The Gift Of The Church Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

Not all the blessings God has in store for believers have to await eternity. In the here and now, He's provided the church where we can serve other believers for mutual encouragement and help. Today, why the local church is so vital for every Christian. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, give us a preview of today's gift for those who have been redeemed. Dave, the good news about the Church of Jesus Christ is simply this, that we are all baptized by the Holy Spirit into one body.

When we speak of the church, we are speaking of the body of Jesus Christ, his body on earth doing his work representing him, and churches, of course, exist throughout the entire world. But there is something that unites us, and that is the good news of the gospel and the witness of the Holy Spirit. As you listen to these messages, have you ever asked yourself the question, how can you listen to them again and again, share them with your friends? We are making this series of messages available to you. It's entitled, The Inheritance of the Redeemed. Now you need info, so here's what you can do.

Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Thank God for his church, his witness to the world. A woman in a church said these words, I am so lonely, I can hardly stand it. I want to be special to someone, but there is no one who cares about me.

I can't remember anyone touching me, smiling at me, or wanting to be with me. I feel so empty inside. Brothers and sisters today, God created us to belong. We're supposed to belong. And today, in this world of fractured families when we have so much individualism and so much brokenness, this sense of belonging is more important than ever. And God, through his word and through his creative power, has given us a vehicle, if I might call it that, by which there can be that sense of belonging, that sense of family, that sense of oneness for which we were created.

It is possible. This happens to be number five in a series of messages entitled The Inheritance of the Redeemed. That is to say that all of the blessings that come to us simply because we're believers, we inherit them. Today's blessing is one that you may not even have known about or thought about. It is the blessing that is oftentimes disregarded or not taken seriously. It is the blessing that sometimes seems to be so optional. And that is the blessing of the new creation that we call the church.

Now, the church's unity is very different than other kinds of unity, very different. You have, for example, that there are organizations today that bring people together because they have a common interest. Their interest may be photography.

Their interest may be music. Rebecca and I were in Colorado at a bread and breakfast where we have bed and breakfast, I should say, where we have some friends who run it. And a whole group of people came in and they were into fly fishing. When I heard that, I actually thought that they were fishing for flies. I thought, you know, we could – we used to be able to do that on the farm. And then I learned a little bit more about it. But somehow that did not really spark my interest.

So I'm not into fly fishing. But many people are. I mean, they were up early in the morning.

They were committed. And so you have these interest groups. You have interest groups of those who are perhaps interested in the same kind of entertainment, the same sports.

We all like skiing or we all like baseball. That's not the kind of creation that God created when we come to a church. That's not what it is. When we belong to the members of Jesus Christ, we actually share the very same life. Because these other interest groups don't necessarily – your commitment to them doesn't necessarily affect your view of sexuality, your view of marriage, your view of generosity and how you give to various causes.

It doesn't affect that. Whereas the life of God in the church affects us to the very core of our being, because metaphysically, that is to say beyond the physical, God created something brand new, just like he created the world's Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. You're a member of the body. You're a member of the family. You're a member of the temple, as we're going to be learning here in a few moments. And you inherit that when you receive Christ as Savior. What a wonderful thing to be in the church that belongs to God. Now, we sometimes have our differences, of course.

I heard about a man who didn't like the music. That was not here at Moody Church. That was another church.

And he came to his pastor and said, you know, if God were alive, he'd be shocked at what is happening in his church. Now I want you to take your Bibles and I want you to turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 13. What we're going to be doing is looking at three different images of the church and our place in that church and why the gift of unity and the gift is so very special.

First of all, we're looking at the gift of one body. Now, I'm in 1 Corinthians and actually I thought I was in 1 Corinthians and that's where I was supposed to go. Bill, is it in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians? All right, 1 Corinthians 12, 13, of course, page 939.

You'll notice what it says, 1 Corinthians chapter 12, verse 12. For just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit, we were all baptized into one body. Jews are Greek, slaves are free, and we are all made to drink of one spirit.

Let's just stop there. There's a lot of controversy that goes on about the baptism of the spirit. There are those who have said, you know, if you're baptized with the spirit, you'll speak in tongues, et cetera. Well, that is incorrect. There is no connection between the two. If we went into Acts chapter 2, I'd help you to understand why, but just take it that this is the clearest verse in the New Testament regarding what the baptism of the spirit does.

And what does it do? Jew, Gentile, bond, free, we are all made members of one body by the baptism of the Holy Spirit. What happened to you, whether you realized it or not when you believed on Jesus, whether you acted on it or not, you are a part of something much larger than you are, namely the body of Christ. Three characteristics of this body.

