What Is the Church?

Good morning, everyone! Happy Holy Day! I certainly appreciated the special music. One of the things Mark Graham has infected me with has been... you like that word, Mark?

Has been trying to get into the minds of people in the Bible, especially the disciples and some of the things that they might have been thinking. So I especially appreciated his song in that context. Have you ever come across something that you just couldn't describe in words? I have to say, as I get older and older, it happens to me more and more because I forget words. And I start playing this sort of charade throughout the synonyms kind of a game until my wife, whoever I'm talking to, understands what it is that the word that I'm trying to grasp. But you know, our usual situation when things like that happen is that we do exactly that. If something comes along, we don't know how to describe it. We grasp onto things that we do understand, and we try to connect those ideas in a way that works and that might be descriptive. You know, there's an example of that in the Bible. John's vision in Revelation 9. I'm not going to turn there, but you might recall his vision of the seventh seal where he lays out all of these crazy, outlandish things that he's seeing. We believe now that he's talking about modern technology of warfare that we have, but he uses words of his time because that's all he's got to work with. He talks about locusts with powers like scorpions. He talks about shaped things that are shaped like horses prepared for battle. Faces like men, hair like women's hair, teeth like lion's teeth, sounding like chariots running into battle. And it's what we do, right? When there's a new technology, something new comes along. We don't quite have the words to describe it, and we don't have an English teacher like Joe Mango to correct us for mixing metaphors. And so we do the same thing in our language. Now, some of you might have heard a few of these descriptions before. The locomotive. What was the locomotive first known as?

An iron horse. That's what people had to tie to. Horses carried large burdens. They were able to move as fast as anything that we could harness. What about the movies? When we go to the movies, where did the word movie come from? Some of us probably remember that. Moving pictures. It's the only thing that people could think of describing when the first cinema came around. The fact that it had pictures and it moved, so we'll call it a moving picture. And we work from there. In more recent times, we've had things like cellular telephones. And of course, some of us today probably have digital wallets. We use words and things that we can understand. Another good example of this is the automobile. You might remember, for those of us who are older, that when the automobile, the car first came along, what was it called? The horseless carriage. That's all that people could think of. And in fact, the entire concept of what a car should look like harkened back to a carriage. You look at the early cars. They resembled carriages. They had big wheels. People didn't sit inside a cab. They sat on a front seat like you would when you were driving a carriage. When I was looking around a bit, just for interesting examples for this sermon, I ran across an 1899 patent diagram. And it was for something called the horsey horseless. The horsey horseless is a patent for an automobile, a car of that time, 1899, and it had a fake horse head on the front. And as far as we know, it was never actually built. But it was designed so it could move down the road, looking like a regular carriage, so it wouldn't spook the other horses that were on the road. So these things run deep. So right about now, you're probably wondering if you're actually in the right place. The sermonette sounded like it made sense, and this really doesn't. Well, we're coming around to that now. This day was a turning point in human history. And it was a time with the coming of the Holy Spirit that things happened, a construct came to this earth that people did not know how to describe.

They didn't know what to do with it. The ultimate outcome of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit that happened on this day at Pentecost was what? It was a formation of the Church of God. And when you think about it, you know, today in the Western world, we just take it for granted what the Church is, what a Church is. It might not be the right definition, but everyone's got one. You can't move through a small town in any part of the Western world without encountering what?

A church. If you're in Europe and it's a big city, it's a cathedral. If you're another part of the world, it's a small town. It might be a small stone chapel. You see them perched on hills. You pass them here in Ohio, other parts of rural United States, anywhere you go, you pass a church. It is so deeply woven into Western culture. And even in the East, you can go through all kinds of different places. I've visited a lot of different cities across Asia, and there are churches in unexpected places and unexpected locations, and you see them everywhere. Style building, the form of worship, how they go about doing things is very different from culture to culture.

But have you ever thought that on that first day of Pentecost, this day way back there in 31 A.D., nobody had any idea what a church was? Nobody had any idea what a church was. And they had to figure out, what is it? What do we do with it? How is it supposed to behave? What's its purpose?

