Jesus Christ Is Lord - Lord of the Church (1) — J. Glyn Owen

It's a joy to see you all this morning and to be present again in the house of the Lord. May I say it's particularly happy to see a number in the congregation who have recently been unwell and whom the Lord has granted to be out among us again.

We are very, very happy to see you. May the Lord's grace be upon you and upon each of us according to our needs. Now you will remember our theme on these Lord's Day mornings. We have taken the basic cardinal Christian affirmation, Jesus Christ is Lord.

We have already seen how Jesus employed that highest of all designations with reference to himself. Unblushingly, he accepted the title given to the Jehovah of the Old Testament, even given to the emperor, the Roman emperor of his day.

He accepted it and his disciples came almost naturally to concede to him the prerogatives of deity and of sovereignty that were implicit in the title Lord. Last Sunday morning we considered how Jesus is Lord of the universe.

Jesus Christ Is Lord of the Church

Now you may have thought that we were starting at the wrong end of things, but it was deliberately done. I wanted right at the or almost at the beginning of this series to establish the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord of the universe in which we live and then to come down to the particulars, to the application of that principle, first of all and this morning to the church, later on to every phase and facet of our individual lives.

And if you're prepared to face the challenge of this teaching of the scriptures, then I will forewarn you what we are going to see as we face the logic and the implications of the affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord is this.

We are going to discover, many of us to our consternation, that there is simply nothing that we have or are or hope to be but that it belongs to him. And we are left in our utter nakedness unable to claim anything for ourselves and forced to acknowledge what we have, what we possess, what we are by the grace of God and what we hope to be materially, spiritually or in any other sense ultimately belongs to him.

Jesus Christ is Lord. Now at this stage in the series we are involved with things that are very much doctrinal. We are coming to the things that are exceedingly practical. But I want you to see the practical in the light of the teaching of scripture.

And I don't want to come to the practical issues directly. I want us to see that the Bible makes it quite clear that the Jesus Christ, who is my Savior and yours if we trust him and believe in him, is really Lord.

And you cannot be a Christian and you cannot serve him in this world unless you acknowledge that he is Lord. If you shall confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.

But to the person who comes into church service such as this, just to salute Jesus of Nazareth, there is no salvation. Salvation is offered in the New Testament to men and women and boys and girls who are prepared to bow, to bend, to yield, to yield obeisance, worship, faith, love, obedience, not to the man of Nazareth merely, but to the man of Nazareth who is Lord of lords and King of kings and is never going to abdicate that position.

Now this morning, then, the aspect of the subject to which we come is that Jesus is Lord of the church. In coming to this subject, one is faced with an alternative. Either one takes one of the metaphors of the church and deal with it at some considerable length and in detail, or one is going to take a bird's eye view and try to get the whole picture.

That's what I would like to do, but time doesn't allow us. But I'm going to take two biblical metaphors this morning. They're quite different, though basically they say the same thing. They're quite different, but what they're going to teach us is this, that Jesus is Lord of the church.

I'm not Lord. The session is not Lord. The presbytery is not Lord. The general assembly of the Presbyterian church is not Lord. The conference of any other church is not Lord. There is only one head of the church, and that head is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the living God, the Lord of Lords.

And I trust that you and I will know what it is to acknowledge Him in our hearts, that primacy which belongs exclusively to Himself. Now, of the two images I'm going to take this morning, the first is that of Jesus as the builder of the church, the builder of the church viewed as His ecclesia.

Christ the Builder of His Ecclesia

I'm deliberately using that Greek word not to show off my little bit of Greek, but because I think you will see in a few moments it's quite important to use it. Now, the basic passage or a key passage where this is taught is in Matthew chapter 16, verses 13 to 18.

You remember the familiar situation. Jesus asked His disciples, Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am? They offered certain replies. Then He becomes very personal and He looks those men in the eye and He says, But what about you?

Who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus replied, Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by My Father in heaven.

