e e for good morning and welcome all. Thank you for being here for our third Kirkin of the Tartans in this Century at least. Okay, this m comes down a little bit please. Okay, how about there we go that’s a little bit better.
So just to want to have go over a few announcements. Thank you to everybody who came out to help with the rummage sale. It was another successful sale bringing in $3,600, $3,655, so thank you for all the hard work getting things set up, getting things sold, and bringing stuff on in. Although I was told we had several carloads that took stuff on to Volunteers of America. So if you know you missed something, if there’s something there that you missed buying that you wanted, you can go over there and pick it up now.
Now, also thank you to everybody who helped decorate the sanctuary and set up the downstairs for us this morning because after service we will be having our Scottish social downstairs. We are also having a group of Irish dancers who are going to be performing as well down there, so please come on downstairs after the service. There’s coffee, tea, specialty coffees, all sorts of goodies that, you know, were probably made with a lot of butter because they’re shortbread. You know, butter and sugar, those are the primary ingredients, so it’s all really good stuff. So come on downstairs.
Third, we do have Joy in the Morning this coming Tuesday, right? Yep, making sure we’ll be meeting down in Westminster as usual. I have one more announcement, but before I get to that are there any other announcements from the floor?
Seeing none, yeah there is a different or new ministry in Christmas charity that we are helping to serve this year. It is Angel Tree. This is the program that’s put out by Prison Fellowship, Chuck Colson’s group. And so, Mark if you’ll please play the video.
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C [Music] [Music] [Music] Lord, so the way this program works is we have a tree set up in the narthex presently with little paper angels on with the names of several of these children as well as gift suggestions of stuff that they are asking for. The way it works on the inside, looking at from the prison standpoint, the inmates actually get the opportunity to ask Prison Fellowship to do this on behalf of their family.
So this is not something that is unexpected to them. We have already gone ahead and ordered Bibles for each of the children so they will be getting that as part of their gifts from the congregation. Once the date comes on in when everything’s here, we’ll be actually having a party for them to come to receive their Christmas presents here from us. And then, you know, as a way for us to minister to them, to meet them, and to engage them, and hopefully even invite them to join us for church.
But this is a very impactful kind of ministry that is very beneficial both to those who are incarcerated and to their families. So if you would like more information, please talk to Jen B or go ahead and just pick up one of the angels off the tree. Are there any other announcements?
Seeing none, then let’s go and stand and pass the Peace of Christ for [Music].
e [Music] [Music]
As we begin to find our [Music] seats, please join me with a responsive call to worship:
Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in.
Who is this King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O gates, and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in.
Who is this King of Glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of Glory.
And the people came up after him, and the people piped with pipes and rejoiced with great joy, so that the earth rent with the sound of [Music].
e [Music] for [Music] for [Music] [Music]
e [Music] Please stand as we sing hymn number three, Holy, Holy, Holy.
[Music] Holy [Music] Holy [Music] Hly glor [Music] [Music]
The [Music] [Music]
h [Music] [Music] [Music] GL [Music] God in three persons, blessed [Music] TR holy and awesome Father; God, we gather together as your church to worship you, to praise you, and bless your holy name.
We are enjoying now a time of fellowship with you as we long for and look forward to when we’re all gathered together around your throne singing your praises with all the saints who have come before us and all those who will come after us.
Lift our hearts with the cherubim and the seraphim. Help us to bend our knee in worship and reverence to you and to you alone because you alone are worthy. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
You may be seated.
The Apostle John writes:
This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.
If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not tell the truth.
But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned, we make him to be a liar, and his word is not in us.
Please join me with our corporate prayer of confession:
Gracious and loving Father, we turn to you as our only hope and comfort in this life. You are the source and giver of all light, separating us from the darkness.
Teach us to always walk in your ways. Help us to be honest with ourselves, with one another, and with you in confessing our sins.
Humble us so that we may ask for forgiveness and so that we will give forgiveness when it is asked of us.
Forgive us whenever we fail to do as you command. Cleanse us of all unrighteousness, we pray.
Give us the strength and courage to stand before all the world in your light of Truth. Let us always be faithful witnesses to the world concerning your son Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.
