I Have Loved You

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

Malachi 1 and the Call to Sequential Expository Preaching

So Malachi chapter 1 and verse 1. And today I'm excited to get back into sequential expository preaching. I texted Sam yesterday and said I am so looking forward to just being back in a book. If you've never preached before or never preached a topical sermon, you might not appreciate just how much it works your mind in a different way to think about some of these topics and to not have a textual guideline to follow.

And so perhaps it's easier, I'm not sure, but I just love going verse by verse, chapter through chapter in our Bibles. And I know that whatever we find there is biblical because that's just where we're going.

And so with our attention turned to Malachi chapter 1 and verse 1, I want us together to read verses 1 through 5. Verses 1 through 5 and this is what it says. The oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi.

I have loved you, says the Lord, but you say, how have you loved us? Is not Esau Jacob's brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.

If Edom says, we are shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins. The Lord of hosts says, they may build, but I will tear down and they will be called the wicked country and the people with whom the Lord is angry forever.

Your eyes shall see this and you shall say, great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel. With that, let's go to the Lord and ask for his help. Our heavenly father, your words, oh God, your words and not mine are what this church desperately needs this afternoon.

Lord, you know far greater than any of us know that we do not, we cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Oh, would you please, Lord, show us yourself, show yourself gracious to us today by feeding your people from the rich storehouses of your word.

As we begin this study, father, in the book of Malachi, show us the wealth of the glorious truths that are found in the Old Testament that your people would see for themselves how rich and how wonderful and how edifying this 77 of our Bibles is.

And Lord, show us the wonders of these often neglected books in the minor prophets. Lord, for your namesake today, bless the preaching of your word as I seek to feed your flock from the whole counsel of God and get all the glory for yourself, all the glory that can be had in this church.

Lord, we ask that you would speak and that you would help your servants, all of us, to listen. We pray this all with the approval, with the authority, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, we are starting in Malachi, but before we get all the way to Malachi, I actually want to shift our focus for a second to the book of 2 Timothy in chapter 4.

Now, you can keep your finger in Malachi, you can turn there to 2 Timothy 4 if you'd like, but I want to highlight for a second the words of the Apostle Paul as he wrote them to Timothy. In 2 Timothy 4 and verse 1, the Apostle Paul said this.

He said, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching.

Now, why do I start Malachi 1 with these verses? It is for this reason. These are the marching orders of every preacher that stands before Christ's church on the Lord's day today. Whether you were to find yourself in Serbia or Singapore, in Uganda or the United States, in the Cayman Islands where it's much warmer than here, or in Canada, these words are a binding summons of every preacher that is to preach today.

Preach God's word. And yet, as each and every preacher seeks to faithfully carry out this solitary objective, the emphasis of each sermon, if we were to go to all of those countries and all of those different places, would be slightly different depending on the text of Scripture and depending on the context of that local church.

Sometimes the primary emphasis, the primary task of the preacher will be to reprove and to rebuke, as we see in the text. Sometimes it will be to instruct and exhort. At other times, it will be to convict.

But this afternoon, I think I have one of the best, one of the most dangerous, and by my estimation, one of the most difficult tasks to fulfill as an expositor of God's word. And that is because my task today is not to rebuke.

It's not to convict. But in fact, my task as I see it this afternoon is to convince all of you, all of you of something that I think many of us, if we are honest with ourselves, struggle with. I have the task this afternoon from this early passage in Malachi to convince you, dear Christian man and dear Christian woman, of God's immense love for you.

Of God's love for you. If I've observed one thing that seems almost universally true amongst all sincere Christians who have a high view of God and a realistic view of self, it is probably this. That while I should preach on the holiness of God and on the justice of God, I think that very few of you need to be persuaded that God is holy.

That God is just. That God is a God who will, in the end, repay. That he will satisfy his wrath, if not on the cross in an eternity amongst those who have rejected Christ. I think even fewer still need to be convinced that you and I deserve that wrath of God.

That wrath of God for an eternity of eternities. Very few of us need to be convinced of that. But almost every single one of us, and probably especially a few of us, especially, need to be reminded that God is love and that every last one of us, if you are a Christian, that that God who is love, that he loves you.

