BE The Church In Love!

The Church as a Gathered People

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Shepherds Church Podcast. My name is Kendall, and if you've never listened to the Shepherds Church Podcast before, this is normally a podcast where we give our weekly sermons that are delivered live and in person at a particular location in Tewksbury, Massachusetts.

But during this coronavirus season where we're not able to gather together as the church, we decided to use this podcast to put out weekly sermons that I'm recording live and at home from my office. So if you hear screaming children, if you hear dogs barking, if you hear cars passing down the street, don't worry, that's just what it sounds like to be in my home.

But we wanted to use this podcast in order to get the message of the gospel out there and to give encouraging messages that would help build up the church during this season of time. And that's why we decided to do this series called Be the Church, because we want to understand what it means for us as Christians to be the church, even in a season of global pandemic.

But with that, I just want to give the disclaimer, please do not misunderstand me with where we are going in a series like this. When I say things like we are called to be the church, I am not saying that to minimize our public gatherings.

I know there's lots of people out there who will say the church is not a building, or the church, I don't need the church in order to be a Christian. You're right. You don't need the church in order to be a Christian, just like you don't need your legs in order to be a human.

But if you lop off your legs, you're not going to be functioning optimally. And in the same way, if you're not an active member of a local church, of a local gathering, you will not be running on all cylinders as a Christian.

The Church Purchased by the Blood of Christ

So the point of this series called Be the Church is not to minimize our public gatherings, it is to build upon it. Now, the very word church in the New Testament is ekklesia, that's Greek for gathering.

So the word church itself actually means those who show up in the assembly of God. Therefore, to be the church, and I would even say to operate optimally as a Christian, means that our physical gathering together is essential for our individual and shared identity.

To be in physical proximity with one another is core to who we are. The word church means gathering. We are members of the church, therefore we are a gathered people. Paul says as much in, he says to the elders in Ephesus in Acts 20 verse 28, when he tells these elders this, he says, pay careful attention to yourselves and to all of the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.

And listen to this, he says, to care for the church of God, which he, God, obtained with Jesus's blood. Paul is not advising the elders to care for individual Christians who are disconnected from the community and have no interest in gathering together when they meet.

He's not saying that, he's saying for these elders to look after and care for the members of the church, the ecclesia, the gathering, because it is the gathered people of God called the church that God the Father purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ.

Have you ever thought about it that way? God purchased a church when he sent his one and only son to the cross. That's what Paul is saying in Acts 20 verse 28. It's the church that Jesus died for. It's the church that Jesus is the head of.

It's the church that he is the bridegroom over and he's gone to prepare a place for his bride so that when that church is presented to him, they will live together in unity for all of eternity. It's the church that Jesus has commissioned to take the gospel to every tribe, tongue, and nation.

It's the church that when we gather together, we experience the sacrament of the word and baptism and the Lord's supper. It is the church, finally and forever, who we've already said will gather together around the throne of grace in heaven in never-ending, ceaseless, joy-filled praise.

There's nothing at all in the Bible about just me and Jesus, about an isolated kind of faith, about a pajama on the couch Sunday morning watching a famous preacher on YouTube kind of faith. That's just not what the Bible communicates.

The Bible communicates a gathered corporate faith where we're all doing this together. You see, I hope that there's nothing about this series, whether it's the title or whether it's something that I say either unintentionally or intentionally, that communicates anything other than the gathering of the saints of God is vital.

It is both fundamental and essential to our Christian identity as a gathered people to be gathered consistently as a local body of believers. Let me say this again, and I'm emphasizing this so much because I've heard so many people trash the church in the modern world.

I've heard so many people trash the gathering. I've heard so many people say, I don't have time to go to church or I have this going on and I can't go to church or a litany of different things. And I just ache for that because that's not what the Bible is trying to communicate about how we should think about the church.

Again, let me say this one more time. We are not a collection of individuals that are isolated by space and time. The church is not an optional program that we attend if we have time or if our schedule allows for it.

The church, by its very definition, is Jesus's faithful gathering of many dissimilar members and parts who have been woven together in unity as a single body with the purpose of being together as we glorify God both now and forever on into eternity.

