The Identity and Destiny of the Visible Church
The Blessings of an "Extended Family" Congregation
The Lord’s Church
Four Expository Sermons on Acts 2:36-47
With Particular Applications for Smaller Congregations
SERMON ONE: The Identity and Destiny of the Visible Church
Introduction: An average American church in today’s missionary environment
I frequently take some time in September to consider together with you where we are as a church, and where we seem to be going.
I recently read a newspaper headline with these words: “Religion takes a back seat in Western Europe.” The picture below the headline showed the inside of a big cathedral in some European city with a small number of worshippers, mostly elderly women. A story like that always catches my eye because missionaries serving in Europe have told me that their situation in France or England is similar to ours here in the Northeast, where we are pretty well aware that we are not exactly the buckle of the Bible belt.
I must tell you that I am happy to minister here. And I find that I am not particularly impressed with any one part of the world as opposed to another. My hope is not resting in any one place on this globe, no matter how supportive that place might be of the Christian faith.
But about our nation, surveys suggest that 40% of Americans attend church in any given week. Those who have looked into the details more deliberately find that people tend to over-report their own attendance. When asked if they attended church this week, people who see themselves as regular church-goers often say yes for the purpose of the phone survey, even though they may not have actually been in church on that particular Sunday. Some analysts tell us that the real number is quite a bit less than 40%.
One thing is fairly clear. Most American churches are surprisingly small. There is another thing I have noticed. In our success-oriented consumer-driven world, many small churches feel like they are failing. If you put these two observations together, particularly in an environment where we are regularly being told that religion is taking a back seat in the world that we live in, it is not surprising that most churches look at their lack of growth and get discouraged.
On the subject of congregational size, I’m not sure that this one statistic can really bear the weight that we place on it. Is it really the best way for us to know who we are and how we are serving the Lord? One of the leading statisticians in the evangelical community, George Barna, has average congregational attendance at about 90 in 1999, the last year for which I can find data. These numbers are actually a little high because of the effect of the very large churches on the calculation of the average. (Imagine the impact of one 5000 member church on average attendance figures in a particular region.) National data tells us that 50% of the churches in America have less than 100 members. Last year in the PCA the number among reporting churches was 52%, so essentially the same as the national data. The most common size church according to many observers has 50 to 150 worshippers on any given Sunday. This is true in more than one nation, and more than one era.
I actually don’t think that’s an accident. I think it may have something to do with the number of people that you can at least know the name of and begin to relate to. The average church is, and I would guess always has been, about the size of a fairly large extended family reunion – about the number of people that could have each found a small spot in a large house where someone was talking and other people were trying to listen. That extended family connection is a very positive thing, helping us to begin to see the diverse group of people that we relate to every Sunday as a part of something eternal – something that is much larger, and something that truly is wildly successful. Individual churches that get very large have to find some way to create that extended family feel, or they end up being places where nobody knows your name.
So in some sense, I not convinced that things are all that unusual for us in the Northeast United States in the beginning of the 21st century. But here is the difference in our place and time. We live in a place and in an era where many people seem to choose increasingly isolated lives of quiet desperation. They do this even though their souls actually long for some connection that would make sense out of their lives. They doubt that there is any sense to be had anyway, and to live in true relationship with a community of people seems increasingly inconvenient and energy-intensive. Though they want something more, they also fear having something more.
It would seem that things would just keep on going like that – more isolation, more desperation, yet more unwilling to take the risk of knowing anyone. We cling to the familiar of our own small world. But then you lose something familiar that you had not planned on losing. And you feel like you absolutely must be with family. At a time like that you can again sense your great need for God, and once again desire to feel His work in the midst of this extended family of faith that we belong to.
September 2005 will be remembered for many years as a time of great loss. Thousands of people who lived in the path of a hurricane lost things that they were not expecting to lose. If we have been paying attention to anything outside of ourselves, the suffering of others has to shake us. That’s not a bad thing. It breaks down some of our hardness and isolation. When that happens, we may see something of the wonder of God and His people again in the midst of this world of trouble and loss.