That he loves you intimately and individually and, if I can say, immutably, meaning unchangingly. I stumbled across something that Paul Washer had wrote this week and he said this. He said, you ask me, what is the single greatest act of faith?

He says, to me, it is to look into the mirror of God's word and to see all of my faults and to see all of my sin and to see all of my shortcomings and then to believe that God loves me exactly as he says he does.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we probably have a defect in the reformed camp, if I can call it that, where we make a great deal of God's holiness as we ought to. And we make a great deal of God's justice and we make a great deal of God's aseity, his self-existence.

But then we make a very little thing of God's love and of God's love to us as Christians. And so this afternoon as we start this study in this prophetic book that deals with, you'll see in verse 1, the oracle of the word of the Lord, oracles of judgment towards a cold and a loveless nation.

At the very foundation of this book, you need to understand this to get the rest of the book. At the very foundation of the book, we discover this. That it has always been, and by God's grace it will always be, God's kind will to show unfailing love toward his undeserving people.

That the same God who is love is the same God who loves you. And so today I have the privilege of obeying the scriptural summons to preach God's word. And as I do, I'm duty-bound to relate to you what I see as two important things.

I'm duty-bound to give us an explanation as to who this Malachi is that we see in verse 1. And then in verses 2 through 5, I'm duty-bound to show you the immense and the sovereign love that God has for all of his people.

Which if you are in Christ, includes even you and even me, despite how undeserving we are. So as we do with every book, and I relish in this, we get to start in Malachi chapter 1 and verse 1 as we make our way through the text.

And so with our attention there, we see that Malachi writes the oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. If you're following along in the insert in your bulletins, this is point number one.

We're going to look for a moment at Malachi the messenger. Now typically a sermon is only ever about one thing. Today it's going to be about one and a half things. It's going to be about the love of God and Malachi is the half thing.

We need to understand who Malachi is. What has happened that we have now received this book in our Old Testaments? And how do we place it in its context? And it's always a difficult thing to know exactly where to begin when we're starting a new book in the Bible.

As I was scheduling, if you're on one of our service teams, the schedule is updated. Go on church track, that's my public service announcement. But as I was scheduling and looking at the book that we're doing after this, I saw Ephesians chapter 1 and verses I believe 1 and 2 and I thought, I think I'm going to schedule Sam to preach on that text because it's always hard to start a new book.

Where do you start? How do you start? But this dilemma I think is even more pronounced when we're starting in a book that is at the end of the New Testament. How much of the Old Testament do we recount before we get to Malachi?

I think most of us have a fairly sound understanding of the biblical timeline of events from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. But I think to enhance our understanding, we need to understand a little bit of the where and when of this prophetic book.

And so we're going to look at that a little bit together, to grasp the chronology of this redemptive historical timeline. I suppose to map ourselves in Malachi, in God's timeline. And so we're going to start very close to the beginning.

In Genesis chapter 12, we see a new character emerge on the pages of Scripture. Kids, I'm going to pose to you and we'll see if your parents can help you. Genesis 12, who is the new character that arrives in the Bible?

Does anyone know? Not Noah, that's Genesis 6, but you're close. Any adults? Genesis chapter 12, Abraham. Abraham, or Abraham as he later is known, after God created the heavens and the earth, and then the subsequent events of the fall, and of the flood, Noah, and of the Tower of Babel, and then the confusion of the languages, God called a man named Abram to himself.

Now often when we read Genesis, we tend to read some of the history of the Bible back into Genesis chapter 12. But there's something that we need to appreciate about what happens in the calling of Abram.

That when Abram was called by God, this was a man who dwelt in complete obscurity in the Middle East. This was before there was any identified people of God. There was no Israel. There was no national Israel.

There was no religious Israel. There was just people doing whatever was right in their own eyes, scattered by this confusion of languages. And so Abram was a man who dwelt in complete obscurity. And likewise, it's very likely that he was a man who was devoted to worshipping false gods and household deities.