And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. Now, I want you to notice the image employed for the church. There, I will build, says Jesus, in the King James Version, My church.

I will build My church. The same in the NIV. But the Greek word is ekklesia. Now, this word has an ancestry. Its roots go back into two separate soils. A Greek soil and a Hebrew soil. As far as the Greek soil is concerned, this word ekklesia simply means an assembly.

By an assembly it is meant people convened, people gathered together. It may be a political assembly. That tempts me, but I won't yield to temptation. It may be a legal assembly. It may be an assembly of any kind.

It does not necessarily need to have a religious connotation at all, but it's an assembly of people who have been summoned together. They've been brought together. Their complexion may be this, that, or the other, but they've just been gathered together.

They've just been convened. As a matter of fact, the word is used three times in Acts 19 in this sense. And if you read that chapter, you will find that in Ephesus, a whole concourse of people have gathered in order to find fault with and to try to harass the Apostle Paul and those who were preaching the gospel with him.

We read in verses 32, 39, and 41 these words. The assembly was in confusion. Now, it's a crowd gathered in the streets. Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not know why they were there, but they were there.

Then in verse 39, if there is anything further you want to bring up, it must be settled in a legal assembly. The word is ecclesia. And then in verse 41, after he had said this, he dismissed the assembly.

Now that is the term against its Greek background. It simply means a group of people gathered together. They may be on a football field. They may be in a political arena. They may be anywhere. They've just been convened.

That's the main thing. An assembly of people. Now when the writers of our New Testament employed that term to describe what we speak of as the church, of course they had that thought in mind. But I want you to see as we go on that there is something entirely different that comes into the concept of the church as being an assembly.

It is not enough to say that the church is an assembly. We have to qualify it. We'll come to that in a moment. But before we do, what does it mean to be an assembly? What does it mean to be the church?

Now, fortunately, this term, this word ecclesia, opens up like a... and you can dissect it very much as a botanist would dissect a flower. Right at its heart is another little word, ecclesia, and at its heart is the word clasis, trimmed up a little bit to fit into the compound word.

Clasis. The word clasis means calling or a summons or an invitation, if you like. An ecclesia is composed of men and women, boys and girls, old and young, who have been summoned. They've been called. They've been brought together.

Someone has announced something and in virtue of the announcement they have been brought together and that constitutes an ecclesia. This is very much, of course, the same as in the Old Testament. Abraham was called to be the father of the faithful.

Abraham didn't just decide to leave the religion of his father and of his mother and to leave his kith and kin and go into another country he knew not where. He was called. He was summoned. Now that is true of every member of the Christian Church.

A man or a woman, old or young, he has been summoned. He or she has been called. He's been invited. You belong to the Christian Church, the Church of Jesus Christ, by invitation only. No man is born in the Christian Church.

You may be born in a Christian home and therefore you may have certain advantages that ought in turn to help you to become a Christian. But you're not born into the Christian Church. You have to be born again to come into the Christian Church.

You come into it by invitation only. The head of the Church, by the Word of His Gospel and the Spirit of the Holy One, calls so that every Christian man and woman has to say, has to confess in one way or another I heard the voice of Jesus say come unto me and live.

A calling. Not only is it a calling, but it is a calling out of something. The first two letters, ek, in the word ekklesia, mean out of. And every Christian whom Jesus calls to be a member of the Ekklesia, every individual whom He calls to become a Christian in the Ekklesia, is called out of.

Out of darkness into light. Out of no faith into faith. Out of rebellion into obedience. Out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. Out from under the dominion of Satan into the liberty of the children of God.

Again you have your Old Testament analogies. Hosea 11 .1 says, When Israel was a child, I loved him. And out of Egypt I called my Son. Out of. Israel had to make her exit from under the yoke of the Pharaohs in order to be constituted the Lord's covenant people on the slopes of Sinai.

