The Church: The Dwelling Place of God
Download MP3If you have a Bible, I invite you to turn to Ephesians. Ephesians chapter 2. We're going to begin reading in verse 19. So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.
Joel Brooks:Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. And whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit. This is the word of the Lord. Yes, amen.
Joel Brooks:If you would pray with me. Father God, I pray that through your spirit, you would open up your word to us, and we would come to see this glorious thing that you have built called the church. And our appreciation of her would grow. We'd see we would see her as the glorious gift that she is. Lord, I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore.
Joel Brooks:But, Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. As a child, I grew up in church. I mean, I I literally, I grew up in church.
Joel Brooks:I was there every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening, every Wednesday night for church supper, for choir, for R. A. S. Anybody know what RAs stands for? Anybody?
Joel Brooks:Royal Ambassadors. That's right. Not resident assistant. We were kinda the Christian Boy Scouts. And, I, my mom was a church organist.
Joel Brooks:My dad was a deacon. And so, I was just always at church, and the church was my playground. So much as you see kids running around everywhere here after the service, you know, crawling under the pews, going into the baptist it's worth repeating because it tells a lot about who I am. But, my mom, you know, I said she was the church organist. And, one Sunday at church, I'm sitting in the pew all by myself because my mom would sit by the organ.
Joel Brooks:And so she was always nervous, and she had a right to be. And I was acting up. And so, during the middle of the sermon, my mom just goes this. Come here. And so, I had to get up and I walk forward while the pastor's preaching, and I had to come sit next to my mom on the floor by the organ.
Joel Brooks:And so she thought problem was solved, but she thought wrong. So I I just kinda worm my way behind the organ without her noticing because she was actually paying attention to the sermon. And I found a dime on the floor. And I used the dime to undo the screws to the vent that was by the stage, pulled it off, crawled in underneath the stage, crawled all the way underneath to where the pastor was preaching, and I began tapping at his feet while he was preaching. I was an absolute terror as a child, but once again, the church was my playground.
Joel Brooks:But but I knew a church was more than just the building. I knew it was the people, and I can still vividly remember all the types of people that that were part of First Baptist Sandy Springs, the church that I grew up in. And I remember we had the, the amen guy, you know, the the older guy in the back who whenever you needed a point, you you needed that that affirmation, you get that amen. You know? And, and I miss the amen guy.
Joel Brooks:Alright? Feel free to bring it back. Yeah. All God's people said? Amen.
Joel Brooks:Was that that hard? Alright. Okay. So yeah. I remember that guy.
Joel Brooks:I remember the the soprano, the off key soprano who couldn't sing, but she thought she could. And, and she just she resonated louder than anybody else in the room. Or I can remember being in at the called conferences after church. I always dreaded those. I mean, these conferences, but but hearing the voices and things like move the motion be received.
Joel Brooks:You know, you just those things just I can remember so vividly the people who made up the church. But I knew that the church was even more than the people. That, yes, there was a building there. Yes. There was the people there, but but there was something more about the church.
Joel Brooks:And I didn't really understand it as a child, and it's taken many years and a lot of study of scripture to finally really come to a better understanding of what is meant by the church. That's what Paul explains to us here. Paints a beautiful picture of the church. Beginning here in verse 19 of chapter 2 and then going all the way through chapter 3, Paul is going to talk about the glory of the church. Now when we think about church, we typically think about all the things that a church does, all the things that happen at a church.
Joel Brooks:We think of once again like the preaching, the singing. We think of taking up an offering, the prayer times, people teaching the children's classes, people serving in the nursery. We think of all the activities that take place to make church happen. But this isn't how Paul describes church. A matter of fact, I'm not sure if you've noticed this as we've been going through Ephesians, but Paul rarely ever describes anything we do.
Joel Brooks:We're we're never doing any action. God is the one who is doing all of it. God is the one at work. And so in chapter 2, when Paul begins describing the things that happen in the church, he'll say things like this, God is our peace. God made us 1.