The first characteristic is simply this, that it has unity. I read it in verse 12, perhaps read it too quickly. For just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. Jesus Christ is the head of the body and we participate in his life.

You don't have a head severed from the body and the body continuing to live. We are actually living within and granted in this miracle of conversion, the very life of Jesus, the oneness of the body. And that's because of the unity that we need to understand that certainly the Holy Spirit connects us, but we have to connect with one another. Going to church is not optional.

It's not something that you simply decide to do if you don't. And then you don't like the church, so you don't attend. Years ago, I told you the true story about a man who was staying in the home of a doctor. And the doctor was on call, so he says, I have to go. He says, if you're hungry, open the fridge and whatever is there you can eat. And the man, the doctor was called away. The man opened the door of the refrigerator and there wrapped in a plastic bag was a human hand. The man telling the story, and I remember him telling it, said that after that he wasn't hungry anymore. Somehow the hunger just dissipated. What's wrong with a human hand?

I have two of them up here and I am now looking at both of them and I see them every single day. Human hands are beautiful, but when they are cut off from the body, they are repulsive. And there are some people who cut themselves off from the body. Now you can't extricate yourself from the body of Christ if you're a believer, but you can reject the body, the local church in such a way and you can become angry.

You can go your own way and you can try to manage your own darkness, but we need one another. The unity of the body. First characteristic of the body is there is unity.

Secondly, there is diversity. Verse 14 for the body does not consist of one member, but many if the foot should say, because I'm not a hand, I don't belong to the body. Well, how would we walk if the foot was upset with the fact that it was a foot and not a hand? And then that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, because I'm not an eye, I don't belong to the body. What if the ear should say, I don't belong to the body? What if the whole body were an eye?

Verse 17, what would you do? You'd prop it up on the couch and all that it could do all day is watch TV. If the whole body were an eye, can you imagine that? And then it says, if the whole body were an ear, what would it be?

Well, you shut off the TV and all that you can do is listen to the radio. What Paul is saying here very graphically is this, that we come to the church with differences. It is not just merely racial differences and political differences, but it has to do with gifting and aptitude. And if we had time, we'd explore this passage where it talks about various gifts that the Holy Spirit of God ministers. And what Paul is saying is, is that just because some gifts are more prominent than others, that doesn't mean that they are more important. And we must realize that we are called to these differences.

We are called to diversity. And that diversity exists within the church. It also, by the way, exists in marriages.

This past week, I was in Florida. I preached seven times this past week and a guy came up to me and he said, my wife and I can look at the same clock and still disagree as to what time it is. There are differences even in marriage.

I hope that that gets resolved, by the way, because there are some things couples should be able to agree on. But the point is that we are not the same and everyone connects some way within the body. And if you physically are unable to serve, you also are important to the body because you are giving other opportunities to people to serve you. In other words, the body must function despite its differences, its aptitudes and its gifting. There's unity, there's diversity. And there is also, you'll notice interdependence.

Now notice this. Verse 21, the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, nor again to the head or the feet, I have no need of you. You know, on the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. And on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty.

But the whole point is that the parts that we see, the parts that are exposed, the parts that are hidden, they are all absolutely necessary and interdependent on one another. If I were to stumble when I'm going down these stairs, if my feet were to stumble, my hands would reach out and try to save me and do all that they possibly can to mitigate the blow. By the way, I had a very serious fall a couple of months ago, fell backwards. My hands were unable to help me think of falling backward on concrete on your head.

Amazing. But I survived that with no permanent damage. At least that's what the doctors tell me for which I am grateful. But my hands, if I had fallen forward, they'd have said, look, we'll be smashed, but we have to protect the head. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we as a body of Christ acted that way? And we are willing to sacrifice for others and say, I'm putting myself out for this person over here, this weaker part of the body, this needy part of the body, because I am a part of the body. And Paul goes on to say, verse 26, if any member suffers, all suffer together for one member is honored, all rejoice together. And you rejoice as if their exaltation and blessing is your own. Can you imagine that if we were so free of sin that when we saw somebody with more money or more exaltation, we rejoiced as if it was our own. That's what the members of the body of Jesus Christ do. You get rid of all the petty stuff, all of the image building, all of the need to feel that you have to outdo someone because when one member is honored, you're honored.