Who's in it? How are they in it? Why are they in it? It was all a blank slate. And you know, the New Testament in many ways is an effort to define the church for posterity, for us, for everyone that would come across. Have we ever thought about that as we read the New Testament? Even the books that cover the time period of Jesus Christ were written, of course, after the death of Jesus Christ, after the foundation of the church, and contained in them as well clues for what it is that the church is. So today, in the short time that we have together, I'd like to just take a bit of a random walk across the New Testament and look at the different metaphors that we see for the church. Because when you encounter something that's strange and different and new and you don't know what to do with it, what do you do? You describe it in terms that people can understand. And that's what happens throughout the New Testament. So as we go through it, we're going to kind of fly across a whole bunch of different things fairly quickly. I'd encourage you to think about what is it in these different metaphors or analogies that resonates with you? What bears additional thought? What's common between the different metaphors that we encounter? What does each deliver as a new or a different facet or insight? And how should it cause me to change the way that I think or act as an individual? Because, of course, the church is not just a collective. It's also made up of individuals with God's Holy Spirit. So as a starting point, I'm going to pause. I'm going to ask all of you to write down on paper if you have it. Pull out your phone if you'd like. Send it in an email to yourself. Think of three to five metaphors for the church that you can think of.

I feel like a little Jeopardy game. And I'll take advantage of this water here and have a nice cool drink of water. What are some of the metaphors or analogies that you can think of?

Bonus question. How many am I going to have in this sermon? And can you guess how many?

I actually forgot, so I can't give it away right now. All right. Hopefully you've had a chance to jot something down or make a mental note. Let's start with the first one that I noted. The well-known one is of the church as a body. The church as a physical body. 1 Corinthians 12 is the place that we usually turn. That's probably the most prominent. There are a number of scriptures for any one of these. I tried to resist keeping everybody through lunch, so I've just jotted one or at the most two scriptures for each one of these. Let's go to 1 Corinthians 12. We'll read verses 12 through 14. Here, Paul writing to the Corinthians, again calling on something very familiar to them to try to describe what is this church thing and how is it supposed to function? For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body being many are one body, so also is Christ. For by one spirit we were baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves are free, and have all been made to drink into one spirit. For in fact the body is not one member, but many.

So what he's doing is he's using here the analogy of the body. We all have one, so we can think and understand and figure out how it functions together. He's making probably the most simple point, which is it's one body but it's many members. And so he's tying together this idea that through the Holy Spirit the many individuals who are part of the body are still part of one single body. You see how much the word one crops up during this passage. And so he's really trying to point that out. And it ties very closely to what we've been focused on in that way as a church. And John Elliott and the sermons that he's given about the idea of oneness and having to focus on that again as a church and as a body. God has one Holy Spirit. He doesn't grant different spirits. He grants a single Holy Spirit. And through ways that we can't fully describe in human terms, that Holy Spirit, which is not physical, is the one, the same Spirit that animates all of us and also knits us together as a body. The other thing that's so important, as I think we understand in this analogy, is the different functions that different parts of the body have. Paul goes pretty deep into that. We're not going to do that today, but we just think of all the various different things. Hair serves a purpose. But if you're walking down the street and you need to pick up something that you dropped down the street, you're not going to use your hair to do it, are you?

