Lawson Road CoC Teaching
Church Belonging to JESUS
This morning a prayer card you've written on, we'll collect those at this time and there's also a good opportunity if you missed picking up a communion cup on your way in and you can grab those either over here or out the back doors. There will be a chance later for additional prayer, if they come to mind as we go along. We are beginning a new sermon series this week and it'll run for a little while, I haven't got a final date on it but it'll be before Christmas. It's actually one that I did, let me see, back in 2010, so if it sounds familiar to you, but I thought it'd be good to go back over it and add to it, expand the ideas. It's an idea that I played around with over the years since then, at least in my head, that what does the "of" in the Church of Christ mean and how does that impact us? But we'll get into this as we go along. One of the first responsibilities of new parents is naming a child and there's all sorts of stories that go with naming children, it could be, there's one spouse, one parent that has that responsibility. It could be that it was, they weren't sure what the name was going to be until they got in the hospital, until they saw the baby. It could be, I've heard stories of the dad going down to wherever it is to fill in the form and spelling it wrong or making a mistake and then it's stuck with them for life. There's all sorts of stories and events and things that go with naming children and you might think, "Oh, well, it's a simple thing to do," but it has all sorts of layers of complexity that go with it. There's a lot to consider about the actual name and the starting point is usually the child's last name, that's the part in most cases, what's the last name going to be? But the sound and the length of the last name is going to influence the first name. And the subsequent names, how do they sound altogether or how do they look altogether? If the last name is something very long, I don't know, Higginbottom. Good English name there. Higginbottom, do you want a long name to begin with and then a long surname, a family name or do you want a short name, like how are you going to balance that? So there's a lot of different choices. There are things to consider, such as are we going to go with a traditional family name? So is there going to be a junior, a third, a fourth, are we going to go with that? Is the family name going to be the first name or the middle name? We're going to honor a grandparent, an uncle or whoever and which name are we going to do that with? Some families, I'd never heard of this before I came to the US, but some families, the names fit a theme, perhaps beginning with the letter J or ending in the letter A or whatever it might be. The children's names, if there's multiple children, have this theme that sort of connects them. For some people, it's important to have a biblical name, right? In my family, we have seven children and seven Bible names. I think if we had 12 boys, we would have had 12 apostles, so I'm just glad I was one of the early ones and wasn't Bartholomew or Thaddeus. I'm sorry Thaddeus. It's a great name. It just wouldn't have fitted my face. And so do we care what the names mean? Sometimes we had this as a question in our growth groups earlier this year, an icebreaker question. I was like, what does your name mean? Some people knew and some people didn't. I know some parents that they've spent a great deal of time and effort on getting the names to have a godly meaning, and that was very important for them. For others, that has no significance at all. For some, we might have to consider if I give my child a name that doesn't sound traditionally English, is that going to cause difficulties or barriers down the road? Does it matter how popular the name already is? Anyone have a name that just like every second person in your class at school had the same name? When I first came here, there were three marks and we sort of find we run in cycles of having people with the similar names. But that can be a factor, either you want that name because it's popular, or you don't want that name because it's popular. And so different couples will make different decisions. What about if the initials have an obscure meaning? Like I could imagine Ed calling naming his child Philip Alfred Robertson and the initials would be P-A-R, which is perfect for a golfer, right? Only because Bertie or Eagle would be too long. But is there some acronym in the initials that actually causes problems, right? You've got to be aware of that. And how many middle names should there be? Some families don't have any middle names. Some have two middle names instead of one. There's just nothing that's fixed about that. So lots of choices and decisions about naming this child. And that's on top of everything else that has to be done with the birth of a new baby. So we could probably have a debate, in other words, we open our Bibles, about the significance of names. In the Bible, though, names are very significant. I think it's important that God told Mary what the name of her child would be, right? As the father, he says, "This is the name that you're going to give." And so the name Jesus is significant, yeah? It wasn't Matthew, right? He said, "No, it's going to be Jesus." Many times we draw a connection between the name of our child and aspirations for our child. The best example I have of this is in different sports that I've played. We give people nicknames. I've played sports with people and I don't know their real name. I only