The Gift Of The Church Part 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. The Church is more than brick and mortar. The Church universal is a spiritual building the Bible calls a temple. Each believer is a stone, making up a part of the walls and structure. Today, more about your part in the Church founded by Christ.

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, if believers abandon local Church involvement, they cut themselves off from vital support from fellow Christians. Dave, the answer to your question is certainly yes, they do cut themselves off from a very vital aspect of the Christian life. As a matter of fact, your question is as relevant as my lunch yesterday when I met with a man who told me he no longer goes to Church but sits in his pajamas with a cup of coffee and goes to Church online. Now, all of us know that during the COVID crisis, that oftentimes happened and we thank God for technology that enabled us to continue to remain connected despite the devastating loss and all that took place during that period of time. However, it is time for believers to recognize that that is not the ideal. We should be physically present with other believers in Church. I've written a book entitled The Inheritance of the Redeemed, claiming the spiritual treasures that are yours in Christ. I wrote that book so that people might understand the connectedness of the body, but more than that, all the blessings or at least most of the blessings that oftentimes are overlooked in the Christian life. I think that this resource will certainly be of help to you. For a gift of any amount, it can be yours. Here's what you do.

Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Let us never forget that Jesus Christ gave his life for the Church. 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. The imagery of the temple.

The simple fact is that God has decided to go into the quarry of sin. Do you remember how Solomon's temple was built? The Bible says that Solomon's temple was built without any noise at the temple site because they quarried the stones far away.

All of the noise took place there and then they were brought together and they fit perfectly, which is truly amazing. If you've ever been to Israel, you know how impressed you are with the fact that all of these buildings, I mean, if you see Herodian stones, stones of Herod that are beveled together and they were weighed 20 tons, you wonder how they did this, but all of the stones were brought together and they all fit together. And the imagery that the apostle Paul has, Peter says that we are living stones is simply this, that God goes into the quarry of sin. And he digs for himself and chisels for himself some stones. And he goes into every country of the world, every racial bit of diversity, every strata of rich and poor, every kind of aptitude and gifting. God goes into that quarry, he chisels out the stones, he chooses them, he brings them together and they rub together so that they become smooth.

And that's why God made us very different. And he brings us together because he is building a temple. And this temple is very special because it is being built by an architect whose name is God. And it's going to be a very famous temple because some buildings are famous because of who lives in them. Rebecca and I have been to England a couple of times and I remember being and standing at the gate there at Buckingham Palace.

It's so famous because of the person who lives there. If you come with us on the tour to the sites of the Protestant Reformation, we will be in the Wartburg Castle. And, you know, we go through the castle, we see all of the things that existed in the 12th and 13th century.

But everybody is anxious to get to a certain room because that's a room where Martin Luther lived for 10 months where he translated the New Testament into German. Where supposedly he threw an inkwell at the devil. By the way, I don't think he did. I think that he said in his table talks, I fought the devil with ink. If you want to fight the devil, you don't throw an inkwell at him. There isn't a demon in the world that says, woo, did you see that?

I just missed it. You fight him with ink. You give people the Bible. Now that does not hinder tour guides from sometimes rubbing some soot on the side of the wall and say, well, that's where the inkwell landed. My friend, why do we want to get to that room? Because a famous person was there. He occupied it and something important happened there. The reason that the church of God is so incredibly important is, did you notice the text? We are being built together for a habitation of God. God dwells within his church and the various stones from all parts of the world and here at the Moody Church where we have people from more than 70 different countries of origin. We come together and we fellowship together.

Why? Because this is where God dwells. Oh, you say he dwells within us. Yes, he dwells within us. But there is no substitute for the fact that when people are gathered together in worship as a church in the name of Jesus, God shows up and says, I dwell with these people. Genesis chapter three, he walked with the people. You get to the book of Exodus, you find out that he wants to dwell with the people. He wants to live with his people. He wants to live among us. Now, I've given you these three images because we are the representatives of Jesus Christ on earth, by the way.

Very interesting. Have you ever read this in Acts chapter one? In Acts chapter one, it says, the former treatise have I written to you, O Theophilus, Luke wrote this, O Theophilus, in all that God, Jesus rather began to do and to teach. He wrote the gospel of Luke. That's where Jesus began to do and to teach his work. But obviously what Luke says is, and then he commissions his apostles, we are the continuation of Jesus Christ on earth.

I'm not bragging, I'm only telling you the truth. We are Jesus on earth. I think, for example, that church in Berlin, which I've been to many times, which was smashed during the war, the image of Jesus was smashed, the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. And when it was put together, they couldn't find the arm. And so today it is a statue of Jesus without the arm as a representative of the fact that we are his arms. We do his work on earth.

