The Mystery and Mission of the Church

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. There's one problem of man and it supersedes race, religion, gender, education, and even political persuasion and that problem is sin and the solution to that problem is the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ who did for all of us what none of us could do for ourselves. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian J.D.

Greer. I'm your host Molly Mitovich. Okay, raise your hand if you've ever tried investigating your family tree. It seems like everyone wants to know who they are and where they come from these days, so it's no surprise that ancestry testing is so popular right now, but does our family tree really define who we are?

Can we truly find out what we should be doing just by having this information in our pocket? I think we'd agree the answer is no, but pastor J.D. addresses that question head on today as he continues our teaching series called Mystery and Clarity. He's helping us understand our true identity and our purpose in a message he titled The Mystery and Mission of the Church. So grab your Bible and let's get started. Paul makes this turn in Ephesians 2 11 where he starts talking about the church. This passage begins, the very first word is therefore, therefore, and that is very significant because therefore connects what he is about to say with what he has just said. In other words, he's not just randomly bringing up the church, he's saying the incredible experience of salvation that he's just described in Ephesians 1 and 2 will lead you to involvement in the church if you really get it. All right, so if you have your Bibles, and I hope you do, open them up to Ephesians chapter 2 and we're going to begin in verse 11.

Ephesians 2 verse 11. Now while you're turning there, this passage I will acknowledge freely before you is very challenging for most Americans because sociologists who study spirituality in America say a couple of things are true about us as Americans. The first thing is that there is enormous spiritual hunger in America. In fact, that's kind of at an all-time high in our country right now. Second thing they say though is at the same time there is a move away from institutional religion. All right, so a high desire for spirituality but a move away from institutional religion. 81% of Americans answered yes to this question. Do you believe that you can be a very good Christian without attending a church?

81% of Americans said yes. So here's the way I would state the question to you. Can God be powerfully at work in your life apart from being a part of Christ's body, the church? You ready for this? This is the most politically incorrect statement of the day. The answer in the New Testament consistently and without exception is resoundingly no.

No, you cannot. Now I know some of you say, well why are you talking to us? We're the good guys. We're here right now.

Yeah, I know. I know you guys are here but many of you that are here are not here if you know what I mean. You're still on the sidelines. The joke that I use every single starting point that we do which is that event where people that are starting to get connected to the church, that's the first place they go, starting point. The joke that I use every time is that that the church in many ways is a lot like a UNC football game.

UNC football game you got 22 guys in desperate need of rest surrounded by 22,000 people in desperate need of exercise. And that's the church. Of the 4,000 or so that come to church here on a weekend, only about one third, excuse me, one half of you are connected in a small group. Whether through one of our small groups or some other group, doesn't matter, but only about a half of you are are connected in that way. Only about a third of you are involved in some kind of intentional ministry.

Now by the way, that's not all bad I realize. It's because we got a lot of new people here and they're just you that are new. I want you to feel like you can take your time and checking things out before you get involved, especially if you're new to Christianity. I don't want you to feel rushed. I want you to, like a friend of mine says, I want you to feel like you can sit and soak for a while. I'm telling you, some of you are starting to get waterlogged.

You start to get that prune look about you that you get if you've been in the bathtub too long. Some of you've been here so long you're starting to mold. If you have been a Christian, excuse me, if you are a Christian and you have been here for six months or more and you still don't know anybody except for that greener that you sort of know that greets you every time you come in, hands you a worship guy, if that's the only person you really know, and if you are still not connected or involved in anything, we need to send you back to Toyota because you are a factory defect. Something's stuck on you, right?

Something's stuck on you, something's not working. So what we're going to do is we're going to read this passage where Paul talks about the nature and the purpose of the church and then we're going to try to answer four questions. Here they are. First question is why we should be involved in the church. The second question is how involved we should be in the church. Then the third question is what the mission of the church is and then number four, what the implications of that are for you.

All right, you ready? First thing we're going to do is we're just going to work right through this passage. So beginning in verse 11, here we go. Therefore, therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, you were separated from Christ and you were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. You're like commonwealth, what's Virginia got to do with this? And what's the commonwealth anyway?