know their nickname. There was one guy who played football with his name was Cow. I don't know why he was named Cow. You would think he's slow and clumsy. He was the best player on the team. I still have no -- I never found out what his real name was. They would put the teams in the newspaper and I would look down and I would see all the names to see who was going to play that weekend and I didn't know who the people were. Just look for my name. But if you're the coach, you might call -- you want someone to be aggressive, right? You might call them Tiger, mightn't you? Come on, Tiger. Let's go get him. And so we give names that say, "This is how I want you to live up to it." Or this is, you know, what the impression that we have of you. I think of the Johnny Cash famous song, "A Boy Called Sue," right? So if you're not familiar with it, the logic of this father naming his son Sue, okay, girl's name, was that he wasn't going to be around. The father was taking off and so he said, "I want my son to be strong. I want him to be independent to stand up for himself." The best way of doing that is to give him a name that will encourage other kids to pick on him and he's going to have to fight back. He's going to have to survive and get through. Now I don't know if that's effective or not, probably not, but that's the basis of the song. So I guess it worked. There's not just fictional stories that people end up with strange names for profound reasons. One of my favorite examples is the boxer George Foreman. He discovered at the age of 25 that his father was not his biological father. He was actually his stepfather and the family had kept it a secret from him all that time. You can imagine this had a pretty strong impact on George and his world was sort of rocked at that point in time. In turn, George Foreman had five sons of his own and he made the unusual decision to name each of his sons George Edward Foreman. In his autobiography, "God in my Corner," he explains why he did this. He says, "Because I wanted to give them something in common, a sense of identity so they would remember the family name. I told them when one George Edward Foreman does well, we all do well. But if one gets into trouble, our name goes down." So whatever you do now, you're not just doing it to yourself but to the entire family. That's a profound concept when it comes to naming. I got no idea what it was like when for the mum, when somebody's in trouble, somebody gets bad grades. Do they all get in trouble? They have nicknames. They must have differentiated somewhere. But that concept of all for one, one for all, and that was communicated by each of these five sons having exactly the same name. Identity is important. A healthy understanding of our identity helps us to find our place within our community and within our world. And so as I said at the start, we're going to take a few weeks to consider the implication of the named church Christ, the name that's on the sign at the front of our building. In the New Testament, the church doesn't really have a name. Has a lot of names or a lot of people refer to in a lot of different ways, but it doesn't have a specific name. A lot of times it's just called the church. And the word church means simply a gathering of people, a gathering of people. You can get the next slide there. It's not working for me, thanks. Back there, yep, there it is. So it's an assembly, a gathering of people. It's sort of, at the time of Jesus, it had reference to a political sort of gathering. But it took on this definition that was Christian. But even though we often say the church is the people, not the building, right? The actual use in English is not the same, as we often say. And so you can see here four other definitions on there. It refers to a group of Christians, and like as in the church at Lawson Road, okay? That's this group of people separate from the church at Southside or at Central or wherever. It also refers to a building. I mean, if you were to go through England or Germany and take a tour of old churches, okay? Would anybody think you're going to go to a Sunday morning assembly where everybody was over the age of 80, right? We say I'm going to tour old churches. Nobody thinks that I'm going to go and hang out with people, you know, closer to a hundred than to any other number. And so it refers to the buildings, and that's just how we use it in English. It can also refer to a service. How many of you came to church this morning? That refers not just to the gathering, to the assembly, but to what we're doing now. And so yeah, that's sort of all of those. So it's a word that has multiple meanings. But when we use it in Scripture, it's almost always referring to the people. And so I think that's why we emphasize that. Over time, as I said, it came to refer exclusively to Christians. But rather than churches having names, in Scripture we find that it's usually the church in a particular city, because there was only one. The reason churches have names today is because we want to differentiate ourselves from the group of people, groups of people down the road, okay? And we want to be able to say, this is where I go. We could just give a street address, but that's not particularly helpful necessarily. And so we have names on our buildings that help us differentiate from others. So in the first century, when Paul writes a letter to the church, the church in Ephesus, which church in Ephesus? Well, there was only one. So that was real simple, right? If there were five different sort of churches or