Can anybody tell me what date it is today? The 25th. So what does that mean happened about a month ago? Christmas. You guys are sharp. Very good. It was Christmas a month ago. It is hard to believe. This week I was reflecting on some of the great gifts I received this past Christmas. I know that many of you were here when we went through the series called Advent Conspiracy. What we got out of that was that we were going to promote more relational gifts. Gifts that you hopefully don’t have to spend a lot of money on, but it gives you the opportunity to spend more time with your family. I was blessed to receive a number of relational gifts. As I reflected on all of my gifts, I began to realize that actually one of the gifts was actually anti-relational. It didn’t really encourage relationship. It actually kind of discouraged relationship. That gift was a metal detector. It is one of those things that the old guys at the beach walk around with while their kids are at the pool. I got one of those. I couldn’t wait to get one of those as a gift. I was especially pleased when I received one. I was so excited to begin using it that I immediately began looking for pieces of metal in my living room. I quickly got bored with the living room and found my way out to the backyard and knew I would find something. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes, I found an interesting looking thing that I have no idea what it is. It is a piece of metal about 7 inches in diameter. I texted a few people from the church who should know what these things are. They couldn’t give me an answer. I said surely somebody must have an answer. So I went online and typed in metal detector enthusiast and I found out there is a whole community of people at this location called TreasureNet who are just sitting there waiting 24 hours a day , 7 days a week to help a newbie like me out. I posted a picture and within an hour or so I had an answer. Somebody suggested it was a wheel off a cart that used to carry an engine or something like that. I was very impressed because they were so helpful. It really created a bond between me and this place called treasure net. So if some Sunday morning you see I don’t show up or I show up late, it could be because I spent too much time Saturday night hanging out with my best friends on TreasureNet.
All kidding aside, when God thinks about community, he is not thinking about community in the sense of some place like TreasureNet. He has a very specific idea of community. He thinks of community more in the sense of a group of people who have confessed Christ as Lord and consequently have been called out from the world and called into a special relationship that he refers to as the body of Christ. We have been going through the series called The Nature of the Church. I spoke about the idea that there are at least four things that help give definition to the church. Those four things are that the church is Christ initiated, the church is spiritual, it is a community, and it is missional. I took all those words and created a mini-definition of the church. The church is a Christ-initiated, spiritual community on a mission with God to reconcile all of his creation back to him. A few weeks ago, we started to unpack this meaning. We looked at the idea that church was Christ initiated. Following Peter’s great confession of faith in Matthew 16, Jesus said “Blessed are you Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” The main emphasis being that it was Christ’s church. It is not our church. It is not a church that belongs to any denomination. It is first and foremost Christ’s church. Last week, I went on to talk about the idea that the church is spiritual. Spiritual in the sense that the church was created by the spirit at Pentecost. It filled up the church, specifically the people of the church at Pentecost. So much so that they began to speak the word of God very boldly and very creatively. Then that spirit goes on to form the church into the very image of Christ. That is where we talked about the idea of the church as a spiritual entity.
