Jesus is building, if this is true, then there are a couple of
implications that need to be examined.
We need to say first of all that romance is the heart of his relationship to us.
It's not just that we are some stone in a building or we are some functioning member
in a body, but the heart of his relationship with us is found in love.
It is found in romance.
It is found in oneness with himself.
Love is the heart of his relationship.
Just as in a marriage, love can cool, so it can happen in the chosen bride.
Christ's love cannot cool for us, but it's possible for our love for him to cool.
In fact that's exactly what happened to the Ephesians.
These very people who received this letter for about 30 some years later, Jesus sends
a little note to them through the apostle John and he says, look I know all about the
good things that are happening there and the works you're doing and the many pluses that
are on your side, but I have something against you.
You have left your first love.
You've laid aside the intensity of that initial love, the fervency of the love is gone.
It's possible for that relationship to our bridegroom to deteriorate to external motions
rather than developing internal emotions.
In other words we go through all of the right routines and we say the right words, but somehow
inside, in the heart, the love cools.
It is possible for the fire to go out.
We need to be aware of anything that would drain the energy from our love for Jesus Christ
or which would attempt to replace it.
Jesus is rightly jealous for our order, our devotion.
I say he is rightly jealous because he is our bridegroom and we have become one with
him spiritually.
Jesus Christ is building his chosen bride, originated for union.
The heart of our relationship with him is romance.
How's the romance coming?
Jesus said I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.
As he builds his church, he is in the first place building a holy temple, a temple that
is ordained for worship.
And he is building a spiritual body that is organized for service.
He is building a chosen bride, a bride that is originated for union with himself.
That's what he's doing and that's what he will accomplish.
The church means so much to Jesus that he gave himself for it.
But I think it's an appropriate question to ask us, what are we giving for the church?
We who are a part of this body.
If the church means this much to Jesus, what does the church mean to you, to me?
Is it to you a holy temple, something to be respected?
Are you careful not to do anything to damage it or to defile it because it is a holy temple?
Do you gather with other believers faithfully, assembling to worship the one who is the chief
cornerstone of our church?
Is the church to you a spiritual body in which you are a contributing member and a healthy
member?
Is the church to you a chosen bride in which there is love that is deepening, love that
is growing, becoming more intense?
Jesus is involved in a very serious project in this age, building his church.
Of all the things that you and I might be involved in, and the options are multitude,
there is nothing that can surpass our involvement in being a part of what he is building in
the world tonight.
Let's pray.
What is your part in what God is doing?
Are you a living stone in the body that is being fitted into place in this holy temple?
Are your attitudes and actions such that the temple is being built up and not torn down
by your presence in the church?
Are you an active, healthy, involved member utilizing your gifts, serving Jesus Christ,
using what he has given you to carry out his desire as your head?
Are you responding to him in love these days, or are you just going through the motions?
After so many years, it has become a habit.
It's an outward form that may not conform to the real reality inside of you.
What is that reality?
Is it love?
Or would Jesus say to you, as he did to the church at Ephesus, you sure look good, but
the love has gone out?
Tonight's the night to understand what Jesus has promised to do and to get on board in
every way.
Lord Jesus, I pray that we will be faithful living stones in this temple that you are
constructing and that we will be fit, a pure body, a fit body for worship.
We might recognize that when we come together, you are here and you reside in us.
I pray that we will be a healthy, spiritual organism carrying out the purpose and the
function that you've given to us as our head.
I pray that we will be a faithful, loving bride.
Warm our hearts.
Correct our attitudes and actions.
Bring our steps back to the right way if that needs to be done so that we will be working
with you in what you're building in this age.
Just before we close in prayer, I want to give you an opportunity to respond personally
just right where you're seated to say, Lord, have your way in my life.
I haven't been cooperating with you.
I've been resistant to you.
I heal myself.
I surrender myself afresh.
Do that right now.
Make ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto
you.
Hallelujah, hallelujah.
Let's stand together, please.
Now our Lord, our risen Lord, as we depart from this time of instruction and this time
of worship as a body of people and we go our ways, we ask your blessing upon each person
and each family unit.
Work in our lives according to your most holy purposes and desires this week and draw us,
we pray, after yourself to love you more, to serve you better.
In Jesus' name, amen.