Over the next four weeks we will be examining an event that took place some 2000 years ago. A message was heard by more than 3000 people in Jerusalem. It shook many people to their core, and changed their lives. It was the beginning of a great and winning institution that most of you are a part of, but that all of you are attending as you hear my voice right now. That institution is the visible church of the Lord Jesus Christ. We open our consideration of this passage from Acts 2 with the last verse of the Apostle Peter’s life-changing message to the people gathered there that day, and then examine what God did, and how the people there responded to it all. As we do so, I want to make the case that what happened there 20 centuries ago is of significant relevance to the purpose of your life as you hear my words this morning.
TODAY’S PASSAGE
36 “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” 40 And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”
41 So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
Exposition of the Text:
(Verse 36-37) What God has done
The people listening to Peter that day needed to know something “for certain.” They needed to know that God “made” this Jesus “Lord and Christ.” This was the same Jesus that was rejected by a crowd at Passover a few weeks before with the words “Crucify Him!” The judgement of Pilate, the religious leaders and the crowd was against Jesus. But God made His judgment known by bringing His Son back from the dead. Of course, Jesus has always been the eternal Son of God, but the resurrection of Jesus was a major declaration of something by God. As Paul says in Romans 1:4, Jesus was declared to be the Son of God “by His resurrection.” It is in that sense that God “made” Him “Lord and Christ.” What man thinks of Jesus counts for little. God has installed Him as the Master and Messiah of the church.
There is one other thing that God did in this passage. He worked in the hearts of the hearers to move them to a tender reception of this hard-hitting message. They were pierced by the truth. This does not always happen. Stephen in Acts 7 faces a very different reaction. He preached and they stoned him to death. It is a marvelous act of God when people are “cut to the heart” regarding their sin, and are willing to respond by turning to the Lord.
(Verse 38-40) What shall we do?
The expectation of the assembled crowd must have been that there was no hope for them. According to Peter’s preaching from Joel 2, they needed to call on the name of the Lord in order to be saved, and Jesus was that Lord. But they crucified Him rather than bowing in worship before Him. Now He was gone. How could there be any hope for them?
The gracious answer is that they could and must repent and be baptized. This was very good news. The word “repent” means to change your mind, but it is much more than a change in your opinion about something. The word I like to use to explain repentance is “surrender.” In fact, an ancient writer used this very same Greek word in a military chronicle to record the command of a victorious general as he spoke to a vanquished foe. He called them to repent. Anything less than surrender is not true repentance.
They were also called to be baptized. Baptism is an identification with the Lord Jesus, and with the community of His people the church – the only place where the forgiveness of sins is known. The promise is that the people of the Lord will receive new life through the Holy Spirit. This is nothing less than death to one master and resurrection life unto another, as in Colossians 3:3, “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
The summary of Peter’s instruction to them is that they should save themselves from this crooked generation! It is not that this one generation was so unusually wicked beyond all others. Peter was calling those assembled there to see themselves as dead to their former life – their love of self and lust for the world, and to find new life in Christ and the heavenly kingdom expressed on earth through the visible church.
(Verse 41) And so they did.
The message met its mark in the hearts of the people. We don’t know how many were there that day, but of the total that may have heard his voice, some 3000 “received His word.” Others may have scoffed, but these 3000 were baptized, and they were “added” to something, according to our text.
Key Question and Consideration:
What were they added to?
We know that the baptized were added to something? The text says so. But what were they added to? Remember that in Matthew 16:18 Jesus said, “I will build my church.” Not long after that we see the founder and cornerstone of the church alone, as he atones for our sins on the cross. Then after the resurrection (Matthew 28) He speaks to the remaining eleven disciples as the leaders of the church that He promised to build. He instructs them to make disciples through baptizing and through teaching people to observe what He has commanded. At the beginning of Acts we are told of 120 disciples who were gathered together. Clearly these 3000 were added to the 120 disciples.