Please take a few moments now to offer your own silent prayers and confessions.
[Music]
My little children, these things write I unto you that you sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
This is the good news of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, our sins are forgiven. Amen.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Please be seated as we now continue our worship through returning to the Lord our tithes, our gifts, and our [Music] offerings.
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
For [Music] bless pra all [Music] creatures, praise him above the heavenly praise: Father, Son, and Holy [Music] Ghost.
You, O Lord, are our Father. You are the one who have given us life. You have given us every blessing that we presently enjoy.
Help us and teach us to be a blessing to others. Take our gifts that we give because you are such a good giver, that we give and return to you.
Give us wisdom. Help us to be good stewards with our talents and our financial gifts and use them for your service and building your kingdom in this world.
We love you and praise you, and it’s in your holy name we pray this, amen.
You may be seated.
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I [Music] [Music] to [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all [Music] [Music]
for [Music] [Music] h [Music] [Music] the [Music]
And the kids can come join me down here, even those who weren’t singing.
Well, good morning. So, as oftentimes I have a question for you, but it’s not the usual question. My question today is: what is the church?
Caleb?
Um, it’s the place where we worship and believe in God.
It is a place that we go and worship and believe in God. It’s God’s house.
What if I told you you’re wrong? You’re right, but you’re wrong. Church is not a building. Yes, church is a place that we come to, and this is a church, but church is really people.
We are the church. You all believe that? Y’all out there believe that?
I think you probably heard that a time or two, and so that’s something we find helpful for us to remember because when we know that we are the church, we know that we are united in Christ, that we are connected to every other person who believes and loves Jesus.
It also means that Jesus, that you can know that Jesus is always with you. Jesus does not live and stay in this building or in every other church building. He is always with his people.
You know, we don’t have to go anywhere to worship him on Sunday, but we get to gather together as the body of the church to worship.
But we can worship Jesus any time and any place. This gives us comfort to know that when we pray, when we’re scared, or at any other time, that Jesus is there with us because we are part of the church, and we are connected with everybody of the church from times past and will be connected with every person in the church in times future.
So this is meant to be a comfort for us because as the church we’re all family, and family love one another, and we also work to love others as well because we were brought into this family because Jesus loves us, and Jesus loves each and every one of you and each and every one of y’all out there as well.
So remember that love of Jesus. Remember that he’s always going to be with you wherever you go. And remember that it’s our privilege to get to come to church on Sunday because wherever we go, we are the church.
Let’s pray.
Father God, we thank you for the gift of your son Jesus. We thank you for the gift of your family, the church that you have called us into. Help us to share the love that we feel and that we know with others so that we can see your church grow as you bring them in and join us in fellowship with you.
We love you and praise you, and in Jesus’ name, amen.
Alright, y’all can go to do all the fun activities that Miss Jen has for you this [Music] morning.
Please pray with me.
Lord Father, we are your loved children of adoption. We are the children you have chosen, not the ones you have begat. We are those that you have called into your family because of your great love for us.
Help us to love you and one another in return as you love us. Help us to see and appreciate your grace and mercy that you have given to us.
Help us to recognize the privilege that we have truly to gather together to worship you every week with our family, our brothers and sisters in Jesus.
Help us to think about those when we gather who do not get to gather as we do, who have to huddle in the dark in places that are hidden because they are fearful of what the world might do to them.
Help us to remember them in our prayers and help us to pray that they would be strengthened and filled with your Spirit and given courage to go out and face the world, to be the church that you have called us to be, and to love as they are loved, even to the point of giving their lives for one another.
Help us to do our part to help them. Help us to remember and be thankful for all the saints who have gone before us who have given their lives as a witness, a testimony to your love and your grace, and as a testimony to your truth for us to follow.
Give us the courage to stand as witnesses wherever we are and wherever we go to proclaim your truth both with our words and by how we live.
Give us the courage to stand for what is right and good and honorable because it is what you have called us to do.
We pray this in the name of Jesus, who taught us to pray by praying:
Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Our next hymn is number 694: The Lord is my [Music] [Music] shepherd.