Therefore, we must not be perpetually absent or estranged from the great body that Jesus died to make. Let me give an example. A body can function with just one lung, but not very well. A body can function with just one eye, but it's woefully limited there.

A body can even technically survive if it has no legs, but it cannot operate as it was designed. Well, in the same way, the church is called a body in Scripture and it's said to be the body of Jesus Christ.

He's head. We are the body. And while the church can survive without all of its members, it can't thrive that way. I've heard, again, many people say, I don't need the church to be a Christian. You're right.

And you don't need legs to be a human, but you're not going to thrive that way. You're not going to be able to run or jump or play or crawl or do many of the other movements that you were designed to do without legs.

You are functioning at the most base and suboptimal level when you chop off your legs as a human. Well, in the same way, you're functioning at the most base and suboptimal level as a Christian when you have a low view of the church of Jesus Christ.

The church thrives just like a body when all of its members are gathered together in unity. Have you thought about that? You're not only going to function at a base and suboptimal level if you spurn the church.

Others are going to suffer when we have a low view of the church. You see, the church thrives when every blood-bought member of that covenant community that Jesus purchased on the cross prioritizes and participates in the corporate gathering.

We thrive together when we're all together in unity around the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is why the Shepherd's Church has intentionally adopted the mission statement that we have We say it this way.

This is our mission statement. We exist to glorify God together, together through the preaching, singing, hearing, and doing of God's Word. But it starts with our together. And that together is not just a word that we added without thought or without reason or just because we wanted it to sound welcoming or anything like that.

That word encapsulates our entire understanding and theology of the church. We exist to follow Christ, not as isolated individuals, but as members of a body, as being committed to one another. And to do that, we must be present and participating when we gather.

Now, don't get me wrong. That does not mean that we have to have perfect attendance as a church member or we're going to somehow be in sin. My great-grandpa had perfect church attendance for like 20 years.

He never missed a service. And when he died, there was this plaque, I believe, that was given to him as having perfect church attendance all those years. No one could ever even strain to remember when he had missed.

And I remember that was a great honor for him. And I remember he had such a high view of the church, but no one would have told him if he missed one of those weeks that he would somehow be in sin. We're not trying to create a new mosaic law system that is going to hang over our head in some way.

That's not what we're saying. There's times when we're all going to be sick, apparently not my great-grandpa, but there's times where all of us are sick. There's times of us when we're out of town or when us or our spouse is having a child.

Maybe there's times like right now where we're living through this global pandemic and we're not allowed to gather. And I believe that the Lord is showing us a tremendous amount of grace, but the Lord also gives a tremendous amount of grace when we gather.

And I would just invite all of us right now, maybe you've had perfect attendance for the last 20 years in church and maybe none of this applies to you, but I would just invite all the rest of us to examine our hearts.

Do we long to gather together with the people of God? Do we wake up on Sunday morning or Saturday morning and do we salivate over the fact that we get to gather together with others so that we can worship God together?

Or is it just another thing that we have to do in an already overcrowded week? Is it something that we do if nothing else is grabbing for our attention? Is it something that we do if there's nothing else that's more important on the calendar?

Is it something that we do if we haven't been there in a while and we want to make sure that we make an appearance so that everyone doesn't believe that we're dead? Or is the church something that we love with the same passion and devotion and affection that Jesus did when he died for her on the cross?

Do we love the church like that? Do we love the church like Jesus loves it? And do we prioritize the church in our life in the way that Jesus prioritized it in his life and for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross for her?

Do we make sacrifices to be in church? Do we give our best when we go to church, the best of our mental faculties? Do we give the best of our worship? Do we give the best of our time and our talents? Do we give the best of every part of who we are while we're participating in the church like Jesus did when he participated or when he gave his life for the church?

And if not, is there not room in our heart right now for repentance on that? Are there attitudes that maybe we've believed about the church that are not shared by Christ that need to be discarded, repented of, and thrown away?

Are there opinions of what it means to be a Christian that are somehow disconnected from the biblical view of what church is that needs to be adjusted, repented of, or thrown out? Are there priorities in our life that need to be repented of and adjusted on?