Before long, the word that Jesus used becomes the word that we all would use to describe the disciples. In Acts 5:11 we read that “great fear came upon the whole church” and in Acts 8:1 we learn that there was a “great persecution against the church in Jerusalem.” The word that is used means “assembly” in the original Greek. It contains the idea of a group of people being called. They are called out of allegiance to the world that is passing away, and they are brought into a whole-hearted allegiance to Jesus and His church.
The identity of the visible church
What is this “church?” We can say this: Not everyone who has been baptized is necessarily part of the Lord’s elect. He has a perfect view of the fullness of His church that we do not yet entirely see. Otherwise, there would be no sense to what Paul says in Romans 8, that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” If the elect church in its final form were perfectly visible to us, then we would not eagerly wait for the revealing of it. There are some that we baptize that end up not being elect. What we see today is the baptized church. God sees the baptized church perfectly of course, but He also sees the elect church perfectly. One day we will see that too. In the meantime, there is a distinction between the church of the elect and the church of the baptized. We call the baptized church the “visible” church. We call the elect church the “invisible” church.
Acts 2 is clearly talking about baptism, and it is through baptism that someone normally enters the visible church. There may have been some among that 3000 that would later turn away from Christ and thereby show that they were never part of the elect church. But all of the 3000 were added that day to the baptized visible church.
There is no true visible church without Jesus. Jesus is at the center of Peter’s preaching. His death is the atoning sacrifice that is our redemption. His name is the one upon which we are to call, “for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). He is the Head of the church. His Word rules it. The church where Jesus is, is a true church.
We must still do today what that first assembly needed to do in the day when Peter preached. We must surrender to Jesus and be marked as those who are identified by Him. Grasp this amazing truth, and I think you have something that our churches need to hear: What we are a part of today is in essence the same thing that those 3000 people became a part of in their day. We are a part of the visible church of Jesus, whom God has made Lord and Christ.
The destiny of the visible church
What has happened to that visible church over the centuries that have passed? In a word, it has grown – not uniformly and particularly not in every location and every time. But the whole of it has grown tremendously. From the 1+ of Matthew 16, to the 11+ of Matthew 28, to the 120+ of Acts 2, and to the 3000+ of the Jerusalem church at the end of the day after Peter’s preaching, the church has grown. But that 3000 was only a very small part of what has taken place over the centuries since that day. Facing extraordinary and numerous trials from without and within, the church of Jesus Christ has been on the move, and it remains very much alive.
Where is this visible church headed? One day the sons of God will be revealed. They will be openly acknowledged and acquitted before the judgment seat of God. The chaff of false Christians will have been cast off, and the wheat will be taken into the barn. Then the elect church of God will be the only church of God. There will be no distinction between the visible and invisible, for the sons of God will live together in the full enjoying of God to all eternity. This is the destiny of the church. If you are a part of this great Kingdom by God’s grace, then this is your destiny.
Two Concerns for Today:
1. The “spirituality” trap
The visible church is not merely a “spirituality,” but a community of life from the dead. We know that many people are confused on this point. They are very interested in “spirituality” and even in Christianity, but the experience that they are looking for is personal, private, and restricted to a portion of their lives. They have no place in their lives for the communal duties and privileges of an extended family congregation.
God has something else in mind for His loved ones. He wants them to live with one another. He wants them to learn from one another. He wants them to care for one another. He is preparing us for heaven, and heaven is not a place of private spirituality. It is a full life – a life that is lived communally, yet without sin.
While we know that many people want just a bare spirituality and reject the church, we don’t seem to recognize how much this kind of heresy affects all of us. Consider this question: Is your life with the Lord and His church one of “balance” where you have many important duties and you try to balance church with your other duties? If so, you may be more affected by this spirituality heresy than you realize. You may know all the correct doctrines of historic Christianity, but you are still living as if just a small portion of your life died and rose again with Jesus. Let me quote Colossians 3:13 again: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” The word for you needs to be “surrender” and not “balance.” All of your life is about Christ and His church, and not just a portion of it. The answer for you needs to be this: Whatever you do is to be done unto the Lord, or it is not to be done at all. This is the life of surrender. Anything less leaves us haggard in our untenable efforts to serve many masters.