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I [Music]
Please turn with me in your Bibles to the Book of Genesis, beginning at chapter 12.
Now the Lord said to Abram,
‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the Earth shall be blessed.’
So Abram went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran.
Then we turn to chapter 17, beginning at verse one.
When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly.’
Then Abram fell on his face, and God said to him, ‘Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.
No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.
I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you.
And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you.
And I will give to you and your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.’
And God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarah your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name.
I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.’
Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, ‘Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’
And Abraham said to God, ‘Oh that Ishmael might live before you.’
God said, ‘No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac.
I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.
As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation; but I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year.’
From there we turn to Paul’s letter to the Romans chapter 9.
Paul writes, ‘I am speaking the truth in Christ; I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.
For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.
To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named.
This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.
For this is what the promise said: About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.
And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls.
She was told, ‘The older shall serve the younger.’ As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion,’ so that it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Father, you have given us your word. You have brought us into relationship with you, calling us out from the world and giving us a promised inheritance. Strengthen our faith and encourage us to live for you.
Help us to trust your promises until we do receive the fullness. We pray this all in Jesus’ name, amen.
So when you ask a person, ‘What is the church?’ you’re certain to receive a wide variety of answers. As we saw from the kids, some people will answer that the church is a building, a place for worship, God’s house, or even they’ll call it an organization.
Other people will respond quite differently and say that church is not a building but a people, God’s people, or even that we are the church.
So really what is the church? Both of those groups of answers are each a little bit right and a little bit wrong.
Recently, my wife and I watched an older movie where the family patriarch was lampooned for saying, ‘Give me any word and I will tell you how it comes from the Greek.’
Now, while this character went to great lengths to stretch every word and create some kind of vague connection to a Greek word, church actually is a word that we can trace back to the Greek.
The word church is an English rendition of the Scots word ‘Kirk,’ which itself was a rendition of the German word ‘Kir,’ which was originally sourced from the Greek ‘kurion,’ a term meaning the Lord’s House.
So yes, group number one is correct: the church is a building and a place, or at least a kind of building and place when we apply the Christian interpretation to it.
Although this may shock you a little bit, the church—the church, this kind of church—is never ever mentioned in the Bible. It’s not.
If you start flipping through your copy of the English Bible, you will find the word church printed many times, yet church never translates ‘kurion’ because that is a word which never appears in scripture.
However, the word that we do translate as church is the Greek word ‘eklesia.’ It’s a compound word consisting of the prefix ‘e,’ meaning out or from, and a root word ‘kalo,’ meaning to call together.
They literally mean the called-out ones, and the term is used by the New Testament writers to describe the sacred assembly of Christian believers.
Today we apply so many ideas and understandings to the word ‘church’ that it may have actually become a poor word to use in our Bible translations, causing us to risk reading our modern interpretations and understandings into the text of scripture and adding thoughts or concepts which were never held by the New Testament believer.
They understood ‘eklesia’ as a community, a body of people, a group of individuals united by shared faith in Jesus Christ, sharing in a positive fellowship, known as ‘koinonia’ with the Lord God.
But instead of asking, ‘What is the church?’ there are two fundamentally better and more appropriate questions for us to ask: ‘Who is the church?’ and ‘Why is the church?’
Which today’s texts do help us to answer.
Who is the church? The church—Capital C Church—is comprised of all of God’s chosen people, whoever was, are, and will ever be gathered together under and into Jesus Christ as her head.
The church has existed from almost the very beginning, since the sixth day of creation when the Lord created man in his own image.
In the image of God, he created him male and female; he created them. See, God called Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, out from nonexistence and spoke them into existence.
He created them and brought them into ‘koinonia’ with him as his perfectly chosen ‘eklesia.’
Why is the church? The church has been given a divine purpose from the very beginning. Adam and Eve were given a job. God told them that they had a duty to perform, a duty for which they were created.
And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’
The church was created to exercise dominion and rule over creation on the Lord’s behalf as His image bearers under His authority and to minister to creation.