Are there scheduling conflicts that maybe we need to repent of and give over to the Lord Jesus Christ so that we can be full members of his body? I think we understand the point. There's totally legitimate reasons for us to miss church like what we're going through now.

But I believe that the genuine follower of Jesus is not going to have a low view or a flippant attitude towards the very thing that Jesus died for, his gathering. If we must miss, we must miss. Even for legitimate reasons, yes, our heart, though, when we miss, will long to be there.

Our hearts will long to be there. If we miss and we have to miss, our hearts will be grieved that we could not be there together with the rest of the body of the believers. And as we walk through this pandemic, I believe that our hearts should be aching.

We should be grieved that we cannot gather together right now. It should be like two lovers who are separated by oceans who are longing to be together. Well, in the same way, without the romantic elements, we have been separated from this body of believers, from this gathering of the saints of God, and we should long to be united with her.

There's nothing lighthearted and flippant about that. To be a Christian and to have a apathetic view towards participating in the local church is a contradiction of your identity. It's not only to have a low view of what Jesus did and not only to have a low view of who you now are, member of the church, it's to have a low view of other people who you've been called to fellowship with and be in community with and love and serve as fellow co-heirs of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

To have low passion for gathering together, worshiping together publicly is oxymoronic as a Christian. That's what you're going to be doing for all eternity. If you don't like that now, what is heaven going to look like?

If you yawn at that now, how will heaven be for you? To not yearn to serve one another and to use our gifts to care for one another is to not have a Christian attitude towards the church at all. And I think the overarching point of everything right now that I've just shared is this.

You can be a Christian and not have a proper view of the church, but please don't call an improper view of the church Christian. It's possible for us to have wrong views of the church and still be Christian, but please let's not take our wrong view of the church, our opinion of the church, our attitude about the church, and then rubber stamp it and call that Christian.

Because the Bible doesn't allow for that. Jesus did not die just to give us a personal relationship with him that's divorced from biblical community. He did not shed his blood on a cross so that we could tune in on YouTube in our slippers and our pajamas and feel like that we've done something there.

He didn't bleed and die for the gathering of all of the saints so that we could have a low view of that. All of eternity is going to be gathered together as his saints. He gave his spirit right now to be present in a special way among the saints.

He ordained the preaching of his word to edify, encourage, and establish the gathering of the saints. He gave us songs and hymns and spiritual songs as we gather together as the saints. He called us to feast at the table of Christ as we gather together as the saints.

There's nothing low about that. It really encompasses all of what it means for our Christian life to be gathered together in unity around the gospel with the saints of God. We are a together kind of people.

We're a people who are known by our gathering. And to not love it and have a low view of it, or to treat it like it's optional when Jesus heartily loved it and gave his life for it, is to willingly adopt a view that Jesus did not have, would not endorse, and it's to live in a manner that's inconsistent with the redemption that he bled and he died for.

It's serious. He died so that we would love the things that he loves, which means because he loved the church ferociously, so should we. That, in a nutshell, is the point of this series. Not to empower us to go at our faith alone, but to teach us how to be the church even while we are yearning to get back together in person.

Our situation that we're living in right now is not good. And in some ways, I'm hoping that a series like this will spark a deeper love and affection for the church that would make us yearn for the day when we can be present together once again that will cause us to worship with a kind of passion that is befitting of the holiness and the righteousness and the worthiness of Christ.

I'm praying that a series like this would ignite our fire and our passion for this thing that Christ loves called the church. That's why we're doing this series. In the first message last week, which was called Be the Church in Unity, it was two weeks ago actually, in that message we talked about how the church is to be unified around the gospel.

That's what we believe. And we're to be unified in the way that gospel works itself out in our lives and the way that we treat one another. And we are to be unified in our collective global mission in the way that the gospel goes forth out of us.

So what we saw last week is how the gospel affects our mind, the gospel affects our behavior, and the gospel goes out from us to the ends of the world. And as the church, we are to be unified around that good gospel message that affects every aspect of our life today.

Love One Another in the Church

We're going to be talking about an aspect of this. And the name of this message is Be the Church in Love. Two weeks ago it was Be the Church in Unity. Now we're talking about Be the Church in Love. And let me just say that that especially applies to the way that we love one another.