As a side note, I think that some of our popular evangelistic phrases are potentially harmful here. Did you receive Jesus into your heart? Did you give your heart to Him? Did you accept Him and make a decision for Him and believe in Him? Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? That is all very wonderful, unless you mean by these phrases something less than a complete surrender of your life and a complete allegiance shift away from Adam’s world and toward the new kingdom of the living God. The answer for us is not balance. The answer is resurrection life from the dead.
2. Your success is too small.
The size of a congregation has nothing to do with the success of the church. The view of the church that men tend to obsess on is a view that is far too small. Men may plant and water, but only the Lord gives the growth. It is the final fullness of the Kingdom of God that matters, and that is certain. Not one will be lost. The size of one piece of the enterprise at a given point in time is not particularly material. Don’t evaluate the church the way that people evaluate worldly competitive enterprises. See the church with the eyes of Jesus, who is Lord and Christ. View her throughout all ages and in all places as the Lord’s church with a view to the fullness of her destiny. Then do the part faithfully and with all your might that the Lord has for you in your place and time.
The Lord’s church is without question a grand success. Of course we want to see any particular congregation growing. “We long to see your churches full,” says the hymn writer. But he goes on to say, “that all the chosen race may, with one voice and heart and soul, sing your redeeming grace.” May this be our longing – for the fullness of the church of God! Whatever the size of our congregation today, may we be satisfied with this: that we are worshipping the Lord God through Jesus Christ His only-begotten Son, and being united with Him in His death and resurrection, we are united with all His church, which will most certainly be victorious forever. Amen.
THE WESTMINSTER CONFESSION OF FAITH
CHAP. XXV. - Of the Church.
Paragraph 2. The visible Church, which is also catholic or universal under the Gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.
The Lord’s Church
Four Expository Sermons on Acts 2:36-47
With Particular Applications for Smaller Congregations
SERMON ONE: The Identity and Destiny of the Visible Church
Introduction: An average American church in today’s missionary environment
I frequently take some time in September to consider together with you where we are as a church, and where we seem to be going.
I recently read a newspaper headline with these words: “Religion takes a back seat in Western Europe.” The picture below the headline showed the inside of a big cathedral in some European city with a small number of worshippers, mostly elderly women. A story like that always catches my eye because missionaries serving in Europe have told me that their situation in France or England is similar to ours here in the Northeast, where we are pretty well aware that we are not exactly the buckle of the Bible belt.
I must tell you that I am happy to minister here. And I find that I am not particularly impressed with any one part of the world as opposed to another. My hope is not resting in any one place on this globe, no matter how supportive that place might be of the Christian faith.
But about our nation, surveys suggest that 40% of Americans attend church in any given week. Those who have looked into the details more deliberately find that people tend to over-report their own attendance. When asked if they attended church this week, people who see themselves as regular church-goers often say yes for the purpose of the phone survey, even though they may not have actually been in church on that particular Sunday. Some analysts tell us that the real number is quite a bit less than 40%.
One thing is fairly clear. Most American churches are surprisingly small. There is another thing I have noticed. In our success-oriented consumer-driven world, many small churches feel like they are failing. If you put these two observations together, particularly in an environment where we are regularly being told that religion is taking a back seat in the world that we live in, it is not surprising that most churches look at their lack of growth and get discouraged.
On the subject of congregational size, I’m not sure that this one statistic can really bear the weight that we place on it. Is it really the best way for us to know who we are and how we are serving the Lord? One of the leading statisticians in the evangelical community, George Barna, has average congregational attendance at about 90 in 1999, the last year for which I can find data. These numbers are actually a little high because of the effect of the very large churches on the calculation of the average. (Imagine the impact of one 5000 member church on average attendance figures in a particular region.) National data tells us that 50% of the churches in America have less than 100 members. Last year in the PCA the number among reporting churches was 52%, so essentially the same as the national data. The most common size church according to many observers has 50 to 150 worshippers on any given Sunday. This is true in more than one nation, and more than one era.