But when Adam sinned, he shattered our original relationship of ‘koinonia’ with God, and our purpose was not removed. Instead, it just became that much more difficult to fulfill because of our sinfulness.
Yet even after man’s original fellowship with God was damaged by our fall, an expression of the ‘eklesia’ continued through the line of Adam’s third son, Seth, down to Noah. And after the flood, it continued from Noah on through the line of Shem until the time of Abram—or Abraham—when it was first significantly expanded and transformed.
Who is the church? When Abram was 75 years young, the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.’
Just as God had first called Adam into existence, he now called Abram out from his native country.
God called Abram out from his father’s house, calling him away from his extended family of uncles, cousins, brothers, and nephews and nieces.
Why is the church? God called Abram—Abraham—out for a great purpose, saying, ‘And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
Abraham’s first purpose was to receive the blessings of God and his promises on behalf of the ‘eklesia’ of God.
Yet his second, far greater purpose was to be the means by which all the families, peoples, and nations would one day become blessed.
That when Abraham was 99 again, the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly.’
First called to be the recipient of God’s promise, God then further explained, ‘And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.’
Explaining Abraham’s representative headship as he received this covenantal promise for his offspring, his legal heirs, God told him, ‘Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.
No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.’
So it was for this coming multitude of nations that Abraham received the covenant, and it would be through the application of this covenant that all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
What was the covenant that Abraham received for himself and his future heirs, the ‘eklesia’?
The covenant of grace: the Lord’s promise to be God to you and to your offspring after you and to give you and your offspring the land of your sojournings, the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.
See, God bound himself with an unbreakable promise to Abraham—to be Abraham’s God and the God of all of his inheritors—that God would adopt them as his own chosen people and that God would give them an eternal, everlasting home.
What God really promised Abraham was a relationship—a relationship restored to how it was in the beginning, to how it was always intended to be: ‘koinonia’ between God and His ‘eklesia.’
This was all promised to Abraham by the Lord’s own willful sovereign grace and not because of anything that Abraham had ever done, nor because of anything that Abraham or his descendants would ever do.
This was a gift of pure grace. All that was necessary to receive it was to believe in the Lord and to trust that the Lord is faithful and that he will always keep his own freely given promises.
Who is the church? By God’s grace, the Lord continued to expand his ‘eklesia’ through Abraham’s descendants, yet he also clearly limited membership in it to only Abraham’s sons.
God said, ‘No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac.
I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.’
See, the Lord sovereignly declared that Isaac, the as-yet-unborn and unconceived younger son from Abraham’s elderly wife Sarah, would be Abraham’s heir and not the older son Ishmael, born to Sarah’s servant Hagar.
God chose who would next inherit his divine blessing and providence that he had given to Abraham, just as God first chose for Abraham to receive it.
Isaac was so chosen by God before he was born, before he could do anything to deserve the Lord’s favor or before he could do anything which would have caused him, or should have caused him, to lose God’s favor.
Now the rest of their story in Genesis would go on to show how both Isaac came to trust in the Lord and his promises and how Ishmael, while he may have had some trust in the Lord, did not trust in him alone, instead relying upon his own strength and becoming actually an oppressor against his kinsman.
Clearly, only one of these men’s families were called out for the Lord, and the other was not.
Who is the church? Some 1800 years later, we’re introduced to Abraham’s ultimate heir, his greatest descendant: Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord’s Christ, the only begotten Son of God.
Now, no one here should be surprised to learn that the Apostle Paul had an answer to the question of who is the church, but it’s not as simple as we would hope.
Paul devotes a lot of ink to answering many questions about the church in his letter to the Romans—questions like: who is a part of the church? Who’s not a part of the church? How does somebody made a part of the church? What do the people in the church do?
However, despite writing so much about the ‘eklesia,’ it’s not actually until the 16th chapter that he ever uses the word. But it’s here in chapter nine that he best defines the people that are brought into, called into the ‘eklesia’ of God.
He begins with the Jews, but he seems to suggest that they, as an assembled body of people in ‘eklesia,’ have now been unelected and deselected by the Lord, saying despairingly, ‘For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.’