You see, the Bible most definitely calls us to love everyone. To love everyone. Whether they're red, yellow, black, or white, male or female. Whether they're homosexual, heterosexual. Whether they are Asian or European or American.

Whatever social distinction, rich, poor. Whatever social distinction that you can come up with. Whatever political class that you can come up with. Whatever wrong opinion that you don't agree with. Every human being that lives, breathes, walks, and talks, we are commanded to love.

We're not commanded to agree with them. We're not commanded to twist the scripture to fit them into our category or our camp. We can love people even while we disagree with them, and the Bible does talk about that.

But that is not the primary message that the Bible is talking about when it commands Christians to be loving. You see, a couple of years ago, I went off to a cabin to do some intense Bible study and to just read the Bible and just spend time with the Lord, and I read the entire New Testament over two days, and I noticed something striking about it.

Every single time the Lord commands us to be loving, and let me not say every time, about 90 of the time that we are commanded to be loving in the New Testament, it is a love that is given to one another.

It is a love from one Christian to another Christian. It is a love from one member of a local body of believers to another local body of believers. Paul writes to Ephesus or Philippians or he writes to these different towns and he tells them to love one another.

That means to love the members of their church. John communicates that in his epistles, Peter communicates that in his epistles, and there's this unified message that Christians are supposed to be loving to one another, especially if they belong to the same local assembly and local church.

And undergirding that message of love is a Trinitarian theology. And what I mean by Trinitarian theology is that present in that love is each of the three members of the triune Godhead, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

And every member of that Trinity is not only loving each other that way, but they are helping us. Every member of the Trinity has a role in our life, helping us to love one another that way. And let me just give you an example of this.

God the Father invented love. For all of eternity, he has been loving the Son and the Spirit. 1 John 4, 7 teaches us this when it says, Beloved, he's talking to a church. John was an overseer of churches.

He's writing to a church. He said, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, meaning that it gets its origins from him. And everyone who loves is born of God, not the way that society defines love.

Everyone who loves in the way that God loves is born of God. And that person knows God. John is saying that one of the most critical and necessary elements of being called God's Beloved or being part of a church or being connected to Jesus's body, these are all synonyms for what he's saying.

One of the most critical elements of that is love. And this is not the kind of love that the world talks about or understands. This is love that is directly from God. This is the kind of love that is exclusively given to redeemed men and women who are bought by Christ in redemption because we've been born of God and because now, because of the Spirit, we know God.

All three members are present and love is critical for all who are in Christ. And the way that we love one another is not rooted in our personalities or in ourselves or in our temperaments or demeanors.

It is authored by, invented by our Father who has eternally poured out that same love onto the Son and Spirit and has shared that love with us through salvation. Just a few verses down, John elaborates on this in verse 11 of chapter 4 in his first epistle.

He says, Beloved, if God so loved us, if God so loved us, then we ought to love one another. John is saying that God's love is not a one-sided love. He not only loved us enough to save us, which would be him pouring out love onto us.

He loved us so perfectly that he intends his love to sanctify us so that we would become loving so that we would reciprocate that love, not just with him, but with others as well. His love is so powerful and so wonderful that it will begin doing something in us, warming us, renewing us, affecting us, regenerating us, so that we will begin being loving to one another.

Don't miss that word one another that's in these passages. John is not writing to the world in these verses. He's writing to the church. He's saying that God's faithful love when it's poured out onto us will propel us to love one another and that one another is members of the body of Christ, the church.

And since John is writing to a local body of believers, he's not talking about the universal church here. He's talking about a specific church. He's talking about a congregation. He's talking about people who are living in proximity with one another, weekly gathering and listening to the word of God being preached, and he's telling them because they know God, then they need to and ought to, as a response to that knowledge, also love one another.

I believe it's right to assume that we can begin demonstrating that love even today simply by loving one another in this local body called the Shepherd's Church. Yes, of course, we're called to love all people in general.

Sure, that specifically applies to all Christians, but let's begin with the little family that God has called us to love at 1500 Andover Street in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, called the Shepherd's Church.