Most of us are going to use our hands. Why? Because the hand is a member of the body within the vigil fingers, which together has a specific function, happens to be a different function than the hair on your body has, or your fingernails, or your kneecap, or anything else. We sort of just intrinsically understand this as human beings, as we're functioning, and as we're doing things. But this, again, metaphor, this analogy, this example of something that Paul brings forward, as a way that people who are trying to understand what is this church thing and what is it that we all do when we're together because we've got this spirit, we want to be together because of that spirit, because it's a single spirit and draws us together. This is a way that he talks about functioning. And so the emphasis here that's being drawn is this combination of being one, but having many different functions along the way. I couldn't resist the urge, so I will throw a second scripture in here, which is Ephesians 1 verse 22, and that's where it lays out one other incredibly important aspect of this analogy of the body, and that is in verse 22 of Ephesians 1, he put all things under his feet, referring to Jesus Christ, and gave Jesus to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all and all. So it's a body. Each part has its function, animated by the Holy Spirit, but there's no question who the head is. There's a reason human beings aren't born, or any other animal for that reason, for that matter, are born with two heads. It's just you can't direct things when you've got two heads, so Jesus Christ is clearly the head directing on what happens in the body. So as we move on from this first metaphor, I'll just tell you one lesson that I thought about when I think about the working of the Holy Spirit, the church that was formed on this day, and that is that as I think about it, I know and reflect that I have to respect what every member, every human member, brings to the functioning of the body as a church, even when it's very different from the function that I bring. That's probably the most challenging thing. I know it is for me. When people think differently, they react differently. They act differently than I do. I have to think about not making a judgment about that and recognizing the fact that God, for very good reasons, gave variety into a single body. What is it this this analogy brings to you? Let's move on to the second one. The church has a building and as a temple. I combined these. You could have them as separate. Both are used as examples. We'll turn to Ephesians 2 for this one. The church has a temple or as a building. Ephesians 2 will start in verse 19. Here Paul writes the Ephesians. He says, You are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. So we see some elements that are the same in terms of one building made up of many elements, in this case talking about building materials or stones, but it brings out some other really important elements as well. First of all, the foundation.

So clearly lays out the fact that part of the foundation is the prophets. We understand we're not under the old covenant anymore, but the old covenant is absolutely expression of God's mind. The prophets were people called by God for a specific purpose. The church is built on top of that foundation. It's the underpinning of what we are as God's people, and it's incredibly important for that reason. Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone. That's one that has so much meaning in it as well, one that we're not going to be able to go deeply into today. But you know, when the ancients built, they built mostly of stone. We're not as used to that today. And once the foundation was laid, the cornerstone was incredibly important. Why was that?

It was put on the corner because, when you think about angles from physics, the cornerstone covers all of the angles of a square building. And so every measurement of how that building was going to be built was measured off the cornerstone. You knew if one side of that building was straight, because you could measure the angle off one side of that stone. You knew if the other side was straight for the same reason. You knew if it was level, because you could measure off the top of the stone. You knew the vertical, because you could measure it again, going up off the side of the stone. Every part of the building, making sure it was cohesive, that it was going to stand, that it was plumb, that it had all of the integrity that it needed, was measured off of that cornerstone as a reference point. That's how Jesus Christ functions with the church. Not only as we saw in the first analogy as the head of the body, but as that reference point, the place from which we measure everything that we do. So we think back to that connectedness. We think of the fitting together as well of a building. You might remember stories of how the temple was built when Solomon was given the job of building the temple. What was one of the unique elements of how the temple was built? They wanted to be very careful on the temple site. There weren't going to be clanking of tools and hammers and metal and chisels. Every stone in the temple was actually dressed out completely in the quarry. And so when it came to the building site of the temple, the stone was brought there and it was laid in place. It had been measured in advance. The dimensions of it were known. It had been worked on in the quarry, and then it was carried to the construction site to be placed in its place. We're talked about as living stones, part of the temple of God. Being prepared, being measured, being set, being exactly as needed in the place in the building where we need to be.

And lastly, this talks about the temple being built as a dwelling of the Holy Spirit. Again, something I encourage you to think about and reflect on if you decide to look into this more in the future. God dwelled in the temple, the ancient temple of Israel. When you think about the old stories of the tabernacle and then the temple, there were years, actually centuries, where there was something called the Shekinah glory that existed above the temple. And as crazy and weird as it might sound, there was actually a flame. You know, we have the flame of fire that led the children of Israel. It would sit down over the tabernacle. The first temple was also understood, and you could see the dedication prayer that Solomon asked, and fire came in. We understand that there was flames even above the temple for many years, as long as that first temple stood. It was a sign of the dwelling place of God, and that's what we are as a church as well.

So what lessons do you carry away from these things? The thing that I thought about as I consider the working of the Holy Spirit in us as a church collectively, in us individually, is the need to keep going back to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the ultimate measure of how all of us should be as stones in his spiritual temple. And when you think about it, that's one of the things that's incredibly important in a church, isn't it? You know you're in the right place when you're in a church that refers back to Jesus Christ as the head, as the cornerstone, as the measure of everything that we should be as Christians.