Today, I want to address the idea of the church as a community. We have already alluded that there are different sorts of communities out there. I thought I would use a standard definition of a community. A community is a social unit of any size that shares common values. Without too much of a stretch, I would suspect most of us would agree that the church fits the idea of a community. We are a social unit. We have people here. We have common values. The four common values that we have. In that definition, we really are a community. But again, when God is thinking about a community, he is moving beyond the basic definition of community. He is thinking about a spiritual community. We see that sense as we begin to look at a few key words and phrases that we find in the New Testament starting with the actual word church. The Greek word for church is ecclesia. Ecclesia is the Greek word that we translate church. Why do we care about the Greek? Because contrary to popular belief, the Bible did not fall out of the air in English. We received it by way of the Greek language. Related to this is another word that is commonly used among scholars. It is the word ecclesiology, which is basically the study of the church. So really as we look at the nature of the church what we are doing is ecclesiology. The word ecclesia actually doesn’t have much of a religious origin. It really just simply means to call out. A term that would be used as far back as 500 B.C. that just referred to the calling out of people from their homes or work places to come into and gather together to hear some sort of a speech from a politician or whatever. We actually see that the gospel writer Luke, who also wrote the book of Acts, uses the idea of an assembly when he talks about how a group of people came against Paul in Ephesus because of the fact that Paul was insulting their goddess Artemis. We see that here where he writes “The assembly (or the ecclesia) was in confusion. Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not even know why they were there.” The point being made is that the word that we translate church really didn’t have a spiritual meaning attached to it. It was more of a secular term. As we know, when Christ came along, he took the word church and gave it more of a spiritual slant. Jesus didn’t think of the ecclesia as just simply the calling out of the people to listen to somebody give a speech. He saw the church as the people of God. The people that would be called out of the world not in a physical sense but more of a spiritual sense and called into a special relationship that he would call his church. A gathered community that would come together to help him carry out his mission on earth.
The apostle Paul later reinforces this idea by the way that he uses church. He uses it quite frequently really just to refer to the gathered community. We know that Paul liked to write letters to his churches. He would write a letter to a specific church like the Church of God in Corinth or regional churches like the churches of Galatia or maybe in some sense a home church to the church that meets in the home such as in Aquila and Priscilla’s household. Paul is very fond of using this word church as a gathered community. But really, beyond that, we see different phrases that further reinforce this idea of a spiritual community. Phrases like “the people of God” or the “temple of the Holy Ghost” or more commonly “the body of Christ”. We know that is because Paul was very comfortable with using this term “the body of Christ”. For example, when he spoke of the resurrected Christ in the book of Ephesians 1:22 it says “And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” Here is speaking of the church more on the global, universal level. Remember we talked about the idea that when you think about church, you have to think about universal. It is made up of all Christians who ever confessed Christ at any time in history. Then you have the local manifestation of the church. Then Paul goes on and takes this imagery of the body of Christ and applies it at the local level. In 1st Corinthians 12:27 where he says “Now you are the body of Christ and each one of you is a part of it.” He is speaking now to the local congregation in Corinth just as if he was speaking to the local church in Bellevue. You are the body of Christ and each one of you is a part of this. So Paul is very big on this metaphor of the body of Christ. He sees this very deep spiritual union between Christ and the church. So much so that some would say Paul even saw the church as the second incarnation of Christ. The first incarnation is when Christ came down and was birthed in the manger and took on human flesh. That is the incarnation we refer to. Some suspect when the spirit came down, also referred to as the spirit of Christ, and filled the church the flesh that Christ took on was the church. Paul is very big on this idea of the church and its close connection to the body of Christ. Other than that, he uses this body of Christ imagery to really express the deep interconnectedness of the people of God. They are connected together in a very spiritual way. You can tell that by this passage. He says “Now you are the body of Christ and each one of you is part of it.”
This really flies against the notion that our relationship with Jesus is just a one-to-one thing between He and I. This is something very difficult to break free of. The notion it is just me and Jesus. I am not saying that a personal relationship is not appropriate. Everybody has to come to Christ on their own. What I am saying is sometimes I think what we fail to get across is that the moment you accept Christ as your Lord you are transferred in to the body of Christ. Really there is no conversion that can take place outside of the community called the body of Christ. There is an author that speaks of this when he writes “There is no salvation apart from the church.” When I came across this quote I said I don’t think I like the sound of this. What does it mean? Really the more I thought about it, it made perfect sense. The moment you accept Christ, you immediately become part of the larger body of Christ, the church universal. You can’t separate the two. In other words, you can’t say Jesus I really want to have this great personal relationship with you. I want to accept you into my life as Lord, but I want nothing to do with the church either local or global or otherwise. That is not an option. When the spirit created the church, he wasn’t creating a bunch of isolated spirit-filled individuals that really had nothing to do with each other. He was creating a single unit. A body of Christ. Even if we could somehow totally separate ourselves from the church, it wouldn’t be beneficial for us or the church. The reality is we need each other. We need the gifts that we bring to the table. When I say gifts, I am talking about the spiritual gifts. We believe that Christians have each been given a spiritual gift, one or more. Last week we talked about the spiritual gifts of prophecy and speaking in tongues and that sort of thing. There are a whole slew of gifts including very practical gifts such as hospitality, mercy, leadership, service, teaching, music, and those sorts of thing. We need those gifts to strengthen the local body of believers and to strengthen the church as a whole.