Like the audience John is writing to, we are to bask in the love of God, which fuels us to love one another, and that should make our church in Tewksbury, and honestly, every church all across this world, the safest place for anyone to ever visit, the most nonjudgmental place, the least among the gossipers.

It should be honest, and it should be safe, and it should be authentic, and it should be secure, and it should be a place where people feel loved, and they feel welcomed, and they feel warm, and even though we're people about the truth, we're also people about love.

We cling to both. Jesus even said that this kind of love would cause the unbelieving world to marvel. He said in the Gospels, he said, by this, by this love, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

Jesus is saying that the world is so deprived of seeing, and experiencing, and witnessing what true love, God's love really is, that when they finally see it going on in the church, it's going to shock them.

They're going to know that it's different. They're going to immediately recognize that what they thought was love was a counterfeit, and it is a fake, because they're going to immediately recognize just how different, and better, and deeper, and richer the love that we have is, because it's from God, and that followers of Jesus have something far superior than what they have.

So, let us just be clear here. To be the church not only means unity with one another, it means that we would love one another, and the source of that love is God, the Father. The Bible also tells us that this love was modeled for us by Jesus Christ.

Serving One Another Through Spiritual Gifts

You see, God didn't want us guessing about what his love is. God didn't want us guessing on how to enact it towards one another, so he gave us the definition of what love is through Jesus Christ. John 15, 12 says it like this, this is my commandment.

This is Jesus talking. You've heard of the 613 commandments in the Old Testament. You've heard all of the Torah. You've read the entire Old Testament. Many of you have memorized it, but this is my commandment, that you would love one another just as I have loved you.

Do you understand what he's saying here? He's saying that I want you to love one another, and this is what that means. I want you to love one another just as I loved you. So, Jesus is now defining the love of God, and what God expects, and he's saying that if you want to know what love is, look no further than the way that Jesus Christ acted, and behaved, and cared for his disciples.

That's what love is. We're to love one another just as Christ loved us, which means that we'd be willing to die for one another, that we'd be willing to sacrifice one another, that we would be willing to love, and care, and pray for, and minister, and get down, and wash someone's feet as an act of humility and service to them, that we would do everything for those who love Christ, just as Jesus did everything for those who he called his disciples.

Practically, this can take root in a lot of different ways. I'll just give a few examples. We love someone in the church enough to check in. If we know someone has died in their family, or if they've been going through a rough time, or if they're depressed, or if they're lonely, if they're frustrated, then we call them.

When this pandemic ends, we visit them, or we ride up. I've had people ride up to my house, sit in their car, and talk to me just because they wanted to check in on me, and I felt so loved and so cared for by that wonderful and beautiful act of kindness.

If you know that someone is depressed, encourage them. If they need a listening ear, then sacrifice your time for them. And I even believe that this applies to new guests that are going to trickle into our gatherings when we get back together.

There's going to be people who are looking for the hope that we have in Jesus Christ, who have just walked through this pandemic, who are going to feel vulnerable, and who are going to feel like that they need hope, and they're going to come into our gathering.

And while it's so easy to love the people that we know best, and while it's easy to talk to the people that we know and interact with the people that we have developed a relationship with, any man, woman, or anyone else who walks into our gathering and is a member of the universal body of Christ is our family.

They're our neighbor. And we must excel at loving them, too, just as Christ has loved us. This may even mean introducing ourselves. This means maybe getting their number so that we can follow up with them, so that we can get to know them.

This may mean walking them over to one of your friends and introducing them so that they will feel like they're a part of the group. This may mean inviting them to lunch or out to dinner and paying for it as a way to show honor and love to them, and as a way of just wanting to get to know who they are.

To be the church in love is to have God's perfect love coursing through our veins as we imitate Jesus's love onto each other. Love comes from God. Love is imitated and modeled by Jesus Christ and third member of the Trinity.

It's fueled by the Holy Spirit's power. We don't love through our own strength and our own power. We don't just see that God the Father invented this love and that gave Christ a model of this love and that we have to go and perfectly model Jesus in our own strength and our own power.