Joel Brooks:God broke down the dividing wall of hostility. God abolished the law. God creates one man instead of 2. God makes peace. God reconciles us.
Joel Brooks:God kills off hostility. God came and preach peace. Over and over again, God's the subject of the verb, not us. And in the text that we just read when we we do finally get in on the action, we're finally in on the action, we find that we're passive in it. We're passive in the actions.
Joel Brooks:So in verse 20, we're the ones being built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. Verse 21, we are joined together. Verse 22, we are built together into the dwelling place of God. Over and over again when Paul describes our salvation or he describes the church, it's never in terms of what we do, it's in terms of what God has done. This is God's work.
Joel Brooks:The church is his gift. It's what he has built and he has given us. And this gift of the church is glorious. And so what I want us to do this morning is to just simply look more as to who we are as the church. We often take time to look at who we are individually in Christ, but I want us to look at who we are corporately in Christ.
Joel Brooks:So what Paul does to teach this to us is he gives us a mixture of metaphors. Paul loves to just like mash up metaphors together. And here, he gives us several of them. They're not just random metaphors. They're actually gonna show a progression.
Joel Brooks:But he first describes us as citizens. Then he says, we belong to the household of God. And then he goes on to say, we're actually the home or the house or the temple of the Lord. And so the the progression is is this, each one of these images gets more and more intense when describing our relationship to God and our relationship to one another. So in relation to God, the progression moves like this.
Joel Brooks:You used to be strangers from God. You didn't you didn't know who he was, but but then he made you citizens. Now you're living in the same city and Jesus is your king. But then more than that, now he's invited you in to be part of his household. You're actually living under the same roof with Jesus, your family.
Joel Brooks:And then even closer, you're not just living under the same roof, you've actually become the house and God himself lives in you. Each metaphor more and more intense and grow and showing our relationship to God. And it's the same with how we relate to one another. Once again, we used to be strangers, but now we're all citizens of the same city. We live in the same city together.
Joel Brooks:Actually, we live in the same house together. We are brothers and sisters in Christ. Actually more than that, we are so interlocked together, we become the house and God through his spirit actually dwells in our midst. And what I want us to do is look at each of these three images and what they mean to us and how they progress us forward in that intimacy with both God and one another. So the first metaphor image that Paul uses is that of citizenship.
Joel Brooks:Read again with me verse 19. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints. Now, Jeff talked some about this last week and so, I'm just going to speak briefly about this now. I'm not going to add many details. But what Paul's describing here is that we used to be strangers.
Joel Brooks:We used to be immigrants. Living in a city, maybe with a temporary visa, but it was not our home. But now we are full blown citizens of the kingdom of God. Meaning that, as Christians, we've essentially become a new race of people, a new citizenship. It's the language that Peter uses, and we read that earlier, when we opened our service reading from Peter.
Joel Brooks:He calls us a chosen race or ethnos in which we are a new race of people. This is what Paul means in verse 15, when he says that there's no longer Jew or Gentile, but God has created in himself one new man instead of 2. A new man has been created, a new race. And it's not that the Gentiles are now becoming Jews or the Jews are now becoming Gentiles, now there's something entirely new that's been created. A new race of people, a new citizenship given.
Joel Brooks:There's a new type of humanity that emerges. Can I just say that, boy, does that need to be proclaimed today? That needs to be proclaimed today that in a church, it does not matter your race. It doesn't matter the color of your skin. It doesn't matter your nationality.
Joel Brooks:It doesn't matter your ethnicity. The identifying marker in your life is that you are of Christ. That's all that matters is that you're of Christ. We are a new creation, a a new race of people. Once again, it's not that one group is already established and welcomes another group in, or this group over here welcomes that other group in, God does away with the groups and He creates an entire new people, a new ethnos, a new race.
Joel Brooks:This is what Paul's talking about when he says that we are a new humanity, and then later that we are all now citizens of a new, a new nation, a new kingdom. 1st image, citizenship. 2nd is this, we're in the household. We're in the same household of God. So no no longer are we just in the same city, we're now living under the same roof.