My wife is from Virginia and I'm always like why can't you be a state like everybody else? All right, I don't know, but don't get caught up on that word. The important thing is, not the word commonwealth, the important thing is what it says in verse 12, that to be separated from Israel was to be separated from Christ.

You see that? See how it says separated from Christ, alienated from Israel. God revealed himself first to and through the nation of Israel and so if you were separated from Israel, you were separated from Christ. The other nations didn't know God and if they wanted to know God, they had to become Jews and to enter the nation of Israel. You Ephesians, Paul says, and you Americans for that matter, you were part of those separated alien nations. You were, verse 12, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Now this is crucial to everything Paul is about to tell them. Paul is reminding them that they were people who were outsiders with no hope and this perspective was to form how they think about all of their relationships.

So since it is so important, could we stop and just reflect on that for a minute about us also? When the gospel was first preached, I want you to think about this, when the gospel was first preached and this book, Ephesians, was written, our people, our ancestors, unless you were Jewish, Greek, or Italian, our people, our ancestors were about the farthest people from God that you could imagine and sometimes we forget that. When Jesus and the apostles talked about taking the gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth, they were talking about us. The civilized Roman world had a name for us called us the barbarians. When Jesus gave the great commission, our great-great-grandparents were swinging from trees with their faces painted blue and clubbing each other with wooden mallets. That's what our ancestors were doing. Our society was like one big Cameron indoor stadium, all right, complete with, you know, crazy towel guy and cheering fans in their speedos.

That was us. In fact, I found this website where you can type in your name and it tells you what you would have been called in barbarian, what you would have been called in England 2,000 years ago. My name means beastly drinker of blood. Veronica's name means the dragon whisperer.

I kid you not. That was us. We were barbarians and we were outsiders and that has enormous implications for how we relate to each other, which I'm going to get to here in a minute. But before I get to that, I want you just to reflect on this because one of the things that I most desire for you, especially you students, is for you to embrace the global focus of the gospel. There's a scholar named Philip Jenkins who has coined the term the new global south to refer to those new regions of the world where Christianity is most flourishing today, specifically South America, Africa, and parts of China and India, the new global south.

I just finished a book by Mark Knoll called The New Shape of World Christianity. Knoll says, and listen very closely to this, he says, in 1900, over 80% of the world Christian population was Caucasian and over 70% of the world Christian population resided in Europe, 2009, when he wrote the book. There are more practicing Christians in Africa than in all European countries combined. On any given Sunday there are more Christians in church in Kenya than in Canada. There are more believers worshiping together in Nagaland than in Norway. Uganda has more Anglicans than Britain, Canada, and the United States combined.

The same is true for Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. This past Sunday there were more Presbyterians at church in Ghana than in Scotland. Brazil now sends more overseas missionaries than does Britain or Canada. In 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China. But it is estimated that today, this Sunday, the number of practicing Christians in China is equal to the number in the United States.

The largest church in Korea has more people present for a single worship service than are at Canada's 10 largest megachurches combined. And the looming explosion of Christians is in the Muslim world where two-thirds of all unreached peoples now live. People like to say, oh Christianity is a Western thing that Americans shouldn't try to oppose on everybody.

Get real. Christianity is not a Western thing. It has never been a Western thing. If anything, it's a Middle Eastern thing that has come to the West and it's now headed around the world and it's not going to stop until it's finished.

I love how Bob Roberts says this. He says, Christianity began as a Jewish movement to God. It will conclude as a Muslim movement to Jesus. The Gospel is a global thing. It is for all peoples of all times in all places in the world.

Let's keep reading here. Verse 13. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in the flesh, in his flesh, the dividing wall of hostility. These verses acknowledge something that we all know is true and that is that our world is very divided and there is real hostility between various peoples.

We're probably more aware of that now than ever. Samuel Huntington wrote a classic book a few years ago called The Clash of Civilizations in which he talks about this coming world crisis as civilizations are being thrust together and hostilities are being pushed to the surface. Paul acknowledges that there are dividing walls of hostility between peoples. The Jews had a literal wall on the outside of the temple with a little sign on it that said no Gentiles and a little warning that said if they pass beyond this sign they had nobody but themselves to blame for their death. That wall separated in the Jewish mind the good from the bad, the clean from the unclean.