Constituted by blood and by the word that God gave. Now let me repeat. Every individual that constitutes the Ekklesia has not only been summoned, but summoned out of. So the question is not have you heard the voice of Jesus calling you, but have you heeded that voice and come out of every opposing tyranny that would claim your absolute allegiance to the Lord Jesus.

Thirdly, not only is everyone called, called out of, but called to belong to the one who calls us. Now this is the distinctively Hebrew flavor to the word Ekklesia. In Greek it is simply an Ekklesia, can belong to anybody.

As I've indicated, political or any other flavor, give it any flavor you like. Anybody can gather a group together. But in the Old Testament whenever you find this word and in the New Testament it has this added significance.

Christians are not just simply an assembly of any kind of people, but they are an assembly of people who have been called, called out of every other dominion over them from under every dominion in order to belong to the one who calls them.

Now you may have sometimes wondered why is it that we have this word church both in the King James and in the NIV. You know the word church doesn't really mean assembly at all. I know some of you have grappled with this because some of you have mentioned it to me.

Why did the translators of the King James Version for example, going back all that far, why did they translate this word Ekklesia by another word coming from another root altogether? Sorry to be involved with grammar this morning.

Why did they do it? The word church comes from an entirely different base. Probably from the Byzantine Greek meaning belonging to the Lord. And the emphasis there is, underlying the word church, the emphasis is this concept of belonging to someone.

Well the point is you see that in the Old Testament whenever this word is used of Israel it refers to her not just as a gathering of people but a gathering of people belonging to God, to Jehovah, to the Almighty God.

And in the New Testament the term Ekklesia has that same flavor. It constitutes a people who belong and belong to their Lord. And the translators of the King James Version and evidently of the NIV thought that that was sufficiently important to introduce this word church here which really is no translation of the word Ekklesia at all.

But it adds this flavor to it and it is lost in this main flavor that is given it. It's not just an assembly, not just that we've been called, but we've been called to be the Lord's. Can you see the point?

Can you see the Lordship going out? You're not just a person who's had a little bit of experience of God. You're not just simply a person that has been washed in the blood of Christ. All this is involved.

You're not just a person that has known something of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. All that is involved. But listen friend, you've been called to belong. To belong. You are not your own. You're bought with a price.

Called, called out, called to belong to the one who calls and then in so, in being thus called, we are called together. In being called out of and called to belong to the Lord of the church, the Ekklesia is necessarily called together as a new community.

And of course, that emerged in the New Testament in a very wonderful way, the story of which one is never tired of reading in the book of Acts. But let's not forget this, that it didn't end with the book of Acts.

When Peter came to write his first epistle, he says something which half the church of the 20th century have forgotten. Or should I say, half the Christians of the 20th century have forgotten. You know what he said?

As you come to Him, I'm quoting from 1 Peter 2, 4 and 5, As you come to Him, the living stone, that is Jesus Christ, rejected by men, but chosen by God and precious to Him, you also as living stones are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Do you see the point? Everyone whom Jesus calls to Himself, He builds into the church. Builds into the church. Have you been built into the church? Many people want to be lone Christians, lone wolves.

You know, you should never be a lone Christian. You should always belong to the church because poor Peter says, If you're coming to Christ, He's building you in. If He's building you in, you should acknowledge it.

Take your place with the people of God. They may not be as worthy as you are. You may find that they're not up to the standard you'd like them to be. My friend, your coming won't take it down very much.

It may build it up. But because this is the pattern in Scripture, God expects that everyone who is called is built into, into the fabric. And He says Jesus is doing that. And if Jesus is not doing that, it is only because people are rebellious against the concept of God and of His church.

I remember my last visit, I think it was, to the United Kingdom. I was out for a walk one day. I came across a group of builders. They were involved doing something or other. I'm not sure what they were building.

But there were two squads of men. One squad was actually involved in the building. But then there were two or three men. They were dismantling an old building. And I watched them for a while. And what they were doing is this.

They were salvaging bricks from the old building in order to incorporate them in the new. And I watched the process. They got the bricks as whole as they could. Generally, they managed it very well. And then they put them in a pile.