I actually don’t think that’s an accident. I think it may have something to do with the number of people that you can at least know the name of and begin to relate to. The average church is, and I would guess always has been, about the size of a fairly large extended family reunion – about the number of people that could have each found a small spot in a large house where someone was talking and other people were trying to listen. That extended family connection is a very positive thing, helping us to begin to see the diverse group of people that we relate to every Sunday as a part of something eternal – something that is much larger, and something that truly is wildly successful. Individual churches that get very large have to find some way to create that extended family feel, or they end up being places where nobody knows your name.
So in some sense, I not convinced that things are all that unusual for us in the Northeast United States in the beginning of the 21st century. But here is the difference in our place and time. We live in a place and in an era where many people seem to choose increasingly isolated lives of quiet desperation. They do this even though their souls actually long for some connection that would make sense out of their lives. They doubt that there is any sense to be had anyway, and to live in true relationship with a community of people seems increasingly inconvenient and energy-intensive. Though they want something more, they also fear having something more.
It would seem that things would just keep on going like that – more isolation, more desperation, yet more unwilling to take the risk of knowing anyone. We cling to the familiar of our own small world. But then you lose something familiar that you had not planned on losing. And you feel like you absolutely must be with family. At a time like that you can again sense your great need for God, and once again desire to feel His work in the midst of this extended family of faith that we belong to.
September 2005 will be remembered for many years as a time of great loss. Thousands of people who lived in the path of a hurricane lost things that they were not expecting to lose. If we have been paying attention to anything outside of ourselves, the suffering of others has to shake us. That’s not a bad thing. It breaks down some of our hardness and isolation. When that happens, we may see something of the wonder of God and His people again in the midst of this world of trouble and loss.
Over the next four weeks we will be examining an event that took place some 2000 years ago. A message was heard by more than 3000 people in Jerusalem. It shook many people to their core, and changed their lives. It was the beginning of a great and winning institution that most of you are a part of, but that all of you are attending as you hear my voice right now. That institution is the visible church of the Lord Jesus Christ. We open our consideration of this passage from Acts 2 with the last verse of the Apostle Peter’s life-changing message to the people gathered there that day, and then examine what God did, and how the people there responded to it all. As we do so, I want to make the case that what happened there 20 centuries ago is of significant relevance to the purpose of your life as you hear my words this morning.
TODAY’S PASSAGE
36 “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” 40 And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”
41 So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
Exposition of the Text:
(Verse 36-37) What God has done
The people listening to Peter that day needed to know something “for certain.” They needed to know that God “made” this Jesus “Lord and Christ.” This was the same Jesus that was rejected by a crowd at Passover a few weeks before with the words “Crucify Him!” The judgement of Pilate, the religious leaders and the crowd was against Jesus. But God made His judgment known by bringing His Son back from the dead. Of course, Jesus has always been the eternal Son of God, but the resurrection of Jesus was a major declaration of something by God. As Paul says in Romans 1:4, Jesus was declared to be the Son of God “by His resurrection.” It is in that sense that God “made” Him “Lord and Christ.” What man thinks of Jesus counts for little. God has installed Him as the Master and Messiah of the church.
There is one other thing that God did in this passage. He worked in the hearts of the hearers to move them to a tender reception of this hard-hitting message. They were pierced by the truth. This does not always happen. Stephen in Acts 7 faces a very different reaction. He preached and they stoned him to death. It is a marvelous act of God when people are “cut to the heart” regarding their sin, and are willing to respond by turning to the Lord.
(Verse 38-40) What shall we do?
