The Mother of God’s Children

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind… Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Tuesday, and we hear Dr. R.C.

Sproul's humor in making a very strong point. Does he mean that you have to belong to a church to be a Christian? Some might say the Bible doesn't make that claim, but indeed there is a clear scriptural basis for being an active member in the body of Christ. In our first session in this series on the church, we began by asking the question, who loves the church? And then as we spoke to that theme, we looked further at a definition of the church. We looked at the Greek word for church in the New Testament and the etymological derivation of our English word church, and then from there we moved to begin to look at some of the metaphors or images that the Bible uses to describe the church. And the first one, of course, was the image of the bride of Christ. Well, I think the image that the New Testament uses for the church that is perhaps more widely known than any other is the one that the Apostle Paul uses in his correspondence to the Corinthians and to the Ephesians, congregation, and elsewhere, where he refers to the church as the body of Christ. You heard the town in Texas, Corpus Christi, which simply literally means the body of Christ. Well, that idea of the churches being the body of Christ is a concept that in one hand is very simple in the New Testament, but yet when we begin to probe its significance and turn over the layers of meaning that the Apostle invests in it, we see that indeed it becomes a profound and profoundly important idea for us.

Before, however, I probe the concept itself. Let me refresh your memories with a quotation from the great Saint Augustine, unarguably the greatest theologian of the first millennium of church history. Augustine has a famous quote that goes like this. He who does not have the church as his mother does not have God as his father. Let me say it again, that he who does not have the church as his mother does not have God as his father. Now for shorthand's sake, let me just skip lightly over this dimension in a moment that there has been a host of difficult theological controversies down through church history in an effort to interpret precisely and completely what Saint Augustine meant by that phrase.

The Roman Catholic Church appeals to it in one sense. Protestant churches appeal to that famous statement in another sense. But I want to leave those considerations aside and get at least to the simple core of what Augustine was driving at when he said, if you don't have the church as your mother, you don't have God as your father. Well, we could look at that simply to mean that just as it's necessary for us to have a human mother to be born into the human family, so a person cannot be born into the kingdom of God unless it's the church who gives birth.

But that's not the way I'm understanding that at this point here. I'm not anticipating a view of the church that sees the church as the institution that saves you or that saves me. Christ is the one who redeems you, and it's the Holy Spirit who begets your soul into newness of life. Now the church acts as a midwife in many cases for the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments and so on. But another crucial function of a mother in this world is the function of nurture. The mother not only bears the child, but the mother nourishes and nurtures the child.

In our culture traditionally the mother cares for and nurtures the father disciplines. Well, when we see this image of the church as the body of Christ, we see in that image one of the most important elements of it being the nurturing ministry of the church to its members. Just as an infant desperately needs the nourishment provided by its mother, so we as infants in the kingdom of God, spiritual babes, desperately require the means of grace which are focused and concentrated in the church. Now I'm aware, and I'm sure you're aware, that we're living in a time where there has been widespread negative reaction against all traditional institutions, a rebellion against schools, a rebellion against parents, a rebellion against politicians.

Virtually every authority structure in our society and in our culture has been leveled by negative criticism. I remember in the sixties we saw a strange phenomenon in America with the Jesus movement where people called themselves, quote, Jesus freaks. And they established on many occasions what was called then the underground church.

And so often that idea of an underground church was a thinly veiled protest against the aboveground church, against the visible institutional or what we call the, quote, organized church. And again, I've heard it many, many times repeated by people who say, look, I'm a Christian, I'm a religious person, but I am not a member of any institutional church. I don't need to be a member of an institutional church. I worship privately.

My religion is personal and private, and I don't need to go to church to have a personal relationship with God. Have you heard that? Maybe you've even said it. If you say that, it is possible that you are a Christian.

It's possible that I can shoot sixty-three in the golf course too, but it's not very likely. Why do I say that? Because when we look at the pages of the New Testament, even a cursory reading of the Scriptures tells us that when Christ redeems an individual, He never leaves that individual in isolation, though redemption is not a group activity. Karl Barth once said that we're members of many different groups. We're members of a family. We're members of a school. We're members of a community. We may be members of a club. We're members of a state.