That's not what the Bible says. It says that it's the Spirit's power at work in us. Galatians 5 .22 says that a fruit of the Spirit is love. That means that the Spirit's power in you is producing fruit in you, and one of those fruits is love.

His power at work in you produces love. Romans 5 .5 says, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit of God who has been given to us. And while there's certainly more passages that we could use to establish this Trinitarian theology of how God's love gets into us as Christians and fuels us to love other Christians, while we could study that for a while here, I want to suffice it to say that the kind of love that makes each and every single one of us unique and special and makes us Christian, that makes us members of Jesus's body, that makes us distinct from the world, that makes the onlooking world marvel at who we are, that kind of love originates from God the Father, is modeled to us by Jesus Christ, and is tangibly given to us by the Holy Spirit of God so that we can love one another just like that.

Each and every member of the Trinity is actively working in your life and in my life so that you and I will be the church in love, so that we will love every single member of the Shepherd's Church in particular, every Christian in a special way in general, and even to the ends of the earth, every human being in the most general way, because they are made in the image of God.

In regard to loving each other within the Shepherd's Church right now, that's hard because we're separate from one another, and it does require some creativity. Since a crucial part of our identity is love shown in our gatherings and love poured out in person, this is going to take some creativity for us right now in the weeks ahead before we can gather together again to be the church in love.

It's going to take creativity. It's going to take patience. It's going to take grace. But no matter who you are right now listening to this message, God the Father has given you his love. He's modeled that love for you in Jesus Christ.

He has equipped you and established you in the love of the Holy Spirit who is empowering you to pour that love out onto others, and he has given you a gift in order to be able to do that, which leads to our second point.

Our love will cause us to serve one another. The love that the triune God has given us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, will not sit with us, but it will cause us to serve one another. And this goes beyond just being kind, and this goes beyond just taking an interest in someone, and this goes beyond just niceties and social gestures.

This is service. Our love will cause us, the love that God gives us will cause us to serve one another. Paul says in Galatians 5 13, for you were called to freedom, meaning you were called out of your slavery to sin.

You were called out of the prison cell, out of the darkness, out of the death. You were called into freedom, but don't use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, or meaning don't use your freedom in order to serve yourself, but through love serve one another.

Paul's making this incredible statement here where he is essentially saying, God did not love you so much so that you could use that love to simply love yourself, so that you could use that love to have a better ego about yourself, or have a better attitude about yourself, or have a better opinion about yourself, or approach to how you take care of yourself.

What he's saying is forget yourself. Put yourself aside, which is one of the core beliefs of Christianity, of picking up our cross, laying down our life, and loving God first, and then others second, and if there's time left over, loving ourselves.

You see, you and I were given such dynamic and awesome love not to serve ourselves, but to serve others. Paul, in the context of Galatians, is telling people who are mired in theological controversies to return to the one and only gospel, be unified in the gospel, be the church in unity, so that they would use their freedom to serve one another in love, so that they could be the church in love.

Just as Jesus knelt down in love to wash his disciples' feet, Paul is saying that the reason that God has lovingly set us free was not to serve ourselves, but to lovingly serve one another. And he goes on just a few verses down, and he says this in verse 14.

He says,. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. He doesn't say, love your neighbor when you're finished loving yourself. He doesn't say, love your neighbor after you've loved yourself, or even while you're loving yourself.

He's saying, love your neighbor, prioritize your neighbor, treat them with the same passion and the same conviction that you would in caring for yourself, and then you're going to fulfill the love of Christ.

Then you're really living in freedom. Then you've really stepped out of bondage because you're imitating the Savior who laid himself down for others, instead of being a slave to himself. And while this command in verse 14 seems like a very general command for us to be loving towards all people, verse 13 really qualifies it and specifies the context that Paul was thinking about.

He's not making a general statement about the way we are to treat all people, although we've agreed that that is true. We are to love all people. But in this verse, in this context, he's making a specific command that informs the way we love one another in the church.

A love that is like Jesus's love, that is not just nice, but it's ready and willing to get down in the dirt and serve and meet another person's needs. And while we could demonstrate this all over the New Testament, the unique love that we are to have serves one another, and the way that God is fueling us to be able to do that in one another is how he's gifted us.