faith for faith

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm (Ephesians 6:12,13).

Our Adversary is a crafty enemy. For millennia, he has been diverting the attention of the people of God from their true enemies and shifting them to those who are not. Take for example the life of Joe the Christian. Tomorrow Joe the Christian, like thousands of other Christians, will line up with others at the polls, adamant in his belief that he is fighting for God and against the Adversary. He will go and vote against the evils of liberalism and socialism, against the evils of injustice, against the evils of high taxes and large government, and then return to his job to pay for his home in Suburbia, surrounded by a white picket fence with 2.3 children running around in the back yard. He returns to his normal life, having fought the good fight for now and waits until he is called upon again in another four years.

For the next four years, Joe the Christian will live the typical American Christian life. He will go to work each week, working fifty to sixty hours to support his family and lifestyle. He and his wife will continue to send their 2.3 children to public schools, because Mrs. Joe, like Joe, has to work a full-time job to help pay for their $250,000 mortgage and their country club membership. Joe and his family somehow find time to go to church several times during the week, on Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings, and the occasional special event. Joe coaches Upward Basketball on Saturdays during Upward season, gives a tithe of his pre-tax income, and occasionally gives a generous contribution to the church’s building fund. Joe also serves as a deacon at his church and is respected by the people there. Joe the Christian is a great American Christian.

Joe the Christian also gets up early every day and reads his Bible. There is a great deal of the Bible that Joe feels like he understands, but there is quite a bit of it that he just cannot grasp. He doesn’t understand, for example, how the Macedonians in 2 Corinthians gave joyfully out of their extreme poverty to the saints in Jerusalem and how that applies today to him today. He doesn’t get how the Church in the book of Acts had all things in common and had time to pray and to fellowship daily. And he really doesn’t get what Christ was trying to say when he told the rich young ruler that he must sell all of his possessions to inherit eternal life or when he said that one must lose his life to gain it.

Joe the Christian prays that the Holy Spirit might reveal the meaning of these things to him, and then he starts his day. He grabs a cup of coffee, hops into his BMW, puts on his seat belt, turns the radio to the local religious station, and drives off to work. On the radio, Joe hears a preacher talking about the persecution and the needs of the Church in Asia. He hears of their running and hiding for their lives, their impoverishment, and their financial woes. Joe’s heart is burdened for these people, and he begins to calculate his budget in his mind to see if there is any money to send to aid the saints in Asia. He begins to subtract from his household income the payment for his home, his car, Mrs. Joe’s SUV, the camper, and the boat. He then subtracts his country club dues, his time share payment, his cable bill, high-speed internet, and utility bills. He then subtracts his and Mrs. Joe’s student loan payments, and their monthly contributions to their 401k’s and Roth IRAs. He subtracts his tithe and his commitment to his church’s building fund, and Joe realizes that he just doesn’t have any money left to send to the Church in Asia. Joe’s conscience is relieved by his quick budgeting, and he soon forgets about the poverty of the Church in Asia.

Joe the Christian doesn’t know it, but he has been utterly defeated by the Adversary. The Adversary has tricked Joe into thinking that his greatest duty is to vote for presidents and to grumble about the godlessness of the country. The Adversary has tricked Joe into thinking that God only wants ten percent from his people. The Adversary has tricked Joe into thinking that the American Dream and Christianity can exist together in harmony. The Adversary has tricked Joe into thinking that Christ is pleased with him all the while Christ is ready to spit him out of his mouth for his lukewarmness.

I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked (Revelation 3:15,16).

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love (Ephesians 4:15,16).

In a society where tolerance is a virtue and offending a person is a crime, telling the truth at times can be tough. And, like it or not, our society’s “morality” has influenced the church’s reaction to the truth. How can we know this? Take this passage from Ephesians 4, for example. Ninety-nine percent of the time when this verse is quoted it is quoted because someone ruffled someone else’s feathers. The expression, “in love,” is taken to mean, “without offense,” in spite of the teachings of this passage. Knowing this passage and understanding its implications are essential to understanding how we are to love one another in the Church.

1. Understand the Goal of the Truth
Paul’s instruction to speak the truth in love is not a call to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. The instruction has a very particular end, namely, to grow up the Church in every way into Christ who is the head. In other words, the instruction does not have an individual objective but a corporate one–unity of the Church under the Lordship of Christ. Therefore, our objective for speaking the truth in love should always be Church-centered. The reverse is true as well; if we are Church-centered people, we should speak the truth in love.