sets of beliefs, Paul wouldn't have known what to do with that. He would have said, in fact, we see, like in the start of Corinthians, he says, some of you are following this person and that person and this person and that person said, what's going on? He would say, there should just be one church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in wherever. You may meet in different places. And the end of Romans sort of has that description there of churches that meet in different places around the city, but there was just one church, I said different churches, different groups of people around the city, but there was just one church in Rome. And so for us, we've come to describe a church of a particular city or a road or a site of the city. But then we also say we find references as we go through Scripture as the church that belongs to God or belongs to Christ. The body of Christ is used over 50 times in the New Testament, referring to the church. In Timothy we see it referred to as the house of God. So there are a lot of different descriptions. That's the only one that actually is a title is when it's called The Way. And so that though didn't really make a lot of traction, at least in the English churches. So given the way that God's single original church has divided into hundreds of different groups, it's impossible that every group can take a name from the Bible. I have heard people say, "Well, this is the right name," and it could be whatever church they have, and they say, "This is the right name," and therefore we know that we're in the right church. But if every other church said, "Oh, yeah, that's the right name," and they all adopted it, it would be chaos, wouldn't it? If the Methodist church down there changed its name to a church of Christ, and if the Presbyterian church down there changed its name to a church of Christ, and he said, "Oh, I'll go to the church of Christ on do we have?" It's like, "Which church of Christ?" It hasn't helped us, has it? And just because they've said, "Oh, you're right. You've got the correct name at the front, all it's done is create chaos," because those other churches are quite different, at least in their worship from ourselves. And so we find that we have all these different names that different groups of Christians have adopted, and so some of them are biblical, whether it be church of God, church of Christ, the house of God, whatever it may be, but some are not. The Lutheran church, the Methodist church, the Presbyterian church, they're named after different things, perhaps their style of government, or their style of worship, or whatever may come to their mind. The community church tells us that it wants to involve itself in the community. And so the names that are chosen tell us something about the church. We can drive through a town and we can see the names of the different churches, and generally we can know what's being taught or what's being practiced in those churches. We know a little bit about if we go through and we see a Lutheran church, we know something about what they believe. They're Methodist church, we know something about what they believe. We might be able if we see a free Methodist church, we can connect that, right, with Robert's Wesleyan, and we know that's the connection between those things. A united Methodist church is different, it's not connected to it. And so we make these associations, we know things about these churches. But what does Church of Christ tell us? Does our name contribute anything to our identity, or is it simply something that we plucked from the Bible? The description is used just once in the Bible in Romans chapter 16 and verse 16, where Paul uses it as a greeting, as he closes his letter. In fact, it's only in the plural there, the churches of Christ. And so that's what we've taken and adopted as our name, as the name on the sign. And so the main point that I want to draw from this name Church of Christ is that it's a description of possession. We can go forward a couple of slides, I don't know why this isn't working, thank you. So it's a description of possession. If I say, "I am a child of my parents," means two things, means that they're the source of me, okay? It also means that I belong to them, I'm connected to them. And so when we say the Church of Christ, it's a description of the Church as a possession. The Church belonging or belongs to Christ. And so we could also say the Church, we've got the Church of Christ, there could be Christ's Church, means the same thing. Church belonging to Christ, Church bought by Christ, Church redeemed by Christ. It is, the connection there is that Christ has ownership, if you will, of the Church. And I think that that's an important aspect of the name that perhaps we often overlook. I'm not sure that that's what we think of the most when we see the name. In 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 19 through 20, in the next slide I'll bring that up. Paul reminds the individual Christians in Corinth to be sexually pure, because they belong to God. You are not your own, you were bought with a price. And so here it's saying to the Christians, yeah, I know you want to be independent, right? I know you want to be autonomous, I know you want to make decisions for yourself. But he says, you need to keep in mind that you have been bought at a price. You are not your own. And therefore that's going to impact the way that you're going to live. You're going to honor God with your body. Individually I think that most of us can understand this. Jesus paid