Joel Brooks:We're brothers and we're sisters in Christ living in the same home with our father. Now, Paul says that this home that we've been given to live in is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. The apostles and the prophets, they're the ones who pointed us to Christ, who taught us about Christ. They're the ones who showed us the gospel. They're the ones who wrote scripture.
Joel Brooks:And we need to remember that this is the foundation of the church. You can't change this foundation. You cannot improve on this foundation. As a church, you're not supposed to come up with some new culturally acceptable foundation for the church. I've told you this before, but hardly a week goes by that, as a pastor, I'm not sent some email or some link to some article that talks about how the American church is declining and how we're moving into a post Christian nation.
Joel Brooks:And I'm always sent these articles to read about. It's really uplifting that I get these. And then usually with that is that link to, you know, how you can preach better or, or or usually a link to some webinar you could go to, some conference you could go to, and really it tells you how to fix this problem, and their solution is is almost always this, your church needs a makeover. It needs a makeover. You you need a face lift, if you will, so you could become culturally relevant once again, and that's the fix.
Joel Brooks:But but I would say that the church attendance has not been going away because the church needs a makeover. I'd say it's been going away because this church has given itself a makeover. It already has. And we see it over and over again how many churches have largely abandoned the gospel. They've largely already abandoned the authority of scripture.
Joel Brooks:And they're trying to build a new foundation on whatever the cultural sands are, and they're forever shifting. And then they're wondering, why are people not coming? Why are their lives not being changed? Well, would you like to go under an ancient structure who keeps changing its foundation? No.
Joel Brooks:What the church needs is to continually continually proclaim Christ. Now here's the deal, when Jesus is preached, when He is proclaimed not just by me, but He is proclaimed by you, the real Jesus proclaimed. Not some fictitious Jesus, you know, that we just kinda make up, but the but the Jesus of the bible, when He is proclaimed by us, what happens is some people will find him, attractional. They will be attracted to him and also people will be repelled by him. Some people will find him utterly beautiful and will come to him and other people will be repulsed by him.
Joel Brooks:It's always been that way in the church. But if you preached a watered down, whatever culturally relevant Jesus you wanna come up with, one that kind of looks just like you, meh, meh. There's no reaction. And the thing is that a Jesus that looks just like us is a Jesus that can't save us. It leaves the world without hope.
Joel Brooks:And so the church has to remember our foundation and it's Christ. It's the apostles. It's the prophets. Jesus himself is the cornerstone, which means he's a rock on which everything else is built and we never change this ever. Let's look at the next metaphor.
Joel Brooks:The next image that we have is that we become a holy temple. Look at verse 21 again, In whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit. So as we are joined to Christ, the cornerstone, as we are joined to Him, we actually become joined to one another and then we grow into the temple of God. A place where God himself will dwell.
Joel Brooks:Every Christian essentially becomes a stone. A stone that is locks together with every other Christian and and you're built into this place where the spirit of God will come and dwell. So now, once again, the image, you start off as strangers, then you're in the same city, then you're in the same home, and now you're actually being built into a home to which God will dwell. This is way more than just the intimacy of family. This is God in us.
Joel Brooks:Now, did you know that the early church the early church, the Romans didn't know how to classify them. So the Romans called them atheists. Is that interesting? The early church, they were called atheists. They were also called cannibals because they regularly ate the body and the blood of somebody.
Joel Brooks:They also were said to have come to, commit incest, because they were calling everybody brothers and sisters, even those they were married to. So the Romans didn't know what to do with this whole new group, But then they called them atheists, which is really confusing. But the reason they were called atheists is because they didn't fit into any existing religious structure that they had. Everybody who worships the gods, they would have at least these three things. First, they would make sacrifices, then they would at least have some form of priest, and then they would have a temple or places of worship.
Joel Brooks:But the Christians didn't have that. The Christians didn't have any sacrifices because they believed Jesus was the only sacrifice. The once and for all sacrifice. They didn't have any priests because they believe every member of the church is a priest. Every member has direct access to God now through the blood of Jesus.