Paul expresses that deep dependency on each other when he goes on to write “Now the body is not made of one part, but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body.” Paul is not giving some crash course in human anatomy. He is speaking about that deep interconnectedness that really is strengthened by the sharing of the gifts in the context of the congregation. It is further strengthened by deep participation in the life of Christ and the life of other believers. Paul goes on and uses a word that describes that sense of deep participation as koinonia. Another Greek word that simply means the community of Christian believers participating together in the life of Christ as made possible by the spirit. If you want a snapshot of what that looks like, all we have to do is turn to the second chapter of Acts 2:42 which says, speaking of the first church, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. All believers were together and had everything in common.” This is really a picture of authentic community. It is a picture of people who really understand the idea that the church is one body, the body of Christ. Each person plays a part in it. How that is strengthened is through participation in the lives of each other and really the participation in the life of Christ as they participate in the activities and the rituals of the church. Things like a common meal. Things like sharing the Lord’s Suppler. Things like teaching and prayer and worship. Those types of things. Those are things that strengthen the body as a whole and really lead to authentic community. The koinonia of God.
I don’t have a lot of time today, but the main point I am trying to get across is that you have to think of the church as a community. You really do. Think of the church as a community and think of the implications of that. Although there are a lot of implications, I am going to leave you with two. The first one being that the church is a community and it means you can never leave the church. People are saying what do you mean by that Chuck? Is this some sort of a cult? I have every perfect right to leave the church when I want. No you don’t because if you are thinking that way, you didn’t listen to me. You weren’t listening to the sermon. When I say you can’t leave the church, what I am saying is you can’t leave the church universal. The body of Christ on earth. You are placed in that body. Short of renouncing Christ, you are there forever. Upon your conversion, you have been given membership into the larger body of Christ. That cannot be denied. You have to see that to have a true understanding of the nature of church. You are forever part of this community.
The second implication, as I have spoken in the last few weeks, is that what happens at the universal or global level always manifests itself somehow in the local level. If you are a member of the body of Christ at large, it means you also need to be a member of a local church. When I am thinking of a local church, I am not just thinking of Bellevue Christian Church. Obviously, the local church can manifest itself in all sorts of ways from the traditional churches all the way up to the cathedrals and everything in between. People who meet in warehouses and coffee shops and all that kind of stuff. Those are local manifestations of the church. The bottom line is that every Christian needs to be part of a local church. It means you don’t church hop. You can look for churches for a while, but at some point you have to put down your roots. Otherwise you are being disobedient. You are not allowing your gifts to be used freely to strengthen a body of Christ. You have to find membership in some sort of local community. If you are not part of a church, you are never going to be able to experience the authentic community and the deep participation into the life of Christ and other believers. In other words, you are not going to find that koinonia. It comes by spending time together, practicing out the rituals and the activities of the church that not only strengthen you as a person and form you as a person but strengthens the complete body of Christ. I close with a quote by a Christian martyr by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote “No one can simply become a Christian by oneself or worship wholly by oneself or be converted by oneself or preach to oneself or serve only oneself. This is not Christianity. Believers are not called out separately to live out a merely individual relation to God but called out and called together and bound together as the people of God.” Let us pray.