Now, all of these images are wonderful, but how do we apply them? This is God's gift, the connectedness of the church. You know, it's possible during the series of messages, when I talk about the various gifts that are given to the church, to simply listen and then not to open your gift, not to apply it.

That certainly is possible all the way through. To tell a somewhat embarrassing story about Rebecca and me, you know, one Christmas we were receiving so many Christmas cards that we put them in a basket. And we opened many of them, but there were some we didn't open because we said to ourselves, we don't have time right now.

You know, we're going to wait a couple of days and then we're going to open the rest. Well, we didn't do that. So the next Christmas, we come across some unopened Christmas cards. Well, that was manageable. One of the little problems with it is that one of the cards had a hundred dollar check written out to us. Not sure exactly how we handled it. You know, I mean, you don't phone up and say, hey, I got your check.

Finally. I think we just ignored it, hoping that her bank would cover for her and tell her that the check was never cashed. But that's the way we can be. God gives us all of these checks. He gives us all of these blessings and we can hear about them and we never opened them. Now, if we are the body of Jesus Christ, if we are his family, if we are his habitation, his temple, who are we in the world? Where is our strength? What I'd like to do is to suggest to you where our strength lies as a church at this moment of great need here in the United States of America.

I think first of all, our strength lies in our basic unity and understanding that unity and with that unity, loyalty and commitment to the local body of Jesus Christ. I hope that you understand that. You know, there are people who look at the church as a gasoline station. You know, you drive up your car Sunday morning, you get it filled and then you leave and you pay as little as you possibly can for the gasoline. And we all like the fact that gasoline prices are falling. And wouldn't it be wonderful, you know, you're listening to the radio, you know, there's a cheap gas over here and this station sells it for this.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if they said, and by the way, if you go down the street another two miles, the station is giving it away free. Everybody would be there. And some people look at the church like that. We can come, we can be filled, we can enjoy the music, we can learn from the sermon, we don't have to make any commitment and it's all free and we make no commitment either by our gifts, our talents or our money and we just come every week to be filled up. That is not the way the church is intended to function. Everyone making a contribution, everyone loyal. Now pastors, senior pastors sometimes come and go.

I'm treading very carefully here for the next few moments. And you're a member of the family. That doesn't mean that you jettison the family because there's some service station down the road that has a higher octane. What you do is you stay committed to the church because your loyalty is very important. As a matter of fact, the Bible says this in the book of Colossians that you cannot enter into all that God has for you. If you look at the church as a filling station, it says that your hearts may be knit together in love to reach all the riches of the full assurance of the understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery.

Did you notice that unless your hearts are knit together in love, you cannot enter into everything that God has planned for you. And that's why we have TMC communities. That's why we have small groups. That's why we have because the loneliness and the sense of alienation, you can't live the Christian life on your own. You need the body of Jesus Christ and to become a part of it in a meaningful way. So our strength, I think, is really dependent on our unity. I think also our strength is dependent upon our purity.

And here I'm thinking of two different kinds of purity. First of all, doctrinal purity and how we thank God for the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached here. And even in evangelical circles today, the gospel is being left behind. It's got all kinds of substitutes for the gospel. May it be that Moody Church ever and ever until the coming of the Lord always leads with a redemptive message to a broken world, the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is our most precious possession. So on the one hand, I'm talking about doctrinal purity, but I'm also speaking about moral purity. Part of my grief is that we are absorbing our values from the world and not from the texts of scripture, not from the fellowship of the saints, not from the word of God. I just think of how far the church has gone and oftentimes how far the church has gone down throughout the years and how we are so accepting of things that years ago would have never been accepted by the church. And the moral impurity, like termites in a building, weakens our witness. And that actually is the third strength that we have and that is the witness of the body of Jesus Christ. A study was done to find out why people don't witness.

Why don't they share the gospel with their neighbors, with their friends, and so forth? And it was very interesting. It wasn't because they didn't have the right knowledge. Many of them even took courses on witnessing but didn't witness.

Why? Almost in each instance, it was because of unconquered sin, unconquered sin. Therefore, as their consciences bothered them because of their own weakness and their own failure, possibly even their own addictions, how are you going to commend Jesus to somebody if he's not delivering you? Do you understand why it's so important for the church to humble itself to seek God? That we might see victories and even as we sang this morning, that we might see the kind of revival whereby we hear stories of deliverance and help and freedom. And when it comes to the witness of the church, we have to do it in two ways.