And by the way, don't just think that's a Jewish issue. All cultures have walls. Every culture has a way of defining itself with walls and those inside the walls are basically good and those outside the walls are basically bad. I have traveled around the world in the last 20 or so years, I think the number, I've been in like 34 different countries in the last 20 years including living in one country in Southeast Asia for two years, and I've never been in a culture, I say this without hesitation, I have never been in a culture, including our own, that did not see themselves as implicitly better in some ways than everybody else.

Why is that? Why is that true of just about every culture in the world or every culture in the world? Psychologists tell us that there is something fundamental to human nature where we're always trying to lift ourselves up above others. It goes back to an insecurity that we feel before God. We think that if we're better than others then that makes us valuable as people.

So we find things about ourselves or our group that set us apart from others. Our race is just better. We're smarter. We're better athletes. We show more courage in battle. We're more generous. We've built a better country or we've been more successful. We're just better people. Our families are stronger. We treat our women better. And then we place around our culture this imaginary wall that distinguishes us and makes us feel like we're better than those who are on the outside.

And by the way, don't just limit that to issues of race. We find things about ourselves individually that set us apart from everybody else. Do you make a certain amount of money? Well, in your mind that kind of puts a wall around you and that makes you better than people who don't make as much money than you. And so you're part of an elite society who makes a certain kind of income. You made a certain score in the SAT and got into a certain school.

And that means you're part of an insider group. And people on the outside of that group who couldn't get in that school or didn't make that in the SAT, they're kind of inferior. In high school you rank yourself by how athletic or how good-looking you are.

You go into a high school lunchroom, it's like all the various groups are sitting together with a little wall, imaginary wall around them. You got your jocks and your dorks and your hot girls, right? And then you got your dorky jockish girls.

And then you got all these places and every group, it's almost like you can see there's a little wall around them that says we're better, right? I mean, the dorks say we're smarter. That makes us better. The jocks say, well, we're better-looking and we're better athletes. We sleep with more girls.

And that makes us better. Every group has got something that sets them apart. For many of you, the most defining wall to you is your political persuasion. It's the people who agree with you that are the good and educated people. And you look with hostility on everybody else outside that wall.

If you don't believe that, just watch Keith Olbermann or Sean Hannity or The View and watch how they talk about people who disagree with them politically. You getting this? Walls of hostility. Christ, Paul says, tore down those walls by giving us a whole new way of understanding inside and outside. Verse 14, for he himself, Paul says, is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.

How? By abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. The walls of hostility got torn down between Christians because the work of Jesus shows us that humanity has a common problem, sin, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. Remember Ephesians 2, we are dead. We were dead in our sin and there's no degrees of dead.

Yes, I have seen the Princess Bride, right? But there's no such thing as nearly dead. There's one problem of man and it supersedes race, religion, gender, education, and even political persuasion. And that problem is sin and the solution to that problem is the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ who did for all of us what none of us could do for ourselves. None of us were on the inside, Paul says.

We were all on the outside. Sin's curse on us means that there are no good people and bad people. There's no winners and losers.

There's no people who have it together and dysfunctional people. There's only bad, dead, dysfunctional losers who desperately need the salvation of Jesus. And Jesus' blood cleanses us all alike. And furthermore, when Jesus rose from the dead, see this verse 15? He created in his resurrection, get this, a whole new race of humanity.

See how it says verse 15? He created in himself one new man out of the two. In other words, Jesus was born as a Jew, but he was not raised as a Jew or a Gentile or some combo of the two, like a Jew-tile or whatever. He was raised as a completely new man.

Get this, he started a third race. Listen, this is radical what I'm about to tell you. That means if you are in Christ, your identity is not primarily as a white man or a black man or a Hispanic. You are a new race of man in Christ. Your identity is not primarily as an American or an Asian or a Hispanic. I know those things are important, but they're all secondary distinctions.