2. Dare to Speak the Truth
Like a physician who would be deemed negligent and hateful for withholding a bitter cure for a terminal disease from an infected person, so should we be deemed negligent and hateful when we refuse to speak the truth. The only remedy that we possess for the heterodoxy and sacrilege that has infiltrated our churches is to persistently apply the truth of God’s Word. We must dare to speak the truth, because when we do, we will be singled out dissenters and as haters of the unity of the Church. People will talk behind our backs, and people who we once thought were our friends will turn against us. But we must persist, because unity that is based upon falsehood and heterodoxy is a not unity from Christ, but it is the appearance of unity from the devil.

3. Dare to Love
Every instance of speaking the truth should be imbued with love. If we do not weep for those to whom we speak the truth, we have no business speaking it. The truth is never a tool for personal gain, and it is never ended by an “I told you so.” Before we ever open our mouths, we need to make sure that, one, our ultimate goal is the sanctification of the Church and, two, that we actually know the truth. These two things coupled with the power of the Holy Spirit are sufficient to cure all the ailments of the Church.

Peace is a blessing from the Lord. Aside from the occasional ridicule that Christians experience from time to time, the Church in America resides in a relatively friendly and peaceful environment. The evidence of this can be seen in where the Church expends most of its energy–divisions. When the Church does not have to worry about hiding underground to avoid being lined up and shot, two things happen to the Church. First, the Church is infested with false teachers and unregenerate converts. When Christianity becomes a low risk lifestyle and social network, people who get invited to church on Sunday might stick around for a few Wednesday night dinners, teach a Sunday School class, and help out with a barbecue fundraiser, all without submitting themselves to King Jesus. Persecution is the refinery of the Church and is extremely effective at removing the insincere. Second, is linked to the first, and that is, divisions in the church become the subject of jokes. So often we find ourselves jesting about how most new churches form from an argument about carpet color, when we should instead be brokenhearted over the disunity in the Bride of Christ–a disunity that is so natural that a church would actually split over the color of carpet.

Even in the innumerable cases where the issue of division is orthodoxy, the greatest teaching and commandment that Christ gave to us is placed on the backburner while we fight and despise each other over minutiae–”Love one another as I have loved you.” While orthodoxy in all spheres is weighty and worth fighting for, no orthodoxy is worth sacrificing the love that we are to have toward one another. And until that fateful day when concerns over carpet and music styles become ash in the refinery of persecution and the tares are removed from the wheat, so long as one names Jesus Christ as Lord, God, and the sole-giver of Reconciliation, we are to love him without question as a member of the Body of Christ.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ 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, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:25-27).

What’s in a name? We give them to dogs, cars, cows, and I’m sure someone somewhere gives them to trees. And even when we name our children, we care much more about how the name sounds with our surname than what it means. It is obvious, however, that names in the Bible had a much greater significance than they do now; in fact a person’s name was the very definition of that person. When Jacob was born, he was given the name “heel catcher” that literally described the manner in which he was born and also the deceptive nature by which he would live. When God revealed to Jacob that his life would be much more that heel-catching, he gave him the name Israel–”he who contends with God.”

We also hear in Scripture of praying in the name of Jesus, calling on the name of the Lord, and not taking the Lord’s name in vain, and we react to such statements much more foolishly than the Jews did who would refuse to utter, “Yahweh,” out of fear of transgressing the commandment. We flippantly tack on “In Jesus’ name” at the end of prayers, not realizing that it is when we pray in accordance to the very being and character of Christ that our prayers are answered not when we add a magical phrase. You will find much more success in your prayer life if you pray, “Conform me to the image of thy Son for thy glory; amen,” than “Lord, please give me a new car, in Jesus’ name; amen.”

All this is to say that when God gives something a name, he does it for a glorious and holy purpose. When God gave the name, “church,” to those he would call out and redeem, a certain reverence should have been granted to that name for his naming it thus alone. Furthermore, when Christ hung on the cross and shed his precious blood for the church, the price of the name “church” went up a million fold. I don’t know about you, but if the very God of the Universe died for the sake of something, I would be sure that I knew and used the correct definition of that for which he died.

In a previous post, we took a look at the origin of the Greek word for church, ekklesia, and noted that the word is a compound word meaning, “Those who have been called out.” This defintion being at the core of the church is significant because it makes the church at its core a personal and living entity rather than impersonal and lifeless one. Each member that composes the body of the Church has been chosen specifically by God before the foundation of the world and singled out in this life by his call through the Holy Spirit.

The question that we must ask ourselves at present is, “Does our present misdefinition of the church as the building with a steeple affect how the genuine church functions?” Or another way, “Do you think that our regarding the church as a building rather than the people who God has called to himself affects relationships within the church? I think that it must, for how much strife would vanish and how much more regard would we have for the each person in the church if we regarded each of them as particularly called by God? I think the impact would be profound indeed.