He wished and wanted to trade his own sure state of salvation for them, almost wishing that he would not enjoy the Lord’s blessing at the price of his people being sured.
Paul defines here who his people are—the first-century Jews—and what he believes should be their rightful inheritance.
They’re Israelites, natural and spiritual descendants of Jacob, Isaac’s son and heir, called Israel. They are people defined by the Lord’s great work of deliverance and earthly redemption from bondage when he rescued their ancestors and saw them also from slavery when the Lord passed over every household in the land who believed Moses and trusted the Lord to deliver them from his divine act of judgment against the firstborn in Egypt.
They’re a people group, nation, and family who, up until that point, were described as the ‘eklesia’ of God.
Who defined Paul’s kinsmen according to the flesh?
While the what of their expected inheritance was the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.
To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race according to the flesh is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
The Jews were chosen by God. God’s glory had been revealed to them. God gave them his promises through Abraham and through Moses. God gave them his holy law and prescribed how to worship him.
They claimed descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with all of his sons as being the reason for their entitlement. They swore their allegiance to the Lord because of what he had done for them.
Yet Jesus Christ also belonged to the Jews according to the flesh because he is Abraham’s truest son of heir as the prophesied king descended from David.
The Jews should have claimed him because he’s also Lord God, God over all, but instead of claiming him for themselves, they rejected him, denied him, and had him crucified.
Paul makes it sound as if, by the Jews’ rejection of Jesus, along with everything that he represented and everything that he is, that by virtue of their rejection, the ‘eklesia’ of Israel forfeited any further right of inheritance to Abraham.
That’s the logical and reasonable understanding because if you do reject the true heir, why should he share his inheritance with you?
Now please understand this is not anti-Semitic. There is no hatred or animosity against anyone on account of their ancestry or religion in this assertion, nor is this a blanket condemnation of the Jews as being Christ killers, which is an unfortunate charge and attitude that many people within the church have held over the centuries.
Christianity is a Semitic religion. Neither was Paul being anti-Semitic because Paul, along with the other Apostles and most of the early church, and most especially Jesus, were all ethnic Jews.
They were all natural-born Israelites, and they were not full of themselves and their relatives. They all just wanted to share in the truth which they had found and been called into with all of the Jews and with all of the world.
See, the early church was never accused of being anti-Semitic, and nor is the true invisible Catholic Church. It loves and cares for the Jews, even though their church has frequently been hunted and persecuted by both Jews and Gentiles alike.
Paul did not write this letter to the Christians in Rome as a polemic against the Jewish people or against the Jewish religion.
Instead, he wrote against their understanding of who Israel actually is and what it means to be in the ‘eklesia’ of God, explaining that not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.
And not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named.
See, not everyone descended from Israel, the patriarch Jacob, belonged to Israel, God’s chosen people.
Not all of Abraham’s offspring, the natural-born children of his flesh, were his children, meaning his legitimate heirs.
Paul’s interpretation of Old Testament scripture here redefined who God’s chosen people are in a shocking way and in a countercultural manner.
After he quotes Genesis 21:12, ‘through Isaac shall your offspring be named,’ Paul denies the understanding that a person’s status within or without the ‘eklesia’ of God was an inherited state determined through the providence of one’s birth.
Instead, it is a status granted solely according to the declarative will and providential election of the Lord.
This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.
His reinterpretation was very controversial, but it’s also very reasonable and understandable when the whole Hebrew scriptures are considered.
From Paul’s point in time, the covenant of circumcision was given to show who belonged to Abraham’s family of descendants for whom the Lord was to be their God alone.
But also, provision was made for people that were not born into Israel into the family to join them by subjecting themselves to circumcision.
However, the natural-born Israelites who chased after idols and false gods and were contemptuously disobedient of God’s holy law were not numbered among God’s ‘eklesia’ because the wicked shall not inherit the blessings of the Lord alongside the righteous.
So you see, there is a spiritual distinction between the nation and people of Israel or the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and God’s ‘eklesia’ Israel.
Although they may have been circumcised in the flesh and were nominally a part of Israelite religion by birth, they proved that they did not belong to God’s true chosen people by their actions.