We're members of a nation. In the final analysis, when you stand before Almighty God, you stand alone. Your brother, your sister, your mother, your father, your friends, your club, your nations, your church's faith will not avail you when you stand before God. God will deal with you as an individual, and it's as an individual that you enter into the kingdom of God.

But don't confuse that with individualism. Again, when Jesus redeems the individual, He places them in a group, and He calls that group, beloved, His own body. Now how in the world can a person love Christ and hate His own body?

How can a person embrace Christ for any period of time and continuously absent himself from fellowship and involvement with the company of God's people, the family of God? That's another image in the Bible, the Laos Theou, the family of God. We know that when babies are born, if once they are delivered, they are simply set on the table in the delivery room, and if they're given no nourishment, no water, no food, they will quickly die.

And yet modern studies have indicated that if they are given food and water but no human companionship, no fellowship, even though they have all of the physical nutrients necessary to maintain life, they will perish. Well again, let's look now then at this image, the body of Christ. For those who find it unpleasant to think of the church as an organization, you think of a body not so much as an organization as an organism. An organism is something that is alive. It's vital. It can move.

It's exciting. It's not inert or lifeless or inanimate. When we talk about that body, we're not talking about a corpse, but a living, vital thing. And people usually respond to that idea of the body of Christ. Yes, they want to be part of a group that's exciting, that's alive, that's vital, and so on.

It's the organizational part of it that turns them off. Let me just direct your attention for a moment to Paul's discussion of this concept of the body of Christ that he gives in his first letter to the Corinthians. He says in chapter 12, verse 12, For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body being many are one body, so also is Christ.

For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, and so on. For in fact the body is not one member, but many. If the foot should say because I am not a hand, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body? And he goes on, he says, If the ear should say because I am not an eye, I am not part of the body, is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?

Boy, could you see wonderfully, huh? If all you were were an intricately constructed, magnificently sculptured eye. Imagine being married to someone that was 6 feet 5 inches of eye, and all it ever did was look at you. I mean, what kind of a relationship can you have with an eye?

Or is a pose you traded that in for a 6-foot 4-inch ear. You could talk to it, but it couldn't see you, and it couldn't talk back. It couldn't touch you and hold you and love you. Yet how important are our ears to us? How much do we value our eyes? But the eye can't say to the ear, I don't need you. The ear can't say to the eye, I don't need you. The eye can't say, I'm not a part of the body.

What's the point? I mean, this is so elementary that the Apostle Paul is speaking here, but an elementariness that I think carries with it profundity. But he says the church is like a human body. It is an organism. But beloved, if you know anything about biology, anything about living organisms, you know that the one absolutely necessary precondition for an organism to remain alive is that it stay organized.

You find an organism that is disorganized, and you have found an organism that is dying. And Paul here is talking organically about the church. But God composed the body, He said, having given greater honor to that part which lacks it, that there be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another, so that if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it, or if one member is honored, all members rejoice with it.

Oh, what a magnificent model. Have you ever seen anybody honored in the church? Has anybody been honored in your work environment or in your school or wherever you are?

When you saw somebody else honored, did you ever feel a pang of envy or jealousy? Christ said, when the body is working together, when one member suffers, everybody suffers. When one part is honored, everybody rejoices, because the individuals never lose their individuality.

They don't lose their distinctive characteristics. You don't submerge your personality into an organization when you join the church. You retain your individuality, but that individuality makes its own contribution to the whole.

That's what he's saying, and that we all need each other. You know, we have a tendency that, the context that Paul is using here is he's talking about spiritual gifts. The thing that provoked the letter and the thing that provokes three chapters of it, at least here, is that people in the Corinthian community were fussing and fighting about whose gifts were most important and whose gifts were the greatest. Well, I speak in tongues. Well, I have the gift of prophecy.

Well, I can do this, and I can do that, and they're starting to have factions based upon pride. I'm an eye. I can see. I'm a mouth. I can talk. I'm an ear. I can hear. Paul says, so what? You know, what good is the hearing if you can't speak?

What good is the speaking if you can't see? And the thing that I think has been missed so deeply in this day is what I read briefly when he says the same Spirit who redeemed you pours out His gifts on every member in the body of Christ. Every person has a supernatural endowment from God as a part of the body of Christ, and the body to be healthy needs your gift, whatever it is.