Not to an individual, not to an organization, not to any kind of a philosophy, but to Jesus Christ himself as that cornerstone. The next one that I came up with as I went through and thought of the different metaphors and how the apostles, the writers of the New Testament were trying to describe to people at that time what it is, what it means to be part of the church, is a family. Probably one that many of you had as well.

The family. Let's go back again to Ephesians 2.19, where we were a moment ago. Here Paul, writing to the Galatians, as we again just read, Therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but your fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. So it might not be immediately evident, but Paul's actually talking about a progression here of status, of belonging. First he uses the word strangers and First he uses the word strangers and foreigners, then he moves to citizens, then he moves to members of a household. So when you think about it, and what we don't understand as well in the language here in our culture, strangers and foreigners, you know, just like it is today, back in the time when Ephesians was written, the idea of who's a citizen, who's not, who's allowed in the country, who's not, what the rights of people are in the country, were all topics of the day.

Strangers and foreigners were two different categories of people who lived in that land. One of those categories were people who were just passing through. They were there for a short time, they were strangers, they were going to live there for a short time, maybe just travel through and move on. The next set was foreigners, people who didn't have citizenship, but by paying a small amount of tax, this referred technically to people who were essentially resident aliens.

They had legal status in the country within the part of the Roman Empire that they lived in, and they were able to exercise certain rights in exchange for paying their taxes, but they didn't have full rights as citizens. And we don't have time to go into all the examples of Roman citizenship that are in the Bible as well, but they still didn't have that right. He talks then next here in Ephesians 2.19 about citizens, fellow citizens with the saints, the fact that as we've been drawn into this thing called the church, we have a brotherhood with the saints, those people who were called before, whether it's the prophets, whether it's the apostles, but fellow citizens, we're all part of the same thing, and it doesn't end there, goes to members of the household of God.

And so this idea that we progress, and we're not just passing through, we're not just living there as non, as aliens, resident aliens, I guess you'd say. We're not just citizens, but we're part of the family. We'll go to Romans 8, verses 14 through 17 to read about this a little bit more. These are powerful verses when they talk about what it is the Holy Spirit does with each and every one of us as we receive it. Romans 8, verse 14. As many of us as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.

I think we understand here it's talking about sons and daughters, children of God. For you did not receive the Spirit of bondage to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by which we cry out, Abba, Father. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. If children then heirs, heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we might also be glorified together. Now again, there's so much in here. I gave a sermon going back a year, a year and a half ago about adoption.

In the Roman world, adoption was incredibly different than what it is today. In fact, many of the emperors of Rome were people who were adopted. Adoption was a device used in that time period to essentially formalize somebody who was your protege, somebody that you were bringing up to take on authority, power, responsibility, certainly politically. People would adopt adults, and it was a way of saying, this person that's been my protege for years and years and years is so important to me.

I am now positioning them officially for this position, for this inheritance to take this power. And so it was something that carried a very high level of prestige with it and position. So we need to understand that in terms of how we're talked about, a spirit of adoption. Family also means acceptance, lifelong devotion. I think about, for example, sports analogy coming up. Sports teams. The Cleveland Cavaliers just finished their season, right? Fantastic season. Probably a missing ingredient or two if they're really going to make a run next year.

So what are they going to do? They're going to keep their same team in place because they care about the team that much. No. That's not how a team works, right? The team is, you pay money to people and they perform. And if you need a different component in your team, what do you do? You trade them away or you let them go because you're not getting what you're paying for, and you bring somebody else to try to do that. Is that how a family works? I certainly hope not. Why is it that God didn't say that he called us to a team?

Why did God not say that he called us to a corporation, a company, an enterprise?

It's because God doesn't switch us in and out because we didn't do so well yesterday.

God has made a lifelong commitment to us. That's what family is, right? We think of a family that functions the way that it should. That family is there to back up the members of that family, no matter what it is that happens, no matter how awful it is, and the family is there for them. And people should know that they can always come back to their family, no matter how much difficulty and how much trouble they've gotten into. That's why the analogy of family is used. We're not a team. We're not a company. We're a family. We're bound together. Now, what comes along with that? We don't choose our families, do we? Plenty of great stories out there about brothers and other family members of presidents of the United States and the things that they've done to embarrass their family. They didn't get disowned. They're part of the family, and you got to live with that, right? It's part of that commitment, that lifelong commitment that you have.