Only the Old Testament saints who trusted in the Lord and his promises—those who remained steadfast in their faith—proved themselves children of God and not merely the children of Abraham’s flesh.
God’s ‘eklesia’ has always been—and had a distinct division within Abraham’s descendants: first between Isaac and Ishmael, and then second between Jacob and Esau.
When the Lord declared Isaac to be Abraham’s heir before he was even conceived, even though he would be his younger son by nature, declaring, ‘through Isaac shall your offspring be named,’ not ‘through Isaac shall your offspring be born.’
Abraham’s legitimate offspring would be named, not born. In the Greek, this was ‘kleduemenoi,’ meaning that they were chosen, called, and declared such solely by the Lord God.
Thus, all of Abraham’s true heirs were named, declared his heirs by God’s grace, and not by natural birthright.
But why did the Lord select Isaac to carry on as his ‘eklesia’? God alone knows why, but this is the same as how God alone knows why he chose Abraham.
Paul explains for us a part of the reason why God chose everyone whom he has chosen in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him who calls.
First, God elected the pagan Abraham and called him out from Ur of the Chaldeans. Then he called him out from Haran to go to the land of Canaan.
Then there, the Lord revealed himself to Abraham and brought him into the ‘koinonia’ of this covenant of grace. And through it all, Abraham trusted God and followed his divine call into uncertainty and the unknown and so was declared righteous on account of his faith.
Next, God elected Abraham’s yet-unborn son Isaac to succeed his father in receiving God’s covenant promise. He called the younger unknown, but still promised, son of Sarah into his ‘koinonia,’ rather than the older known son of Hagar.
And yet that older son, Ishmael, still received a measure of the Lord’s blessing and favor by grace, but he did not receive the fullness of the promise.
That when Isaac’s wife Rebekah was still pregnant with twins, God elected that the one to be born younger would be the heir to Abraham and Isaac, declaring that the older will serve the younger, placing the elder beneath his brother.
Within the familial pecking order, the younger Jacob received the Lord’s venal promise and blessing, while Esau, although he was still blessed by God in many ways, also did not get to enjoy the fullness of God’s promise.
That is what Paul and the prophet he quoted, Malachi, meant by saying, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,’ where love is understood as God giving an extraordinary blessing and hate is understood as God withholding an extraordinary blessing.
Paul closes his point by defending the Lord’s sovereign right of election, his divine right to give his covenant of grace to whoever he wills.
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion,’ so that it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.
The Apostle Peter witnessed the Holy Spirit descend upon and fill the household of Cornelius the Gentile in Joppa, and so now, ever after the cross of Christ, the Lord has chosen to elect people from every family, tribe, clan, people, and nation into his ‘eklesia’ through faith in Jesus Christ by his sovereign grace alone.
However, while the Lord grossly expanded the tree of faith to now include Gentiles, he also pruned off the branches without spiritual fruit and evidence of belonging to that true Israel—those without faith in Christ Jesus the Lord.
And so even now, just as not all those born to the nation of Israel belong to God’s elect Israel, so too not everyone now belonging to a church belongs to God’s elect Israel, the Capital C Church.
See, the Lord has never and will never abandon his elect Israel, even though the Israelites, the natural-born descendants of Abraham, the Jews, abandoned the Lord through their rejection of God’s son Jesus.
God’s chosen ‘eklesia’ of Israel remains, and so Israel continues to thrive according to God’s providential grace and mercy.
See, we believe that all of the Old Testament saints were saved by their faith in the Lord and not by their works or religious rituals.
Their faith, which was held in an incomplete revelation of God, was truly actually faith in Jesus Christ.
So it is possible that even now Jews who earnestly believe in and trust the Lord may be saved under the Old Testament dispensation of faith. It’s possible, yes, because everyone who’s saved is saved by God’s grace alone.
But that should not be our ordinary expectation because Jesus was very clear that no one comes to the Father except through him.
Yet their salvation through faith in Messiah Jesus should still be our hope and our prayer just as it has been ever since the early church.
Is it unjust or an act of unrighteousness for the Lord God to choose whom he wishes to have a relationship with, and then to also define the terms of that relationship?