We see that later cropping up in his family. By all accounts, Abram was an undeserving man. A man who was undeserving of both God's attention, let alone his affection. And yet, in Genesis chapter 12, we see that God sovereignly called Abram to himself.

And if you have your Bible to Genesis 2, in verse 2, you will see that he said to him, I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. And then through Abram, what we found is that his lineage continued into Isaac and then through Isaac to Jacob in spite of his older brother Esau.

And God, through that lineage, established a nation, the nation of Israel. A group of people that I would call God's very imperfect but chosen people. And because of God's purposes for that nation, he gave them a land of their own.

And he blessed them with judges, and then with kings, and then with prophets, despite their hardness of heart. If you've ever read 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, you'll know that those books tell us about these days.

When eventually the one nation of Israel became a divided two nations of Israel in the northern kingdom and of Judah in the southern kingdom. And it seemed we're always trying to test God's patience. But despite all of that patience testing, God maintained a remnant, a thin line of people that were faithful to him all throughout.

Nevertheless, because of these nations and their persistent disobedience over several centuries, God gave them over to their enemies. Now this is usually where I think a lot of Christians begin to get fuzzy on the details.

Because a lot of this storyline ends and then we enter into the prophets. And then we get a little glimpse at Nehemiah and Ezra. But this is what happened. That the northern kingdom and its capital Samaria, so that's Israel in the divided nations, fell to the Assyrians in 720 BC, 720 years before Christ.

And then about 120 years later in 597 BC, Jerusalem and the remaining kingdom of Judah likewise fell to the Babylonians. And so began a period of captivity that lasted until about 538 BC. When Persia, we read about Cyrus the Great in our Bibles, when Persia defeated Babylon and Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem.

And then in the years that followed, if you're familiar with your Old Testament, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah take place. When the people of Israel begin to go back to their homeland and they rebuild the temple and they rebuild the walls of Jerusalem despite a lot of difficulty.

And the Jews slowly returned to their home. But the nation, as far as it was concerned, when we think about what happened in Ezra and Nehemiah and around that time, was a far cry from what it once was.

If you were in Israel at the height, at the very height of its prosperity, when Solomon was king and gold and silver were plentiful, the population of the Jews at that time, historians estimate, was about two million to two and a half million people.

It was for its land size a large country. But when Israel ended up going back to their homeland post-exile, the way we understand it, there were only about 50 ,000 who ever went back to Jerusalem. And so the nation was a far cry from what it once was.

And this moment, when the nation of Israel returns to their homeland, begins to set the stage for this book. So if you like dates, this might help you to map it out in your mind. In 538, the Israelites were permitted to go back to the nation.

Then in 458 BC, roughly, Ezra the priest returned, so some 80 years later. And then a few years later, in 445, Nehemiah returned to rebuild the walls of the city. And so where does Malachi fall in all of this?

There's a lot of debate about dates. As I've done all of my studying, I've kind of picked a mediating date of about 440 BC. Right around the time that Nehemiah is building the wall in Jerusalem, that is when Malachi is ministering to the nation.

And as we're going to see over the next couple of months as we go through, many of Malachi's disputations deal with the same ethical issues that we see confronted in Nehemiah and in Ezra. As a matter of fact, Malachi goes through six disputations, and we'll see it here right in verse 2, this question and answer debate that goes back and forth.

And in it, he deals with, and if you're familiar with Ezra and Nehemiah, you'll notice this, he deals with mixed marriages and divorce, Israel's failure to tithe, Sabbath-keeping violations, corrupt priests, and then other societal problems.

And so when we land in Malachi chapter 1 and verse 1, it is like we're being airdropped back into post-exilic Jerusalem after the nation is just beginning to resettle and rebuild following their exile.

The nation is in shambles. And Malachi says in Malachi chapter 1 and verse 1 that this is an oracle of the word of the Lord by Malachi. Now we could go deep, deep, deep into who Malachi was exactly, if Malachi even was a real person, some would debate.

But one thing we know for sure, Malachi means, and you might see it as a little footnote in your Bibles, my messenger. And as a result of that, people have often asked, is this an anonymous prophet who wrote this book, and he's simply a messenger of the Lord?