Joel Brooks:They didn't have a temple where you had to go and do those things because they believed wherever the church gathered together, the church became the temple. The Roman empire didn't know how to classify us. People still don't, but we become the temple of God. Now this idea is not new. Paul's not writing about it here for the first time.
Joel Brooks:You you find this idea of us being the temple of God throughout the new testament. So you have 1st Corinthians 3, when Paul says, do you not know that you are a temple of the holy spirit? You have what we just read in 1st Peter chapter 2, that we are living stones being built up into a spiritual house. So these ideas are percolating all throughout the New Testament and in all of these places, except for 1, all of these places, except for 1st Corinthians 6, when when Paul or Peter, whoever is saying that you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that you is plural. He's saying you all or if he was southern y'all, y'all are the temple of the holy spirit.
Joel Brooks:In 1st Corinthians 6, he says, you are a temple of the Holy Spirit and he's talking about individuals. And yes, that is true that each one of us becomes a place where the Holy Spirit comes to dwell. But the great emphasis in the new testament is not on our individual being temples, but collectively, we become the temple of God. God's glory comes to abide in us just like it came to abide in the temple in the old testament. And so this is why you cannot have church in your car listening to praise music and then listening to a podcast.
Joel Brooks:That's not church. You can't have church while just hiking on the trail, just you and God. That's not church. It's when you gather together with other Christians. When you come together as these living stones, you become the temple of God and then he blows in your midst.
Joel Brooks:But hear me, it's more than just coming on a Sunday. It's more than just gathering here. He's not describing a heap of stones coming together like a pile of stones. You know, all of you are living stones and you just kind of congregate together and there's this giant heap of stones, pile of stones, and he says, that's the temple. That's not the temple.
Joel Brooks:That's not what he's describing here. Instead, there's there's we're being built. They're they're interlocking stones. There's a design to this. We're being joined together.
Joel Brooks:Verse 21, he says that we are joined together. Verse 22, he says we're being built together. And what he's describing is each one of us as stones. God is taking his putting here, then he's mortaring together your life with another. Then your life with another and another.
Joel Brooks:And he's building us all together as interlocking stones, creating the temple. So once again, do you see the progression in intimacy, now with one another? You went from strangers, to now living in the same city, now living in the same house. Now, you are so joined together, your lives are. It can only be described as you were built together into a house that now God himself dwells.
Joel Brooks:Is that what church is to you? But what Paul is saying here is that the closer you come to God, the closer you become to one another. And the closer you become to one another, the closer you become to God. You can't have one without the other. So being in close relationship to one another is absolutely necessary for you to know God.
Joel Brooks:You cannot know God alone. I can't think of anybody who illustrates this better than C. S. Lewis, as in most always. But in his book, The Four Loves, he has a chapter in there a little article in there on friendship, that really just just illustrates this beautifully.
Joel Brooks:Lewis was friends with a guy named Charles Williams and, Ronald Tolkien, who we know as JRR Tolkien. Together they formed the Inklings. That was their little group name, for their friendship. And they were just fantastic friends. They had deep friendship with one another.
Joel Brooks:And then Charles died. And so it was just Ronald and CS Lewis together now and Lewis is reflecting on that and he's trying to come up with some kind of silver lining from Charles's death. And he thought, well, I guess if there's any silver lining, it's this, at least I'll know Ronald better. I mean, at least I I now I have Ronald all to myself, and so our friendship will deepen and I'll know him more. But then he found as the weeks turned to months that he actually didn't know Ronald better.
Joel Brooks:He knew Ronald less. And so he was just thinking and pondering, why do I know Ronald less now that I have him all to myself? And so he wrote this. He said, in each of my friends, there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself, I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity.
Joel Brooks:I want other lights other than my own to show all his facets. And now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald and having him all to myself now that Charles is away, I actually have less of Ronald. I I don't care how great you are or great you think you are. You are not large enough to know God by yourself.