And then one man was just getting rid of the old cement that was clinging to the old bricks so as to clean up the old bricks and the old cement in order to incorporate them in the new wall, in the new building.

Brothers and sisters, this is a process that goes on spiritually. You and I are taken out of the old building of the Adamic stock. And the cement, the things that made us stick, made us cling to the old life, God, by His Spirit and His Word and in the fellowship of His people, gradually gets rid of the old cement.

He strips us down to cling, to put new cement upon us that enables us to cling to one another. He builds us in. Have you been built in? Are you a loner this morning? God sets the solitary in families.

And He wants you to know something of the belonging, a sense of belonging to the family of God. He wants to build you in. Don't sin. Don't run away. Now there are other concepts here. I can't add any more or I shall never be able to come to the other one I want to refer to.

One other point that I can just refer to is in being called together, we are being called for a purpose. That comes out in the passage in Matthew chapter 16. We are called for a purpose. God has something for His church to do and to do together, to do as an army, to do as a people who belong.

Now can you see the implications of lordship here? You don't belong to this entity until you're called. See, we are dead in trespasses and sins by nature. We are literally, spiritually dead. Oh, we may love a little bit of religion that we can form and fashion after our own ideas.

We don't mind doing that. You add one doctrinal tenet and I add another and it gives us a sense of achievement. This is our church. This is what we believe. This is our charter. This is our church. This is my institution.

God have mercy on us. That's not the church. The charter is given. The terms are set. There is a lord to the church before it was founded. And if you are in the church, you've been called by the head of the church by the power of the Spirit and the proclamation of His Word.

You've been called in and you've been called out of and if you haven't come out, you can't come in. There must be a coming out in order to come in. Many people don't become members of Christ because they are not prepared to turn their backs upon the unbelieving, hostile, evil, pornographic world.

My friend, you've got to leave that world if you would be saved. You've got to turn your back on Sodom, ancient and modern, and to come into Christ. And He becomes your sphere of living. And don't tease yourself.

Don't tease yourself by any form of ratiocination or rationalism that you can belong to the two worlds because you cannot. You've got to cross a line and you've got to say no to the world. Hands off. You've got to say yes to Jesus Christ.

You shall. He's Lord. He's the Builder. He sets the terms. He is Lord. He's not just another member with whom we confer about things from time to time. He's the Lord. Now come with me to the next. Jesus is the bridegroom or the husband of the church which is viewed as His bride.

Christ the Bridegroom of the Church

You encounter this image. Excuse me. That's what comes of getting excited, isn't it? Praise the Lord. Now you encounter this image in a number of places in the New Testament. It's found actually in the Old.

Way back in Isaiah chapter 62, we are told that God was Israel's husband. I am your husband, says the Lord. John the Baptist was the first to introduce it into the New Testament. I'm not going after the details this morning.

But then Jesus Himself took it up and used it in a number of places. For example, when John the Baptist was a little bit puzzled that Jesus and His disciples didn't fast, Jesus told His disciples to tell John, How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while He is with them?

The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them. Then will they fast. You see, He's introducing the concept of the bridegroom and the husband of the church right there. You find it in many other places.

Now, what is the significance of this metaphor of the church? The church is the bride. Christ is the husband. The bridegroom. What is the distinctive about the concept of Jesus Christ as the husband or the bridegroom?

Well, a bridegroom's love or a husband's love is first of all a love that has made its choice. Made its choice and committed itself. Now, it may be that some of you this morning think you're in love with someone else but you haven't committed yourselves.

Let me shake some of you up. It may be the time has come for you to commit yourself. Don't lead a girl up the garden path or the other way around for that matter. But that's not my business this morning.

Our Lord Jesus Christ has committed himself to his bride. He's not been flirting with her. He's not been making vague promises or professions, but he's committed himself. He's chosen her. He's singled her out.

