Week 2 I am the church

Paul is reminding the believers in Ephesus that they are the real temple of God, that is the church.  This is Christ’s body; each congregation is a local manifestation of this heavenly entity, not a part of it. So although the apostle is writing about the one body which is in heaven, all that he says applies also to each local congregation, for it is here that the unity of the body is visible.  The citizen of Ephesus that I made up before thought his identity and purpose came from being a part of that grand temple made by human hands.  He thought that just being a part of the temple and its system made him special. He never even dreamed of knowing this god or being known by this god.  This temple gave him bragging rights but did not fix the emptiness inside.  It did not fix that fact that he ached from loneliness and he felt guilty and dead on the inside.  Maybe he knew somehow that temple was false, just a big show on the outside. But Paul wanted these Christians to understand that they were different. That this new thing called the church , it was really the new humanity called the body of Christ.  He wanted them to grasp that they represented the one hope and faith that is found in the gospel, that is the Jesus is our only hope and salvation and gives us access to God through the Holy Spirit.  This is how he expressed it in Eph. 2: 15b

“His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, ¹⁶and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. ¹⁷He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. ¹⁸For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

¹⁹Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, ²⁰built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. ²¹In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. ²²And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

We have been invited into the body of Christ, to be His holy dwelling place and we have this hope! Hope that God will reconcile all things to Himself.  He is faithful. Hebrews 3:6 says, “But Christ is faithful as a son over God’s house. And we are his house, if we hold on to our courage and the hope of which we boast.”

For some of us today, we are living in the reality of this hope. We know that we are in the body of Christ and we share this unity with all those in Christ.  For some of us, this is a harder thing to grasp.  We have been left out in some way; we have not really believed this for ourselves; the scriptures that describe the church seem to apply to others and not us; or we somehow lost our sense of belonging because of sin or shame.  Tonight, we want to help your mind be transformed by the truth of God’s word.

Here are some truths from Ephesians:

• We are alive with Christ- even though you used to be dead in your sins
• We are seated with Christ in the heavenly realms
• We are God’s workmanship- created in Jesus to glorify Him through our good works
• We are the ‘new man’ or ‘new humanity’ and have peace with each other in this new body
• We are fellow citizens, member’s of God’s household, built on the foundation that is Jesus, His holy temple- the new dwelling place of God by His Spirit.

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