Joel Brooks:You're not large enough. You need to see how God is working in the lives of all these other people. So so if you are not in in a stage of suffering, you need to be able to look at somebody who is suffering and see how God is relating to them. And in seeing that relate relationship, you actually learn more about God. Seeing how God relates to each one of us individually actually teaches us so much about who He is and you cannot get that in a car through a podcast.
Joel Brooks:We have to be in relationship with one another. When you're alone and you're singing your heart out in your car, and that's great. And you're worshiping however you you want to worship there, and and and you're listening to the world's best sermon, hear this. You're not getting to know God more than you would apart from a relationship. You're knowing him less.
Joel Brooks:He's called you to be a part of a church. Now, to be mortared to somebody, to be interlocked with somebody means that you are so joined with them that their stability now depends upon you. And your stability now depends upon them because the structure is being built. And what it means is that if if you're absent, the structural integrity is at stake. Your absence leaves a gap, it leaves a hole.
Joel Brooks:People should feel it and you should feel it. The whole structure should suffer when you are gone. Is this your view of the church? Or does the church more resemble to you a heaping pile of random stones thrown together, in which you're always looking around and you're singing next to people you have no relationship with? Your lives are not intertwined with.
Joel Brooks:You're just gathered with on a Sunday. Is that what Paul has in mind for the church? Is that what Jesus gave his blood for? Next week, we are going to introduce 103 new members to our church. A 103 new members.
Joel Brooks:And what we do is something called covenant membership, in which we actually make a covenant together, that we're gonna live life with each other, that we're gonna encourage one another in the faith, that we're gonna try to do all these different things together. But we, actually, think the nature of the church implies a covenant, that we do covenant with one another. And so there are all these one another's you're gonna find in the Bible. There's over 70 one another's in the New Testament. Be kind to one another.
Joel Brooks:Love one another. Be tenderhearted to one another. Be patient with one another. Gentle with one another. Forgive one another.
Joel Brooks:You're gonna find all of these one anothers. That implies an incredibly close relationship. You don't have to be patient or to forgive one another when you could just leave the person. But if you're committed and there's a problem is, well, we gotta work through this. I've gotta be patient.
Joel Brooks:I've gotta be gentle. I've gotta be forgiving. As a matter of fact, the closest thing we have to all of these one another's, the closest thing that we have in our culture is this, wedding vows, in which the husband and wife pledge to be these things to one another. That's what the church most closely resembles. Once again, is that what the church is to you?
Joel Brooks:Is that how you think of church? Are are are you so interconnected with the lives of the people here that you would be missed? There would be a gaping hole in their life if you were absent. And if I could speak really direct here, I I don't know if there's ever been a generation that has talked more about wanting community and has sacrificed for it less. That's all you ever hear is, I wanna be a part of a community.
Joel Brooks:I need to be part of a community. I do this, but then you look at it, your entire life is being built, and all you do is put yourself in isolation. Community comes at a sacrifice. You do actually have to give up other things in order to give yourself to a community. But what I consistently hear is things like this.
Joel Brooks:You know, if it's whether it's sports or whatever, it's like, I gotta be there because I don't wanna let down my team. I don't wanna let down my coworkers. I don't wanna let down all these people. All these other things you've given yourself to. But what about the church?
Joel Brooks:I'm talking about far more than just attending on a Sunday. That's preaching to the choir here. Alright? Are you giving yourself to the church, because Christ literally gave His blood for this gift to you, to be a part of. Do you see the church is that glorious?
Joel Brooks:The blood of Jesus is the mortar, if you will, that links our lives together. And I would just ask, are you taking advantage of that? We remind ourselves of this at this table. We remind ourselves of the broken body and the blood of Jesus, the price that was necessary to give us this glorious gift of the church, to make us into a new race, to make us into a house where God dwells, and not only that, but to make us a place where God actually dwells in us. Pray with me.
Joel Brooks:Our father, we come to this table here so thankful for this glorious gift of the church. And I pray, Lord, that through your spirit, you would press into us just the beauty of this gift, that we would treasure this gift. We would take full advantage of what you have given us to the very cost of your son, Jesus. We remember him in this moment, And we pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.