Let me offer this challenge to you this week: You know that person who is a member of your local body of believers who gets under your skin with his personality, who teaches something that you know is unbiblical, who looks at you funny, who voted against your proposed chair color at the last business meeting?—this week, instead of murmuring and talking about that person behind his back, look at that person as one who was called by God to be exactly where he is now. How will your attitude toward him change now that you look at him not as “that guy at church” but as “him who was chosen and called by God”?

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 1:1-7).

There is a certain ambiguity that one encounters with every mention of the term “church” at this present time roughly two thousand years after the Apostle Paul penned his letters to the saints dispersed throughout the Roman kingdom. Typically, that ambiguity is solved by the context of the conversation in which the term is mentioned. If one listens in on a conversation and hears the word “church” mentioned in the same sentence with basketball, barbecue chicken, committee meetings, and the like, that person can be pretty certain that the term “church” is to be defined as the building(s) where a certain group of self-identified Christians gather together to participate in various activities. On the other hand, if the term “church” is mentioned in the context of Jesus Christ and his bride, church discipline, holiness, and the like, one can be fairly certain that “church” in that instance is to be defined as the collective saints of God, called by him to holy and blameless before him. There also exists another key identifier, the Church Universal, which is unambiguously the whole of the redeemed, bought by Jesus Christ to be his spotless bride and to dwell with him forever in eternal bliss.

Confused yet?

Unfortunately, I believe it is history, not Scripture, that is responsible for the confusion that we now encounter with the term “church” and like a tumor, has attached itself to the word and has usurped the proper meaning and replaced it with an improper one. “What is the big deal?” you might ask, “What impact can the meaning of one word have on the whole of Providential history?” The impact has been great indeed, and I believe that an evaluation of our present definitions of the “church” put beside what the Bible says concerning the church will reveal the gravity of that which we regard as trivial and trite.

For the sake of brevity, I will address our definition of the church with what Scripture says concerning the church on future posts and gauge the significance of our misdefinition:

1. The Church is Called by God
2. The Church is Bought by the Blood of Jesus Christ
3. The Church is the Bride of Christ
4. The Church Is To Be the Holy and Blameless
5. The Church is To Love Its Members

Oftentimes, the best way to understand a word is to understand where it comes from. In our case, the original word for church, ekklesia, is particularly insightful as to its original definition. Ekklesia is a compound word in the Greek, composed of a preposition, “ek,” which means “from, after, out,” and “kleth-,” which means “to call, to bid.” Therefore, at its base, ekklesia means “called out,” or when applied to people, as it is, “those who have been called out.” This definition by itself raises two very points–those who are of the ekklesia have been called by someone and have been called out for something. The first chapter of Ephesians, vv. 3-10 gives some insight on these two points:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Though in this text we do not see verbatim “those who have been called,” we do clearly see the idea of the church and the definitions of the aforementioned two variables. First, we see that those who have been called have been called by the Father through Jesus Christ. The Apostle writes, “Even as he [the Father] chose us in him [Jesus Christ] before the foundation of the world.” It is the Father who has called the Church through his instrument, Jesus Christ, before the world existed.

In this statement alone we can deduce that the Church is established outside of the power of men (for it is establish by God), it is established through an intermediate (i.e. Jesus Christ), it is established outside of the dominion of man (i.e. the world), and it is established outside of the existence of man (i.e. before the creation of the world). In other words, the Church is an institution established and called by God alone beyond the realm of human influence.

Second, we see what the Church is called to. The Apostle writes: “He chose us in him . . . that we should be holy and blameless before him.” In other words, the
Church’s purpose in being called out is for the creation of a holy people that will be to praise of God’s glorious grace through the work of his intermediary, Jesus Christ.

This is the Church at its very base. From this base I build the rest of my evaluation of the doctrine of the Church.

Perhaps one of the more difficult things, and indeed unexpected things, in my marriage has been getting involved in a particular “church.” Since getting married early last year, the wife and I have attended regularly two “churches” (one at the beginning of our marriage, the other in the latter months) on Sunday all the while not acknowledging those “churches” at any other point in the week. We had rather flippantly begun the membership process (which by God’s providence was never completed) at the latter “church” across the street from our home simply because of its proximity and lack of heterodoxy, which, in retrospect, seem not to be the two most important factors when joining a “church.” And now again, the wife and I find ourselves on the brink of making the ever important decision of joining a particular “church” and finds ourselves a bit more sober-minded this time around.

Before taking the plunge of “church” membership, I have decided that before we join the aforementioned “church” that I would evaluate first the Bible’s picture of the church and then place that picture against our present picture of the “church” (which my present opinion you might have ascertained by the ridiculous amount of quotation marks). I will share my thoughts with you here, so stayed tuned.