You're a whole new third race. And Paul says if you understood that, the hostilities would die away. Why? Well, because A, it shatters pride. There's nothing in your past that should make you feel better than others or nothing that should make you feel inferior to others.

And it gives you something in common with other believers that is so fundamental to who you are that it supersedes everything else in your life. A few years ago, I took a mission trip over to Malaysia. I was speaking at a college student conference there.

I'm college students from all over Malaysia and parts of China. And I spoke four nights in a row. After the first talk, a couple of girls approached me originally from China. And we had this conversation, and I noticed this girl, one girl, she was just asking the most incredibly insightful questions. She was not a believer, said this is one of her first exposures to Christianity, but she was so curious about it. And we probably an hour after each session, I sat with him and just walked them through some things. On the third night, she puts her faith in Christ.

It was awesome. She comes to Christ and she just wept and it was beautiful. On the fourth day, I'm sitting somewhere and one of these girls comes up and talks to me. She says, you probably don't know this and you probably don't realize this, but that girl, the one that came to Christ last night, she's considered royalty in our country. I was like, well, why? She said, because she's a 65th generation direct descendant of Confucius. That's her family lineage. She is like a, she's like a princess. That explained all the really hard questions she was asking.

Yeah. And so I talked to this girl later and I said, they call her Christine. I said, Christine, do you realize that there's something true about you that's not true about many people? And that is you are a blood descendant of two very important people.

One was Confucius and the other is Jesus Christ. You have the blood of both of them in your body. And she said, she got a thought back. She goes, I've never thought about that.

She said, that's pretty interesting. She said, but you know, now that I know that Jesus' blood is what defines me, now that I know that I have His blood, the fact that I'm a blood descendant of Confucius doesn't really matter to me that much anymore. See what happens when you realize, watch this, when you realize that your primary identity is something that Christ gave you, something His blood provided for you, all the other distinctions, they're still there, but they just aren't that important anymore. The gospel does not mean that I cease to be white or that you cease to be black or that somehow I have to start acting like I'm from some other culture. I mean, that would be a disaster, right?

I mean, think M&M, right? It means that more important to me than being American or being white is the fact that I am bought by and raised in Jesus. In Christ, we have something larger in common than our racial identities and cultural preferences. We have Jesus. He gives us our true identity. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor and author, J.D.

Greer. As always, you can listen again or download the unedited transcript for further study by visiting jdgreer.com. So J.D., I might guess that Ephesians is one of your favorite books in the Bible based on how frequently it comes up in your teaching. So why are you so drawn to this book of the Bible? Yeah, you're right. I do return to it every few years. In fact, I was kind of hoping people wouldn't notice.

So thank you for letting that cat out of the bag, Molly. One of the reasons I do that though is because Ephesians is so carefully structured. Paul writes it a bit differently than some of his other letters. Romans might be the most impressive of Paul's letters, but Ephesians is eloquent.

It's almost poetic. The clear division of the letter into two halves, right at the end of chapter three. Four verse one starts a whole new section and each section is almost equal in length. It shows you, it gives you a picture of the Christian life. Chapters one through three are doctrine. It's your gospel identity.

Chapters four through six are practical. It's what difference it makes and what you do as a result of who you are. We usually determine who we are by what we do. What Ephesians shows you is what you do grows out of who you are, who God has made you.

That very pattern alone, Molly, makes this a great book to walk through in a study. So not just listening to the message, but actually pressing deeper into the verses. You'll want this Bible study resource that we've created for you. It'll help you take the book of Ephesians a little more slowly and make sure that you are getting out of its verses, the promises that God wants you to have. You can grab your copy right now today. Just go to jdbrair.com. Each session actually includes a new component for our resources, scripture memory.

So you'll want to take advantage of that for sure. You'll find great commentary, interactive study questions, personal application points, and a prayer guide. You can request your copy today of this new Bible study working through the book of Ephesians. We'll send you a copy when you donate to support this ministry at the suggested level of $25 or more. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or give and request the book online at jdbrair.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Join us tomorrow as Pastor J.D. Greer reveals that, in a sense, Christians are kind of like Lego bricks.

We can only accomplish our mission when we're working together. That's Thursday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.