Or was this a real man named Malachi? I would suggest to you, based on my study and on the consensus, or perhaps a good degree of agreement from conservative Bible scholars, that Malachi was a real man, and that Malachi was the proper name of that real man.

And the reason for this is twofold. Because in the first instance, it has always been the historical practice to identify prophetic books by the name of their historical author. So for instance, when we read the book of Isaiah, which means salvation of Yah, or a shortened form of salvation of Yahweh, we don't say, ah, that was written by an anonymous man who enjoyed salvation from God.

But no, we say that it was written by the Isaiah of the Bible, the 8th century prophet, who we read about in other places in our Old Testaments. Likewise, if we read Obadiah, which means the servant of Yah, we don't say, ah, it was written by an unknown servant of Yahweh.

But in fact, Obadiah was a real name that was given to a number of children all the way from the Iron Age to the Persian Age. And if you look in your Old Testaments, if you have a concordance, or look online even, how many Obadiahs there are in the Bible, it's because it was the name of a real man and a real prophet.

And likewise for Malachi. This is how the Jews did it. This is how the Jews understood it. To ascribe the name Malachi at the top of the book. I was reading the Septuagint this week. Malachi is at the top.

It is because they understood, they believed, they knew that Malachi was a real man who actually authored the book. Sometimes I wonder if Bible scholars, liberal Bible scholars don't just call into question the authorship of the book, so that then they can undermine the contents of the book.

But the second reason why we think this was a real Malachi is because there is a historical Malachi. Extensive Jewish tradition tells us that Malachi was a member of a group called the Great Synagogue.

This was about 120 scribes and prophets and teachers in the Second Temple period who collected and preserved the Old Testament canon. And so even to this day, if you were to look up the Great Synagogue, you will see Jews, modern-day Jews, praising God for members of the Great Synagogue, including a historical prophet named Malachi, who were part of preserving this 77 of our Bibles from Genesis to the end of Malachi.

And so the reason why I think this is important is for this purpose. As we begin to approach the book of Malachi, I want us to have confidence, both from the biblical and the extra-biblical evidence, that the confidence that this is in fact, as verse 1 puts it, the word of the Lord to Israel.

We don't often give a lot of thought to the canon and why the books of the Bible are in the canon that we have, but we can look at the history of Malachi and its preservation, and we can trust this is the word of God.

The Pronouncement of God's Love

Now, that is the context of Malachi. Let us look then at the content of Malachi. And to do that, we'll start in verse 2. Verse 2, it says, I have loved you, says the Lord, but you say, how have you loved us?

We'll stop there for the moment. Here I want us to look at point number 2 in our outline, which is the pronouncement of God's love. As we will see, this is now the first disputation concerning God's love.

Sorry, the first disputation between Malachi and the nation of Israel, and it's concerning God's love. And as I said at the onset, this is foundational, not only to our understanding of this passage, but it is foundational to the entire book of Malachi.

It is no accident that verse 2, the first disputation, deals with these four words, I have loved you. As we will see, Malachi, if he's building a tower, if he's building a scaffold, this is the foundation upon which he is building now.

You could say, if you wanted to summarize Malachi in a couple of words, Malachi is a love letter, a letter expressing God's love to an unfaithful and an adulterous spouse. It is one constant throughout the book that God's love is certain, and yet Israel's love is certainly in question.

And so, as Malachi pens these words, he uses a very interesting phrase. Notice here that he doesn't say that I love you on behalf of God. He doesn't say I love you in the present tense. Nor does he say I loved you in the past tense.

But in Malachi 1 and verse 2, he combines the two tenses, and he says in the perfect tense. Boy, I'm glad I'm studying Greek. God tells his people, I have loved you. Now that sounds a bit awkward. I think of our brother Alex, if he were to greet his wife in the morning and say, I have loved you.

What his wife might, how she might look at him. What do you mean, you have loved me? Is that in the past? What exactly does that mean? And it could be an awkward translation, but in fact, it is an accurate translation.

And it's important to our understanding of God's love. The reason why we don't see many phrases like that in our Old Testaments or in our New Testaments is because when an author uses the perfect tense, like Malachi does, they're conveying something very important.

