Christ’s Bride
How many people watched the Royal wedding? The history made that day will stay in the minds of over two billion people who watched this young couple get married – the future King of England and his bride.
I was intrigued with the service – how it was formal for sure, I recalled being in Westminster Abby and the sound of famous old hymns took me back there. I found the prayers meaningful, and the ceremony a real glimpse of how real royalty moves forward.
But what I came away with was one phrase that was spoken by one of the bishops officiating the wedding. He was giving advice to William and Kate and in that message he talked about how they might be kind, loving and forgiving to each other all the days of their life. That, that was the foundation of a marriage filled with love, peace and joy. Then he spoke about the church, The church, he said is the ‘spouse of Christ.’ And it struck me, how far we have come from the root meaning of the ‘Bride of Christ.’ This thing we refer to offhandedly as the ‘church’ was the very thing that Christ loved the most. So much so that He referred to it as his. Organized religion, as we call it, has moved so far from the intention of Christ for His church that we hardly recognize it anymore. That phrase, put just a little differently, caught me off guard and when I heard the bishop say, “The spouse of Christ,” the very definition of the church hit me.
The past forty years have not been kind to the church. Its very servants have caused irreparable damage to the ‘spouse of Christ.’ There have been atrocities committed by clergy that will forever drive people from the church, and there are attitudinal sins committed against those who come to worship by those who gossip and nit-pick behind their backs – but who, non the less, get the point across that those people are not really welcome. Clergy are attacked personally in spite of their attempts to carry God’s Word to the people for whom they feel a calling to minister.
All of this is the unfortunate reality of the church today. But what really caught me by that phrase, ‘spouse of Christ’ was the intimacy of this thing we call the church. In 2 Cor 11:2, Paul is talking to the Corinthian church, which he founded. He said to the people, “I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness, but you are already doing that.” (here Paul shows how familiar he is with the people of this church.) Then in the second verse he says, “I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I may present you as a pure virgin to Him.” Paul likens our relationship, us being the church, to a marriage with Christ. Again in Romans 7:4 Paul is telling the Romans, “Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another—to Him who was raised.” NKJV. Very clearly, we are the Bride of Christ, a body of believers that have the most intimate relationship possible with our Lord.
Do we have to assemble to be the Bride of Christ? Well that begs the question; Why would a person who truly believes that Christ is their Saviour not want to have fellowship in the body of believers that Christ died for? If we jump from Romans to 1 John 3:14, we find the answer; “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers.” If we do, in fact, love our brothers, why would we not want to be with them as part of the Bride of Christ? An obvious sign of one who is moving away from Christ is their moving away from regular attendance to worship with those who they have professed to love. If we liken it to our own families, it becomes very clear. If certain members of your family drift away from family get-togethers and are absent for important family dates, they, by their actions, define how important, or unimportant their family has become to them.
Missing in too many of those who have drifted into the world and away from the church is the notion of who they were in the first place. The act of being saved, accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, is in essence, a marriage, a commitment to Him and also to fellow brothers and sisters who have this common relationship with Christ. We have, as a group, been ‘called out of the world’ to be together as one body and worship Him. It is a calling that we accepted and hopefully value.
Paul both understood and practiced this concept of the church being a living thing made up of believers. This Bride of Christ, he describes in Ephesians 4:16, as “the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” We are connected simply because we are part of the great body of Christ. An interesting fact about this concept of us being a ‘part’ of the Body of Christ, is that in almost every case in the New Testament of a person giving their heart to Christ, it is followed by that person becoming part of the church or the Bride of Christ. For someone today who says they are a Christian, and does not attend church, the gathering of His believers, they are living a life totally foreign to Scripture. The fact is most all of the Epistles or letters written in the New Testament are written to local churches. It is that body that Christ referred to as His Bride.
We have just had the Lord’s Supper over Easter. It is called ‘communion’, it is a ‘common union’ of believers working in concert to worship their Lord. It is also a place to plan and move outward into the community in which we live. But we do it with a sense of family and that family has the purist ties of all. We are related to Christ – all of us. What He intended was for us to act as His Bride. We have promised ourselves to Him in a way which is paralleled by any marriage vow. We promise Him to be loyal and show our love and honour to Him alone. How are we doing with that as His Bride? I mean as a body of believers. Do you know what strikes me in this picture? We are not only responsible for our loyalty and attention to Him, but our promise is to each other; to love and honour each other in this body of believers. When I see that picture, I see each of us supporting one another and reaching out to those who have drifted away from this body. I will ask again, “How are we doing with that?” How many phone calls have come from one member to another member of this church to check in and see how they are doing? How many of those calls do you think were made this past month? Are we operating as the Scripture instructs us to do? Are we loving to everyone who passes through these doors? Do we continue to show that acceptance and love each time we enter God’s house?
This ‘marriage’ we have with Christ is not unlike our own. It is a commitment to care for, and show respect to our fellow members. That goes far beyond the pleasantries of hello’s and ‘how are you.’ The Body of Christ is a living, breathing, feeling body – connected to Him. It is through us that He operates. We, recognizing the call to His body of believers, are to adopt others as whole heartedly as we do our biological families. The act of gathering as believers holds a special bond that goes far beyond our social structures of the day. It is displaying an appetite to extend our love and care not only among ourselves but out into the community. But it must be a genuine love that we display within our own ‘believers body.’
Friends, this is the Sunday for the Annual Meeting. If we begin to approach this thing we call the Bride of Christ, this thing that each of us are a part of, connected by the sinew of faith, love, devotion to Christ, as a real ‘body’ of Christ, we will begin to attract others and grow in His midst. We have to develop past neighbours simply gathering on Sunday. We have to begin to think of ourselves as part of something much bigger, much more important than social gathering. New Life was founded with Christ at its center. We can not call ourselves a ‘body of Christ’ unless we open our hearts and minds to the real concept of ‘The Bride of Christ.”
I don’t know how many of you have played ‘Scrabble’ but I can tell you it’s a challenging game. It involves the bringing together of letters to form words. Although at first glance this may seem like an easy game to play because there are only twenty six letters in the alphabet, these letters come together to form enough words to fill thick dictionaries and vast libraries.
This game involves putting in order things that originally had no order to them at all. They were just single letters in isolation. Words already exist but the letters must be arranged in a certain way to make the words come to life. The goal of Scrabble is for the players to set out the letters so that they now make sense. Christians are to live their lives in such a way that they come together to form the picture of what salvation represents. Salvation is a gift and for the Christian, already exists. The goal of living the Christian life is to arrange one’s life so that it now looks like the existence of a person saved by grace.
When we assemble here as a part of the body of Christ, our presence demonstrates our initial commitment to our vow to Christ. That decision to come to fellowship is the very life of the relationship we have with Him.
He will, if we are genuine in our efforts to be together, bless us with a larger and larger family. That will make us capable of much greater acts as a body of believers working in concert to the betterment of the Body of Christ and His kingdom.
Amen