You know what you do when you become married. You look around the whole world and you look at the people of the opposite sex and you bring them down perhaps to a short list of three. Oh, I shouldn't say that, should I?

What do you do? But ultimately you choose one. Now, I didn't do that, so please don't bring that against me. But the point I'm getting to is this, you see. Ultimately, ultimately you exclude everybody else unless you live in a polygamous society.

You exclude everybody else and you say this is the one and you become that person's husband. Now, the glorious thing about this image is this. It tells us that our Lord Jesus Christ has committed himself in love.

He's not made vague statements about his care for us or his love for us, but he's drawn us to himself and he's committed himself to us. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is the greatest love story ever told.

It speaks of an undying love for the most unworthy objects, a love that is so often ridiculed even as it is coldly rejected and refused. No lover ever came so far or stooped so low or offered such a sacrifice to win his bride, but he did.

He did it. And he's committed himself. Let me add to that, he's not simply committed himself, he's covenanted with his bride. Now, there can be a commitment which is short of a covenant, but Jesus Christ has covenanted with his bride.

That is, he has committed himself as far as it is possible for him to go. He has put his character on the line. He has put his good name on the line. And he says, look, I will on no condition cast you off if you come to me.

I will love you to the very uttermost. And he's given us two wedding rings or an engagement ring and a wedding ring. I don't care how you think of it. He's given us two symbols. He's given us two rites which prove this.

And that's what the two sacraments are meant to be. They are signs and seals of the covenant intention of our blessed Lord. Whether you are immersed in the waters of baptism or whether the water is poured upon you, don't lose the significance of either.

It means this. Jesus is saying, as sure as I have cleansed you from my sin of which this water is a symbol, your sins will never be allowed to come between you and me again. Only on a temporary basis.

Never eternally to separate us. I'll not allow it. I've loved you with an everlasting love. And when once I set my love upon you, I'll not give you up. And when we come to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and let me remind you, good people, two weeks from today we shall be meeting at His table.

What's the meaning of it? Well, there are many aspects of it, but one is this. It's just as if the husband were to take the bride's hand in his again and take the wedding ring off for a moment and put it back again.

And say, I'm choosing you again. And I want you to be sure and sure as sure can be that I'm choosing you again to keep you my own. I don't care what your sins have been. I love you still. In fact, you see, this is a conquering love.

The Apostle John puts it like this. We love because He first loved us. What do you mean, John? Well, what he means is this. We are only capable of loving God with Christian love and of loving one another with Christian love because the love of God has overcome us and it has transformed us and it has found a way into our hearts to make us new creatures.

And we are able to love just because He loved us. Now look at the implications of lordship here. I've gone very quickly over that. You must kindly spell it out and read it up in your own private time.

The implications of lordship in that metaphor. All their multitude in us. Let me concentrate on perhaps two or three. First of all, once again we see in this image of the church the primacy of Christ's love which brought the church into being.

In the previous metaphor we said we referred to that little term at the heart of Ecclesia, placis, calling. Who calls? The head of the church. He calls men and women to be His own. Now you see it's the same truth but in a different guise, in a different garb.

What is this? He loved me. He drew me. And I followed on. He set His love upon us. The fact is we were all unlovely in our natural state. Not only were we unlovely but we were hateful to God. We were disobedient.

We despised His law. We desecrated His every commandment from the first to the last. We turned His cosmos upside down by putting ourselves, the creature in the center and putting the Creator on the circumference or putting Him into limbo.

We turned everything upside down. So the apostle Paul doesn't hesitate to say that we were hostile to God and we were enemies of God. But He loved us. Why are we here? How do you explain the fact that you're in Christ this morning, believer?

I'll tell you there's only one explanation. He loved you despite your sin. Now I'm going to read you a passage this morning which you may never have heard read from a pulpit before. No passage to my mind expresses that love for the unlovely better than one in Ezekiel.