When one member is going through a trial, you are there and you are participating. When I was about, oh, I guess maybe 18 or so, I was helping my father build something on the farm and I was hammering spikes. I mean, I'm talking to you about two by fours, if you know what those are, nailing them together with spikes that were probably three inches long or maybe longer. Well, this wasn't my cup of tea.

That kind of work was never my fastball, so to speak, but I was doing it. And as I was leaning over and hammering with all my might, I hit this finger, this finger. We didn't go to the doctor that day. We waited till the next day. But isn't it interesting that only my finger hurt, but that night all the parts of my body were awake to keep my hurting finger company. I never slept one wink that night. I could have said, well, you know, the finger is hurting, but my legs aren't, so let me sleep.

No. We're willing to stay up with people who are hurting even at great personal cost. That's the way the body is supposed to function. So the Apostle Paul says that there is a unity that comes about because of the baptism of the Holy Spirit and one image of the church is the body. There are other images, of course, and we're going to very briefly look at two others, and now we're turning to the book of Ephesians.

And in Ephesians, what we find in chapter two is the fact that the Apostle Paul talks about two other images of the body, and we'll see where this is going. The passage of scripture that was read to us comes from chapter two, and I'm just going to lift out a phrase or two. We are members of the same family. You'll notice he says we are members of the household of God in verse 19. The household of God.

We're members of the same family. And as the Apostle Paul develops this thought earlier in the text, if we had time to read it and to look at it more carefully, what we discover is that Paul says that he's taking Jew and Gentile who hated each other. Jew and Gentile, something like Arabs and Jews. Certainly we can think in terms of racial hatreds and racism, and we can pour all that into this text. And the Apostle Paul says very clearly that God has made us into one new man.

Boy, that impresses me. That's in the end of verse 14 and 15. He has created in himself one new man in place of the two. What that means is that in the reconciliation of the church, it is not that the Jews had to become Gentiles or the Gentiles had to become Jews. God says, I am building a transnational community that transcends all this and you don't have to become one or the other.

You stay who you are, but you are united in the body, in the family together, and I have created the new man. Which means that when we speak about racial reconciliation or other kinds of reconciliation, blacks don't have to become whites, whites don't have to become black, Asian don't have to become Latinos. We maintain all of that identity, but there is a fundamental family unity that transcends all of that.

And I love the phrase, read it last night. It says, God killed the hostility. The church of Jesus Christ should mirror the kind of unity and reconciliation that kills hostility between races, between the rich and the poor, between the educated and the uneducated, and that hostility has to be put to death. And Jesus says, I have already done that if you only accepted it and acted on it because you are members of the same family. He says by one spirit, we have access to the same father. We have the same father, God, we have the same brother, Jesus, and we have the same companion, the blessed Holy Spirit of God. So we are definitely unified in our relationships within the family.

And what we must do is to emphasize that. Now there's another figure of speech. We talked about one body.

Very briefly, I talked about one family. There's another figure of speech here that I want us to understand, and that is one temple. You'll notice it says in verse 19 of chapter two of Ephesians, so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and the members of God's household built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built together.

Do you see this text? You are being built together into a dwelling place for God. By the Spirit. Isn't it wonderful to contemplate the fact that in Jesus Christ, all believers are one? Now oftentimes throughout church history and even in our own day, we don't necessarily see that, do we? But underlining all of our differences is the fact that we belong to the one who purchased the church at high cost. I certainly hope that you attend a church. I hope that you attend a gospel preaching church. If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you belong within the body of Christ. Let me ask you this question.

As you listen to the ministry of Running to Win and this series of messages that has to do with predestination, the gift of the Holy Spirit, sonship, what does it mean to be a son or daughter of Jesus Christ? You may have missed some of the messages. Some of them you might like to hear again and again. Share them with your friends. Well, we are making this series available to you for a gift of any amount. The title of the series is The Inheritance of the Redeemed.

And here's what you can do. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Let me remind you that we are making these resources available to you in order to help you to live the Christian life, to be able to run all the way to the finish line as we like to say. And thank you so much for your prayers and for your support. I'm going to be giving you that contact info again so that these messages might be yours in permanent form. Here's what you do.

Go to RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. As we think of the ministry of running to win, I am reminded that we are a part of a larger family, a family of believers, and we exist here to serve you, to help you in whichever way we can, and thank you in advance for helping us. Together we are a part of the same body, the same church, for the glory of God.

You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. The Church Universal is a spiritual building. Each believer is a stone making up part of the structure. Next time on Running to Win, more about your part in the church founded by Christ. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.