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 sojourning, 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 100 years old? Shall Sarah, who is 90 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 kinsman 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 Rebecca 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 then, 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 that they’ll call it an organization.
Other people will respond quite differently and say that the 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—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 ‘cleo,’ 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 believers. They understood ‘eklesia’ as a community, a body of people, a group of individuals united by shared faith in Jesus Christ.
So yes, group number two is also correct, perhaps more correct than group number one, because they are closer to the first-century understanding of what we now call the church.
So answering the question of what is the church: it is a group or body created through the union of individuals by a shared faith in Jesus Christ, sharing in a positive fellowship, ‘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 were, 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 non-existence 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. 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.’
This explained 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 sojourning, 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 heirs. 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 in 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, becoming actually an oppressor against his kinsman. Clearly, only one of these men’s families were called out by the Lord, and the other was not.
Who is the church? Some 1,800 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, and how does someone become 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 9 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 accursed 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 sundered. Paul defines here who his people are: the first-century Jews.
And what he believes should be their rightful inheritance. They are Israelites, natural and spiritual descendants of Jacob, Isaac’s son and heir, called Israel. They are a 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 are a people, nation, and family who, up until that point, were described as the eklesia of God—that is 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 and 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 hateful of themselves and their relatives.
They all just wanted to share in the truth which they had found, had 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 agapes the Jews, even though the 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, was intended 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.
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 ‘elegchos,’ 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, 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, that there the Lord revealed himself to Abraham and brought him into the koinonia of this covenant of grace.
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 Rebecca 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 would serve the younger, placing the elder beneath his brother within the familial pecking order.
The younger Jacob received the Lord’s covenantal promise and blessing, while Esau—although he was still blessed by God in many ways—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 whomever 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 then, it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.’
Able 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 branches without spiritual fruit and evidence of belonging to that true Israel—those without faith in Christ Jesus.
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 is 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 all 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 to him alone that all the promises of God belong.
But through Jesus, through him, 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 until the end.
Not everyone born to Israel belongs to Israel, and not everyone who belongs to Israel was born to Israel.
See, 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, and it’s 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.
They are 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 elect 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.
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? As the Lord has blessed and his blessing, every family, tribe, clan, 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 to the creation as God’s delegates.
So 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 done in faith, and we get to tell them all about his merciful grace and love.
We do not have to; we get 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.