No, of course not! Because he is the author and creator of the universe. He can do whatever he wants with whomever he chooses.
We cannot force him to choose us. We cannot force him to relate to us however we want him to relate to us because he is God and we are not.
He’s the Creator, and we are his creations. We exist and live solely because he chose for us to exist.
He is the Lord, and we are all his servants. But every one of us, every single one of us, is a rebellious and disobedient servant because every one of us disobeys his holy commandments in our every word, thought, and deed.
So God’s choice of some to enjoy the benefits of ‘koinonia’ with him, to enjoy the benefit of his electing grace unto salvation, is a sovereign act of mercy and compassion because we deserve his wrath and condemnation for our constant sinfulness.
God’s choice of some instead of others, or even God’s choice of some instead of all, is neither unjust nor unfair because God is not obligated to choose anyone at all.
That’s why it’s called grace, mercy, and compassion. God chooses to give us everything that not one of us deserves: hope, life, freedom, and his love instead of giving us what we do deserve: condemnation, despair, death, and his hatred.
Because God chose to send his only begotten son, Jesus, to be born as a man descended from Abraham, God chose his Son as Abraham’s offspring, his ultimate heir, and gave to Jesus the fullness of his inheritance.
Upon his resurrection, God removed the promises from the caretakers who held them until the Christ came for whom they were always intended and gave them all to Jesus.
So just as Abraham was the foundational head of Israel, receiving God’s promises in trust on their behalf, Jesus is the final head of elect Israel, and it’s him alone that all the promises of God belong.
But through Jesus, God has chosen to share this inheritance with all of his elect Israel, God’s ‘eklesia,’ all of those who are in Christ collectively known as the church, all of whom he has predestined from before the foundation of the world through the ‘koinonia’ of our adoption as sons and daughters of the Lord.
God alone chooses who is in his ‘eklesia.’ God alone calls people into his ‘eklesia,’ but it is our responsibility still to respond to his call with faith.
Every person within the church has been brought there by God’s grace alone, without any deference to or consideration of either their good or their evil works.
Then once we’re inside the church, he gives us the faith to remain here and persevere unto the end.
Not everyone born to Israel belongs to Israel, and not everyone who belongs to Israel was born to Israel, says the Israel is who and what Paul understood the ‘eklesia’ of Jesus Christ to be.
He teaches us that if Israel is the ‘eklesia’ and the ‘eklesia’ is the church, then the church must be Israel.
The church is the continuation of Israel and not a replacement for it, just as Isaac was a continuation of Abraham and Jacob was the continuation of Isaac.
Everyone up until Jesus Christ who believed in and trusted in the Lord alone belonged to the ‘eklesia’ of Israel on account of their faith in him and not on account of their birth origin.
But everyone after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus who believes in and trusts in Jesus Christ alone belongs to the ‘eklesia’ of the church.
And ever since Jesus was raised, the church has also contained Gentiles—people not born of Israelite descent—because now those who are not of Abraham’s lineage are being grafted into the ‘eklesia’ of Abraham’s inheritance through their faith in Jesus.
Anyone, from anywhere, may now be brought into Israel and receive Abraham’s blessing.
It could only ever have been that way because that’s how God chose to make Abraham into a divine blessing for every family, people, and nation.
God did it by broadening his ‘eklesia,’ the church, to be inclusive of all families, all peoples, and all nations through their union into the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Thus, the church, the ‘eklesia’ of God, is the most inclusive organization in the world, yet it is also the most exclusive organization in the world because it’s through the atoning death of Jesus Christ upon that Roman cross that the sins of everyone who believes were put to death with him.
And they’re brought into the original relationship of ‘koinonia’ broken by Adam but now repaired and restored by Christ.
It’s through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit that wretched sinners elected and called by God’s sovereign grace are saved and redeemed and brought into his fellowship of the ‘eklesia’ and given the faith to believe and trust in Jesus Christ alone.
So if you believe and trust in Jesus already, then you may know that you belong to a family and a fellowship that stretches almost all the way back to the beginning of time.