The expectation of the assembled crowd must have been that there was no hope for them. According to Peter’s preaching from Joel 2, they needed to call on the name of the Lord in order to be saved, and Jesus was that Lord. But they crucified Him rather than bowing in worship before Him. Now He was gone. How could there be any hope for them?
The gracious answer is that they could and must repent and be baptized. This was very good news. The word “repent” means to change your mind, but it is much more than a change in your opinion about something. The word I like to use to explain repentance is “surrender.” In fact, an ancient writer used this very same Greek word in a military chronicle to record the command of a victorious general as he spoke to a vanquished foe. He called them to repent. Anything less than surrender is not true repentance.
They were also called to be baptized. Baptism is an identification with the Lord Jesus, and with the community of His people the church – the only place where the forgiveness of sins is known. The promise is that the people of the Lord will receive new life through the Holy Spirit. This is nothing less than death to one master and resurrection life unto another, as in Colossians 3:3, “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
The summary of Peter’s instruction to them is that they should save themselves from this crooked generation! It is not that this one generation was so unusually wicked beyond all others. Peter was calling those assembled there to see themselves as dead to their former life – their love of self and lust for the world, and to find new life in Christ and the heavenly kingdom expressed on earth through the visible church.
(Verse 41) And so they did.
The message met its mark in the hearts of the people. We don’t know how many were there that day, but of the total that may have heard his voice, some 3000 “received His word.” Others may have scoffed, but these 3000 were baptized, and they were “added” to something, according to our text.
Key Question and Consideration:
What were they added to?
We know that the baptized were added to something? The text says so. But what were they added to? Remember that in Matthew 16:18 Jesus said, “I will build my church.” Not long after that we see the founder and cornerstone of the church alone, as he atones for our sins on the cross. Then after the resurrection (Matthew 28) He speaks to the remaining eleven disciples as the leaders of the church that He promised to build. He instructs them to make disciples through baptizing and through teaching people to observe what He has commanded. At the beginning of Acts we are told of 120 disciples who were gathered together. Clearly these 3000 were added to the 120 disciples.
Before long, the word that Jesus used becomes the word that we all would use to describe the disciples. In Acts 5:11 we read that “great fear came upon the whole church” and in Acts 8:1 we learn that there was a “great persecution against the church in Jerusalem.” The word that is used means “assembly” in the original Greek. It contains the idea of a group of people being called. They are called out of allegiance to the world that is passing away, and they are brought into a whole-hearted allegiance to Jesus and His church.
The identity of the visible church
What is this “church?” We can say this: Not everyone who has been baptized is necessarily part of the Lord’s elect. He has a perfect view of the fullness of His church that we do not yet entirely see. Otherwise, there would be no sense to what Paul says in Romans 8, that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” If the elect church in its final form were perfectly visible to us, then we would not eagerly wait for the revealing of it. There are some that we baptize that end up not being elect. What we see today is the baptized church. God sees the baptized church perfectly of course, but He also sees the elect church perfectly. One day we will see that too. In the meantime, there is a distinction between the church of the elect and the church of the baptized. We call the baptized church the “visible” church. We call the elect church the “invisible” church.
Acts 2 is clearly talking about baptism, and it is through baptism that someone normally enters the visible church. There may have been some among that 3000 that would later turn away from Christ and thereby show that they were never part of the elect church. But all of the 3000 were added that day to the baptized visible church.
There is no true visible church without Jesus. Jesus is at the center of Peter’s preaching. His death is the atoning sacrifice that is our redemption. His name is the one upon which we are to call, “for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). He is the Head of the church. His Word rules it. The church where Jesus is, is a true church.
We must still do today what that first assembly needed to do in the day when Peter preached. We must surrender to Jesus and be marked as those who are identified by Him. Grasp this amazing truth, and I think you have something that our churches need to hear: What we are a part of today is in essence the same thing that those 3000 people became a part of in their day. We are a part of the visible church of Jesus, whom God has made Lord and Christ.