The Love That Chooses and Restores the Unworthy

The language is picturesque, but it is terribly daring. And it is expressive of the glorious reality that lay first of all behind God's love for ancient Israel and behind the love of the same God in Christ for the Israel, the church.

Now listen to this. Lest you think it's not in the Bible, you look it up afterwards, Ezekiel 16, 2 -14. Listen to this. But please listen carefully. Don't miss anything. Son of man, says God to Ezekiel, confront Jerusalem with her detestable practices and say, this is what the Sovereign Lord says to Jerusalem.

Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites. Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. On the day that you were born, your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloth.

No one looked on you with pity or had compassion upon you enough to do you any of these things. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field for on the day you were born you were despised. Then, says the Lord God, then, says God, I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood.

And as you lay there in your blood, I said to you, Live! I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew up and developed and became the most beautiful of jewels. Your breasts were formed and your hair grew and you were naked and bare and you were lovely.

Later, I passed by and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.

I bathed you with water and I washed the blood from you and put ointments on you. I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put leather sandals under your feet. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments.

I adorned you with jewelry. I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck. And I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears, and a beautiful crown on your head. So you were adorned with gold and silver.

Your clothes were of fine linen and costly fabric and embroidered cloth. Your food was fine flour, honey and olive oil. You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen. And your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty because the splendor I had given you made your beauty perfect, declares the Sovereign Lord.

Men and women, I ask you, did you ever come across such a representation of absolute love as that? When you and I were in our blood, God in infinite compassion loved us. He chose us. Now, the next thing is, the continuity of that infinite love keeps the church in being.

And here again we see the amazing, lordly love of our Savior. Were it not for our Lord's undying and abiding love, we would have been cast aside a long, long time ago. You see, we make promises, but we break them, every one of us.

We begin to do something, and we pack it up, every one of us. We rebel, and we break the commandments of saints that we broke as sinners. Someone expressed this truth to me recently in terms of a most painful confession that emerged from a startling realization.

Distressed with his own lack of growth as a Christian, this believer of 25 years said to me that it had just hit him between the eyes. It is as if the Lord had spoken to him so clearly, he said. For 25 years you've been coming back to me, you've been confessing the same sins, almost in identically the same words.

For 25 years you've done that. And it had just come home to roost. It's true. Why hasn't the Lord given me up? Am I presuming upon the grace of God? How would you answer a man like that? I turned him to a passage, some words from which we know very well, but we don't know the context.

In the book of Lamentations in chapter 3, I asked him to read these words. Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed. For His compassions never fail. That we know. But we scarcely give a thought to what is said before it.

Why are His compassions new every morning when we rebel against Him and are unprofitable servants at best? Why? It's because of His unchanging love. He's determined to love His people through to the end.

Now, of course, it is the prophet Hosea who out of his personal experience proclaims the sovereignty and mastery of divine love most daringly in the Scriptures. You people who don't read your Old Testament, you miss so much.

I would encourage you get back to your Old Testaments. Listen to this story. When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, Go take to yourself an adulterous wife. That's a command for you.

That's contrary to the normal practices of God. But he had a special message to declare to the nation. And the special times and the special condition of the nation demanded something right out of the ordinary.

Go and take yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord. So, he married Gomer, daughter of Diblaim. And she conceived and she bore him a son.

Now, you go on from there and what you find in the next chapter, chapter 2, is a hideous story of how Gomer, Hosea's wife, played the harlot. How she went after one man and another and gave her body and gave her mind, gave her soul away and was untrue to her husband.

Finally, she became a prostitute and left her home and left her husband. And then we begin to read in chapter 3. Listen to these amazing words. The Lord said to me, Hosea is speaking, Go, show your love to your wife again.

Though she is loved by another and is an adulteress, love her as the Lord loves the Israelites. Though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes, so says Hosea, I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and about a hummer and a lethic of barley.

You see, she had sold herself. She had become a slave. She had become a prostitute. And Hosea buys her out of her prostitution. And then he turns to her and he says,. Then I told her, You are to live with me many days.