What is it that you think of when you think of this analogy of the church as a family, of yourself as a family member of the family of God? The inheritance that we all have individually.

My lesson that I wrote down is I thought about the working of the Holy Spirit, and this analogy of the family is exactly what I said a moment ago. A family is not a corporation or a team. Where those who don't cut it are simply let go. It's a lifelong commitment. That's what God has to us and what we have to have to one another. Let's go to the next analogy. I've lost count already. Someone can remind me later. And that is a bride. This is a fairly familiar one, I think, to most of us. Church being talked about as the Bride of Christ. Let's go to Revelation 19.

We'll read verses 7 and 8 of Revelation 19, and we'll consider this analogy a metaphor. Let us be glad and rejoice, John writes, and give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. And to her it was granted to be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. We know, of course, that that's referring to the church being prepared and being ready for Jesus Christ. Matthew 9, verse 15. I guess I did say I was only going to use one scripture for each one, but I guess sometimes. Matthew 9, 15. Jesus said to them, Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them and they will fast. So here's Jesus Christ referring to himself as the bridegroom. Revelation, we see the church being referred to as the bride. What does this teach us about the relationship between God and his church? It might seem odd, especially for us guys, to think of ourselves individually as brides, kind of weird, but as a church, as a collective, this talks very much about what it is that the relationship is between Jesus Christ and that body of believers. You know, I think about the level of devotion that a husband has to his wife, and you think especially of that time leading up to the wedding, as a husband is seeking to do everything he can to establish life together, to be deferential to the needs of his bride, to make sure that everything goes well. Think about the care and the preparation that takes place before a wedding. Again, we don't have time to go into all the wedding customs at that time, which teach all kinds of very interesting lessons. You know, one of the things that a bride at that point in time would do would be to sew an elaborate wedding dress, which would take time. And so the preparation and the time that would go into that, not so different from what we think about today. How long does a typical wedding take to plan? Probably six to twelve months people take in our culture to plan a wedding, which is why a certain number of people just elope instead, I suppose. But people take a lot of time and care, and that's something we need to think about when we consider ourselves as individual members of the church. We think about the church as a group, the time, the preparation, the attention, the care that's given, like a bride preparing for the wedding. And then you think as well about the anticipation.

If you talk to somebody, especially a bride, who's going to be married in the next few months, pretty much anything and everything going on in their life is going to revolve around that wedding, isn't it? You think about that as an analogy or metaphor in terms of what was being brought across here about the idea of a church as a bride. A bride, a lady looking forward to her wedding, is preoccupied, and at the very forefront of the mind is everything about how that wedding is going to be a wonderful and a special day, and it's focused around those things. So what is it that you think about? What is it that you need to focus on more, consider further in this analogy of the church as a bride? As I thought about it, my lesson when I think about the working of the spirit is my own anticipation. Does my anticipation of God's kingdom consume my full attention? Does it animate everything in my life the way that an impending wedding does for a bride? Something, certainly, that I need to think about, something we might all consider.

The next one is a mother. So these are sort of mixed metaphors, and it just strikes me how much the writers of the New Testament must have been just searching for ways to describe something. And, you know, the church is something spiritual, even though we've got plenty of words from plenty of centuries to describe it. Even today, we need to rely on all of these different elements of it, because to describe the church and what it does and how it functions and how it operates is just not... it's a spiritual thing. It's not a natural, physical thing that we know. Let's turn to Galatians 4. Hear Paul writing to the Galatians? He's using the analogy of himself as the shepherd or the pastor of this church, saying, My little children, for whom I labor in birth again, until Christ is formed in you. Sort of personifying himself as the pastor of the church, the caretaker, and the effort he puts in, puts it in the terminology of a woman in labor, a mother. And then in verse 26, he refers to the Jerusalem above that is free, which is the mother of us all.