For the body to be complete, it needs you. Martin Luther spoke in the 16th century about the priesthood of all believers, and many of us are familiar with the concept or at least the words, but there's great misunderstanding that associates with that. What Luther meant by the priesthood of all believers is not that that's an end of clergy. He wasn't trying to do away with preachers.

All right? But what was he saying? The concept of the priesthood of all believers is that the ministry of Christ, the priestly ministry of Christ is not given exclusively to the clergy, that the mission and the ministry is given to every person in the church to play their part. We are all responsible for the ministry of the body of Christ. Well, you may do evangelism, you may do administration, and you may not be called to be an evangelist and he may not be called to be an administrator, but you in your evangelism are to support his administration and he in his administration is to support him in his evangelism.

But we have a tendency because of our human pride to exalt our own gifts, but that's not the way it works. I should be doing everything in my power as a theologian to assist and support the work of evangelism and the work of ministering to the poor and to the work of administration because we need that and that all of us are called into this task. Now there is a concept that has been linked with this idea of the body of Christ and that is the church has been called in some circles as the continuing incarnation. That is since the body of Jesus refers to his physical nature, to his human nature, the human manifestation of the second person of the Trinity, and now the human body of Jesus has been removed from the world by ascending into heaven and being seated at the right hand of God. Now the incarnation continues through the church.

I have ambivalent feelings about that concept. On the one hand I can say with Luther that yes, the church, the people of God are to be Christ to their neighbor. You are to put flesh and blood on Jesus to your neighbor, Luther says. Not in the sense that you actually become Christ, of course not, but as his ambassador you may be the only thing that person sees to learn anything of Jesus.

You are his presence as his ambassador to your neighbor. Or we can say that the church continues the incarnation in the sense that the church continues in this world some of the ministry of Christ. But where this becomes exceedingly dangerous, and I believe heretical, is when we think that the church continues the redemptive atoning work of Jesus as some have assumed. Paul says for example in his letter to the Colossians where he says that he is suffering in his body and that he is filling up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ through his own suffering. Some have jumped on that text and say, not only does Jesus perform a redemptive work of satisfying the demands of God's law with his suffering and with his passion, but we can add to the merit of Jesus' suffering through our own suffering as we continue the incarnation. No, no, no, my friends, when Paul said that he fills up what is lacking, he didn't mean to suggest for a second that there was any deficiency in the merit of Christ. But rather there is a history and a mission and a task that Christ gives to the church. And in so far as we are in Christ and He is in us, we as His people must be willing to and inevitably shall to some degree or another participate in His suffering.

We will participate in His dishonor, in His humiliation, not meritoriously, but as His witnesses, for we are the body of Christ. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul with a message titled, The Mother of God's Children.

We're glad you've joined us today for Renewing Your Mind as we continue R.C. 's series on the church. It's called Communion of Saints.

You have more than likely heard someone say that you don't need to belong to a church to be a Christian. Today's message evaluated that statement from a biblical perspective. It also reveals how far the church has drifted from its biblical roots. And that's why we want to get today's resource offer into your hands. Dr. Robert Godfrey is a Ligonier teaching fellow, and he also taught a series on this important topic. It's called The Necessity of Reforming the Church.

Dr. Godfrey is also a noted church historian, and that's evident as he explains important periods of Reformation in the church. We'll send you the six messages on one DVD when you contact us today with your gift of any amount. Let me give you our phone number. It's 800-435-4343.

You can call us, or you can go online to make your request at renewingyourmind.org. Church history is just one of the many topics we address here on Renewing Your Mind. We also cover apologetics, biblical studies, philosophy, ethics, theology, and personal holiness. Dr. Sproul was serious about seeing the historic Christian faith advance around the world, and that's why we're thankful for your generous donation of any amount. The church is the only institution that I know of that absolutely requires that you be a sinner to be a member. So you might expect the church fathers in describing the church to call it the one unholy Catholic and apostolic church. But no, the fathers called it holy. That's a preview of Dr. Sproul's message tomorrow, and we hope you'll join us for Renewing Your Mind.