They expect the reader, as we're reading it, we would go, that is different. What's going on? And begin to take note, to be gripped by what is being said. And so what does this mean? Why would God speak through Malachi and say, I have loved you?

What this means is that unlike the love of people, we think about divorce rates in the world. We think of the way relationships work in this world. People fall in and out of love every day, depending on how they feel that day, perhaps depending on what they had for breakfast that morning.

But in stark contrast to that fickle and faint-hearted love of people, God's love is consistent. It is perfect. It is constant. It has a verifiable track record. He not only loves his people for who they are or who they aren't today, but God has loved them and continues to love them.

Now, if you aren't understanding what I mean by the perfect tense, as I was thinking about this this week, I came up with what I think is a good example. Some of you will know that I will often message people in this church to check in and to let you know that I am praying for you.

As a tent-making elder of this church, I don't have an abundance of time, but one of the ministries that I can do, regardless of whether I am driving or walking or on my break at work, is that I can be praying for the saints in this church.

And it is one of the richest blessings of my ministry in this church. I truly mean it. That at all hours of the day, the Lord brings you to my mind and I am able to pray for you, regardless of whether I am vocational or not in my ministry.

And I'm usually so encouraged as I am praying for you that I will let you know that I am praying for you. And so you might get a text that says, Brother, I'm praying for you. Sister, I'm praying for you.

How are you doing? Whatever the case might be. And as I do this, I'm often struck by two different things that I could write in those messages. They're two similar statements, but they have very different meanings.

The first statement that I can send to you is this. And sometimes I say this, and you'll understand now when I say it. I am praying for you, in the present tense. And what this means, what this implies, is that I am presently praying for you and for your good.

And it is no doubt a good thing to presently be praying for people. But there is something that I aspire to that is far greater than saying to you, I am praying for you. Something that I aspire to with God's help.

And that is that I aspire to one day be able to message each one of you and say, I have prayed for you, and I am praying for you. I have been praying for you. In the perfect tense, meaning that I have been in a continuous state of praying for you.

Is there a difference? There is. The first statement implies a present action. But the second statement implies a state of being. Of constancy. Not only that I prayed for you today, but I can say, like the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 1 .16, I do not cease to give thanks for you.

Remembering you in my prayers. That is the difference between the present tense and the perfect tense. It is continuous and without ceasing. And so what God is telling his people in verse 2 is that his love is not like our love.

But his love is always turned on. Always 100%. Oftentimes in this church, I know that if I want the brothers and sisters here to sing loud, you get to know as a song leader, some of the songs that we really need to sing loud before this sermon, before this, whatever the case might be.

I know that this church loves to sing, He will hold me fast. He will hold me fast. And I think that we love to sing that song, not because it has the catchiest tune, although I think the tune is good.

It's not because it's got the perfect chord progression, like maybe a group like Hillsong has perfected, just the right swell at the right time to stir a person's emotions. But it's because the words of the song are true.

And we can sing them, and we can mean them, and so we do sing them, and so we do mean them, and so we sing loudly. And in verse two, we read this. We sing this. I could never keep my hold. He must hold me fast.

For my love is often cold. He must hold me fast. Like the Israelites in Malachi's day, our love is not what it ought to be, but praise be to the living God that when he sets his love on his people, he loves his people with a love incorruptible, including you if you are a Christian.

Now, am I reading you into this text? Are we not studying about God's words to Malachi some 440 years before Christ? Can we say the same thing of these words to you, Christian, in your seat this afternoon?

That God says to you, I have loved you.

I say yes.

Not only because it is God's word, but because the Apostle Paul, when he gets to Romans chapter nine and verse 12, immediately takes from this passage, references this passage, and then applies it to the Christian today.

That he has loved you, that he does love you, that he ever will love you. John 1, sorry, 1 John 4, 8 tells us that God is love and that he is in a constant state of loving you, dear Christian. It is as if God is saying, since the day that I set my affections upon you, there has never been a day that I have not loved you.

My brothers and sisters, we don't believe it. How infrequently, how difficulty, or how difficult it is to believe it. And we see it, that this is not a new phenomenon, but in the second half of that saying, I have loved you, says the Lord, but you say, how have you loved us?