The destiny of the visible church
What has happened to that visible church over the centuries that have passed? In a word, it has grown – not uniformly and particularly not in every location and every time. But the whole of it has grown tremendously. From the 1+ of Matthew 16, to the 11+ of Matthew 28, to the 120+ of Acts 2, and to the 3000+ of the Jerusalem church at the end of the day after Peter’s preaching, the church has grown. But that 3000 was only a very small part of what has taken place over the centuries since that day. Facing extraordinary and numerous trials from without and within, the church of Jesus Christ has been on the move, and it remains very much alive.
Where is this visible church headed? One day the sons of God will be revealed. They will be openly acknowledged and acquitted before the judgment seat of God. The chaff of false Christians will have been cast off, and the wheat will be taken into the barn. Then the elect church of God will be the only church of God. There will be no distinction between the visible and invisible, for the sons of God will live together in the full enjoying of God to all eternity. This is the destiny of the church. If you are a part of this great Kingdom by God’s grace, then this is your destiny.
Two Concerns for Today:
1. The “spirituality” trap
The visible church is not merely a “spirituality,” but a community of life from the dead. We know that many people are confused on this point. They are very interested in “spirituality” and even in Christianity, but the experience that they are looking for is personal, private, and restricted to a portion of their lives. They have no place in their lives for the communal duties and privileges of an extended family congregation.
God has something else in mind for His loved ones. He wants them to live with one another. He wants them to learn from one another. He wants them to care for one another. He is preparing us for heaven, and heaven is not a place of private spirituality. It is a full life – a life that is lived communally, yet without sin.
While we know that many people want just a bare spirituality and reject the church, we don’t seem to recognize how much this kind of heresy affects all of us. Consider this question: Is your life with the Lord and His church one of “balance” where you have many important duties and you try to balance church with your other duties? If so, you may be more affected by this spirituality heresy than you realize. You may know all the correct doctrines of historic Christianity, but you are still living as if just a small portion of your life died and rose again with Jesus. Let me quote Colossians 3:13 again: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” The word for you needs to be “surrender” and not “balance.” All of your life is about Christ and His church, and not just a portion of it. The answer for you needs to be this: Whatever you do is to be done unto the Lord, or it is not to be done at all. This is the life of surrender. Anything less leaves us haggard in our untenable efforts to serve many masters.
As a side note, I think that some of our popular evangelistic phrases are potentially harmful here. Did you receive Jesus into your heart? Did you give your heart to Him? Did you accept Him and make a decision for Him and believe in Him? Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? That is all very wonderful, unless you mean by these phrases something less than a complete surrender of your life and a complete allegiance shift away from Adam’s world and toward the new kingdom of the living God. The answer for us is not balance. The answer is resurrection life from the dead.
2. Your success is too small.
The size of a congregation has nothing to do with the success of the church. The view of the church that men tend to obsess on is a view that is far too small. Men may plant and water, but only the Lord gives the growth. It is the final fullness of the Kingdom of God that matters, and that is certain. Not one will be lost. The size of one piece of the enterprise at a given point in time is not particularly material. Don’t evaluate the church the way that people evaluate worldly competitive enterprises. See the church with the eyes of Jesus, who is Lord and Christ. View her throughout all ages and in all places as the Lord’s church with a view to the fullness of her destiny. Then do the part faithfully and with all your might that the Lord has for you in your place and time.
The Lord’s church is without question a grand success. Of course we want to see any particular congregation growing. “We long to see your churches full,” says the hymn writer. But he goes on to say, “that all the chosen race may, with one voice and heart and soul, sing your redeeming grace.” May this be our longing – for the fullness of the church of God! Whatever the size of our congregation today, may we be satisfied with this: that we are worshipping the Lord God through Jesus Christ His only-begotten Son, and being united with Him in His death and resurrection, we are united with all His church, which will most certainly be victorious forever. Amen.
THE WESTMINSTER CONFESSION OF FAITH
CHAP. XXV. - Of the Church.
Paragraph 2. The visible Church, which is also catholic or universal under the Gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.
posted by Pastor Magee at 10:30 AM
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