First of all, what we need to do is to do it by our works. You know, Bishop Sam Wheel, who died in a hail of gunfire when Anwar Sadat was assassinated in Egypt in the 80s, told a friend of mine, he said, the way in which Christianity won North Africa is because of the kindness of the Christians. You know, in those days, there were plagues and the pagans just threw the bodies away, burned them. And the Christians took them and washed them and gave them a decent burial, arguing that because of the resurrection, even the wicked have a right to a decent burial. And then babies in those days were discarded. If you didn't want a baby, they didn't have abortion like we do today.

You just leave it in the back alley and let it cry itself to death. But the church organized baby runs and picked up all these abandoned children and brought them all to nursing mothers who accepted them as if they were their own. And the pagans said, where's all this love coming from?

The pagans began to say, tell me about your Jesus. My friend today, the world can out entertain us. They can outnumber us.

They can out finance us, but let it never be said that they can out love us because we have the blessed Holy Spirit of God in our hearts. And we take a stand against certain things, as you know, but in our personal relationships, we are always loving, accepting, humble, broken, and welcoming to the people of Chicago, but also to the people in our own lives. So what we must do is to understand that at the end of the day, we approach life with a very redemptive message. Yesterday I was speaking in Palm Beach at a memorial service. It was a very interesting memorial service where I had the opportunity of preaching the gospel. And I concluded with this story, which I will summarize. And that is speaking of the gospel, here I am on a plane and I'm meeting a young man by the name of Joshua, maybe 40 something, obviously successful. I said, tell me your story.

That's always important. Always ask people their story. Everybody has a story. The addict has a story. The atheist has a story. The religious fanatic has a story. Democrats have their story. Republicans have their story. Everybody has a story. Listen to people's stories. It's one of the best ways to witness.

Okay. Brought up in a church, harsh judgmental father. He becomes of age, throws it all away, goes into atheism for awhile.

Now he was into Buddhism. It's the old story of I hate my dad. I hate his God.

I hate his church. He had two problems. The first problem was the intellectual one. Why Jesus and not Buddha.

Now that was easy for me to answer. I won't go into my answer, but you know, of course that Jesus is a savior and Buddha isn't. Buddha claimed enlightenment, but he never had the nerve to say, I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but you'll have the light of life.

Jesus has all the credentials of saviorhood that nobody else has. So we could dispense with that. The other was the anger, the anger against the church, the anger against his father. That's difficult. And I may be speaking to some of you here and that's your issue. You know, the church betrayed you because God knows we're members of the same body of the same family, the same temple, but we are filled with struggles with sin, shortcomings, and we are a lot less than God would want us to be. We humbly confess that we are so far from perfect that sometimes it's embarrassing. Would you today overcome that barrier and say, I am going to receive Christ and not let my bitter experience about the church stand in the way of my redemption?

Be tragic if you allowed your bitterness to be the barrier. The verse I gave to this young man whom I give to you today, the same verse, come on to me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you.

My yoke is easy. My burden is light. Come to Jesus Christ outstretched arms. Tell him you are tired of managing your darkness and you come to him for light, for life and salvation. The end of the day, it's all about Jesus and at the end of the day, we scatter after today in high rises, in banks, in hospitals, in offices.

Why? We represent Jesus wherever we are. That's why we're here, his representatives on earth. Father, we pray that you might help us to understand that when you created the body, when you created the new man, and when you are creating this temple, that those are your gifts to us.

Help us to live them out wherever you've planted us. O Lord Jesus, come to invigorate us and to help us to delight in the gospel that saves sinners. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. Yes, my friend, sometimes I've been asked, why doesn't God take us directly to heaven after we receive Christ as Savior? Well, the obvious answer is because he still has work for us to do on earth. And that work is strengthened through ministry within the church, benefiting from the church's blessings, its corporate worship, its corporate prayers, connections between believers. You know, even as you think about this weekend, I hope that you have a church in mind that you have your church that you attend, and I hope that you will be a faithful member. I've written a book entitled The Inheritance of the Redeemed, claiming the spiritual treasures that are yours in Christ. Let me ask you a question. Would you trade places with the angel Gabriel? Well, before you answer yes, think of this. Gabriel will never be an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ. We will be above the angels, and this book emphasizes the blessings that are ours in Christ.

For a gift of any amount, it can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com, or call us at 1-888-218-9337, rtwoffer.com, or 1-888-218-9337, the title of the book, The Inheritance of the Redeemed.

You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 N. LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. We are sometimes tempted to take shortcuts from God's path. We can be glad that Jesus stands before the Father as our mediator, praying for His own, that we might be able to persevere. Next time, the gift of an intercessor. Thanks for listening. For Dr. Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.