When Israel came back, there was the initial burst of enthusiasm as they entered back into their promised land. But now they've been there for, we're coming on a hundred years. And the two million people are now 50 ,000 and change.

The city is still in ruins. There's social disorder in every place. And the people want to know, how have you loved us? We don't experience your love. We don't believe that you love us. We look around, our lives are not accompanied by great success.

Please show us, how have you loved us? And we are not that different from these post-exilic Jews. When we look into the mirror of God's word, and we see our own sin, and we see our own shame, and we see our own listlessness, we assume that God does not love us, that there is no room, that we are not lovely, that we are not lovable, just like the nation of Israel that sinned and then experienced the consequences of that sin.

So we sin and we experience the consequences of that sin. And then we say, how could God love me? And we often, I'll stand at the front of the line, we often poke fun at those sermons where the proposition of the sermon is, God loves you and he has a wonderful plan for your life.

These trite and shallow and superficial sermons, sentimental sermons, that say God loves you, no matter if you love him, no matter what happens, you can hate him, he still loves you, you cannot escape it.

Hopefully you can see that I am not doing this here. This is not a vague statement or a statement, vague statement based on sentimental feelings. This is not a claim found in the seeker sensitive methodology book.

This is a biblical assertion that God brought to the nation of Israel and a biblical assertion that Paul applies to you Christian of the unchangeable nature of God's character and of the unchangeable nature of God's love for you.

Imperfect Christian. God loves you. I don't know what else to tell you, but that you need to believe it. That God is not, he does not hate you. He has not rejected you. He has not cast you aside. Even when you fall into the most grievous sin, he relates to you as a father does to his child.

And does a good father hate his son or hate his daughter when he or she falls into sin? No, but he loves him, he loves her and he disciplines him and her for their own good. And if we could only grasp for a moment the love of God for us, it would change your life and my life forever.

Just to begin to grasp the extent of that love. John Owen. Many of the men, if we're talking about John Owen, we like to have fun with how theologically rigorous John Owen was. Some of you have probably read John Owen's book The Mortification of Sin.

And the Puritan paperback series has done a really nice job of rebranding that book, at least based on the cover.

Of the book.

Because John Owen, if you had the original copy on your bookshelf, the title of that book was The Mortification of Sin in Believers, the Necessity, Nature, and Means of it with a Resolution of Various Cases of Conscience Belonging to It.

That is how John Owen thought in a way that my mind does not think and probably a way that your mind does not think. And yet, in all of John Owen's study, he sought to discover what does it mean? How can a person be nearest to Christ in their life?

And it's really interesting. For all of his studying, what did John Owen learn? He did not say that one is nearest to Christ when they affirm the central tenets of classical theism. He did not say that a person is nearest to Christ when they understand the doctrine of eternal generation.

But he said, we are never, never nearer to Christ than when we find ourselves lost in a holy amazement at his unspeakable love. That one of the greatest things that a Christian will understand, one of the highest mountains that we will ever climb and get to the top is to discover this, that God loves me and you in spite of all that we are.

In spite of the fact that we do not deserve it. In spite of the fact that there is nothing in this world that can commend us to God.

And yet,.

He loves us. Such a mystery. We cannot even begin to explain. But I'm not just here to tell you that God loves you as good and as important as that is. Now you all need to understand it better. But I'm going to strengthen the case.

I'm going to bolster it by helping us to understand the basis of that love for us. In the second half of verse 2, and then verse 3 and 4, he goes into this more. Israel or Malachi offers the rhetorical question, how have you loved us?

And God replies, is not Esau Jacob's brother, declares the Lord. Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to the jackals of the desert. If Edom says we are shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins.

The Lord of hosts says, they may build, but I will tear down. And they will be called the wicked country and the people with whom the Lord is angry forever. The basis, I want us to look at for a moment, the basis of God's love.

Now each of these points could be 20 sermons. But I want to touch briefly on how these two and a half verses in fact demonstrate an unshakable basis for us to believe and to understand and to appreciate God's love for us as believers in Christ.