Membership in this family and fellowship is not something that you’ve earned, nor is it something that you are born into because membership is something which you must have been first chosen for.
The Lord has called his people into his church from out of every family, tribe, clan, ethnicity, and nation from all times and places by his sovereign electing grace and mercy.
God does not discriminate against any, but he is very discriminating because he only draws those whom he has chosen into his church.
But if you do not yet believe, then know that you are invited and that Christ is calling you to repent of your sins and trust in him for this life and the life in the world to come.
We belong to Jesus Christ. He has redeemed us from being subject to the wrath of our heavenly Father and united us into himself and given us a share of his eternal inheritance.
So finally, who is the church? We are the church.
We are privileged and blessed to be a continuing part of the ‘eklesia’ of Israel.
The church is not a building, and the church is not a place—it is a people.
The church, the whole Kirk of God, is the body of people called and collected by the Lord to enjoy ‘koinonia’ with him, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Why is the church? It is because the Lord has blessed and is blessing every family, tribe, clan, and people and nation, bringing us together and uniting us through the redemption of Jesus Christ.
We are now obligated to be the church as Adam and Eve were first charged. Our job is to work and tend in the world, to minister to all creation as God’s delegates.
We have been blessed to be a blessing to others. We all have the privilege and responsibility to share the love of Christ that we have received with one another and with others who may not know him yet.
We get to bring God’s blessings to them through our good works that are done in faith, and we get to tell them all about his merciful grace and love.
We do not have to; we get to! To tell everyone about God’s son, Jesus Christ, who gave himself as an atoning sacrifice for their sins to rescue them from his just wrath and to instead bring them into a loving fellowship with the Lord God—that is truly good news worth sharing.
So let us each go and live out the why of the church. Let us give God all the glory as we bring him glory by continuing to share his blessing with all the world. Amen.
Let us stand, please, and say what we believe about the church using the Westminster Confession of Faith.
The Catholic or universal church is invisible and consists of all the elect who have been, are, or ever will be gathered into one under Christ, the head.
The church is his body and spouse, the fullness of God who fills all in all.
The visible church is also Catholic or universal under the gospel. It is not confined to one nation, as previously under the Mosaic law.
It consists of everyone in the world who professes the true religion. Their children, the visible church, is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ and the house and family of God outside of which people cannot ordinarily be saved.
In order to gather and perfect the saints in this life until the end of the world, Christ has given the ministry, scriptures, and ordinances of God to this universal visible church.
By his own presence and spirit, he enables the church to function in this way according to his promise.
This universal church has been sometimes more and less visible. Particular churches which are members of it are also more or less pure depending on how the gospel is accepted and taught, how the ordinances of God are administered, and how public worship is performed.
The purest churches under heaven are subject both to impurity and error. Some churches have been so degenerated that they are not churches of Christ but synagogues of Satan.
Nevertheless, there will always be a church on earth to worship God according to his will.
There is no other head of the church than Jesus Christ. Amen.
Please be seated.
As we sing hymn number 101, which is Psalm 100, we’re only going to sing the first four verses.
[Music] [Music] [Music]
GL [Music] PR [Music] [Music]
PR [Music]
sh from age to age.
As has been the tradition with various Kirkens of the tartan ever since Peter Marshall instituted it back during the World War II era, we would ask now that those who wish to receive a blessing for their family or their clan or such to hold up a piece of tartan as we pray for them and pray over them as we consider all of those that we are connected to as family.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, you have promised that in all places where you record your name, you will meet your servants and bless them.
Fulfill now your promise and make us joyful in praying so that our worship, being offered in the name of your son Jesus Christ and by the guidance of your Holy Spirit, may be acceptable to you and profitable to ourselves.
Bless us, we pray, and these tartans and other tokens of our families that they may be unto us and unto all a token of the faith of our ancestors, of our faith and the sign of our service to you through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.
Our closing hymn is number 151: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Please [Music] stand.
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
Earth [Music] [Music]
the [Music]
chrus [Music] my [Music] GL [Music]
might.
And so as we leave this place, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God our Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each of us now and always. Amen.
Go in peace.