the price for my sin on the cross. He bought my forgiveness. And since the Church is a collection of individual Christians, it's also true that Jesus bought the Church. He died for the Church. In Acts chapter 20, in verse 28, Paul sort of fleshes this out in another context. He's saying, talking here to a group of elders, and if we go to the next slide. He says to these elders, he says, "Be shepherds of the Church of God." He shepherds of the Church of God, which he bought with his own blood. I think this is really interesting, A, because it's got a different title, right? It says Church of God, not Church of Christ. But what we see then is he says, "He bought with his own blood." And you're like, hang on, I thought Jesus was on the cross, not God. So what we see here is that Jesus and God are interchangeable, right? It demonstrates that, because it says he bought with his own blood. So God and Jesus are the same. The blood of Jesus on the cross was the blood of God on the cross. And he bought the Church. The Church now belongs to him, be shepherds of the Church of God, because he's bought it with his blood. It's not the Church of us, it's not the Church of the preacher, it's not the Church of the elders, or the elders' wives, or the deacons, or whoever it might be. It's the Church that belongs to God, because he's the one that bought it, that paid the price. Whichever way you look at it, the Church doesn't belong to us. And so all of this brings us back to our earlier reading from Ephesians chapter 4 verses 11 through 16. And at the end of that reading, in verses 15 and 16, the Church is described as forming the body of Christ. Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ. From him the whole body joined and held together by every supporting ligament grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work. So the head of the body is Christ. Now I know if you take the heart out of the body, the body will stop working, if you take the lungs out, there's different organs that are important to the body. But if you just chop a hand off, the body in most cases will continue to live. But you chop the head off and it won't. And so the head is what unites the body, what keeps it together, what makes the body grow and function and the head of the body, the Church, is Christ. And so this sort of gives us another image of what it means to belong to Christ, a healthy and mature Church grows to form a healthy body because it's connected to the head. The head guides the Church, guides the individuals as it grows. And it begins with speaking the truth in love. This is the environment in which this body grows. And then notice at the end here it says that together by every supporting ligament grows builds itself up in love. Okay, so we have this whole process of the body connected to the head and the growth and the existence of the body getting along with each other. It's surrounded by love and as each part does its work. So it's not a competition, right? It's not a competition to start at the feet and work our way up till we get to be the head, okay? We can't do that. If we're a kneecap, we're a kneecap, you know? If we're a hand, we're a hand and the only head is Christ. And so the head, if we just think of how our bodies function, the head is what tells our hands how to move, right? It tells our feet to take steps that it controls what the body does. And so if we think of the Church as a body, that we're a part of it, but we belong to Christ. Our actions are determined by our relationship with Christ. We're going to explore this more in future weeks as we get into it. And so I want to just leave you with a very simple concept that I'd like you to think about throughout this week. Think about the name Church of Christ. But think about it as the Church belonging to Christ, okay? So I belong to the Church that belongs to Christ, if you will. We can go to the next slide. And so this week, think about what that means to you. What does it mean for the Church to belong to Christ? Does it impact your life in a meaningful way? Because here's the thing, it's not just about what do I need to do? What do I need to change? What's different because I've got this concept of belonging to Christ, or the Church belonging to Christ? That's maybe part of it as we explore it in the coming weeks, but as we get started, I think this is the significant point for us to leave with. You and I are part of a Church that belongs to Jesus. Another way of saying it is you and I belong to Jesus. And that can put expectations, or maybe we feel constricted, or whatever, but it can also be tremendously comforting, right? That whatever else is going on in the world, whatever things happen to us, whatever problems we run into, whatever people say about us, we belong to Jesus. And nothing that happens on the outside of us impacts or changes that relationship. That's set in stone. You and I, not only does the Church belong to Jesus, but you and I belong to Jesus. And I hope that's a point of comfort and reassurance for you. I want to just express that maybe you're here today and you're saying, "I don't know about this belonging to Jesus." I don't really know what that means or how it happens. And so if you want to explore that further, if you want to say, "Yeah, I need Jesus in my corner," then talk to me, talk to someone else here that you know and trust, and would love to have that conversation with you. What does it mean for people to belong to Jesus, and how do we make that happen? [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]