So we think about mothers and everything that they bring to the table and what they do for their children. Loving care that they provide to an infant that's helpless and really can't give anything back, especially during that time when they're first born. But it's just loving, nurturing care, giving life, enabling growth, bringing to maturity, meeting a whole variety of different needs, whatever they are that come along, no matter how noisy they are, no matter how messy they are, no matter what time of day or night that they come. And as much as men help out, the mother is at the front lines of all of those things. And there's a deep connectedness and love that goes beyond any appearances, isn't there? There's a reason that the old phrase, only a face only a mother can love.

There's a reason that phrase exists, and it's because it's true, right? Mothers love their children no matter what. And that's what brings us to the place that we are so often, isn't it, as adults, because our mothers perhaps saw things in us and encouraged things that nobody else in the world saw. And we were able to accomplish things because of that. You know, I think of a lady that I met after a number of years. I went to my 40-year high school reunion this past August, and was talking with a lady who'd been in my first grade class, which was a lot of fun just meeting up with old school comrades from first grade. Ended up being connected with her on Facebook, like I am with a number of people they went through school with. And when I looked at her posts, she had a lot of posts of her son who has Down syndrome. And what's just immediately apparent from those posts is the depth of love that she has for her son, and what she does for him, the opportunities she gives him, the activities that they do together. And it made a real impact on me. How as a mother, somebody who might not in our society be viewed as somebody that's got a lot to give, still receives all of that love from his mother. That's the analogy of the church that's being used here. How we as individuals are to be to those who are with us as members of the church, as well as to anybody who comes into our orbit. And also the recipients that we are of that as the church nurtures us. So the lesson I took away from this metaphor, analogy, and how the spirit works in animating the church is the importance of the church as a place where people experience the same unconditional love, encouragement, and growth that they receive from a mother.

The next one, which you might have on your list, is a flock. There's a lot of talk about flocks of sheep in the Bible, and the church, of course, is referred to as a flock in Jesus Christ as the shepherd. John 10 is one noteworthy passage where that comes into play. John 10, we'll read verses 11 through 16, and we learn here both more about Jesus Christ as the shepherd, as well as ourselves as a flock. Starting in verse 11, I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep, but a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. The hireling flees because he is a hireling and doesn't care about the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep, and I am known by my own. As the father knows me, even so I know the father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold, and them also I must bring, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd. Again, that idea of one out of many, one being formed from many, comes again. In Luke 15, verse 4, I couldn't resist including this as well because it's so incredibly important about God's view towards mankind. Luke 15, verse 4, what man of you, having a hundred sheep if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? It's just such a great expression to me that there's no such thing as acceptable loss in the eyes of God. The math doesn't work, does it? The economics don't work to go after one and leave the other ninety-nine behind. But God doesn't work according to that logic in the way that he as a shepherd works with his flock. The sacrificial love of the shepherd really comes across strongly here, the fact that the shepherd is there to guard the sheep, to protect them no matter where they're going to go, and to go after them if necessary. The value of every single one, the care of every need, and also the vulnerability of the individuals. Sheep are not known as the smartest animals. You don't really talk about cunning sheep.

It just doesn't happen, right? And in a spiritual sense, that's how God is talking. We know there are wolves out there. We know Satan moves about as a roaring lion, which is part of this whole analogy of us as a flock. And Jesus Christ is there. He laid down his life so we could have that victory and that protection. But it also reminds us that we need to recognize our own frailty, our own weaknesses, and our need for Jesus Christ, our need for the flock. A sheep that's in the middle of that hundred sheep and the flock is pretty safe. Lots of wool around you to insulate things. The sheep that's wandered off, often some other meadow, is easy prey. The lesson that I'm reflecting on as I consider this metaphor and the working of God's Spirit with his church is that the shepherd is instinctively known by his sheep. You know, it's something that when there have been troubles in the church from time to time, that's certainly been my prayer, which has been, you know, helped me to recognize the shepherd's voice. Do I recognize the shepherd's voice? That's a prayer that should always be at the top of our minds. And we have to think about as well, does my involvement in the church aid in a focus on the shepherd, the hearing and the understanding, the sensing of his voice above and beyond everything else? The next analogy that I came upon was the analogy of the garden, vineyard or field. Now, this has a lot of different elements that we're not going to go into, but there is one that you probably can already guess, and you're probably already reciting it in your head, which comes from John 15. We read it at the Passover. We'll read verses 1 through 5 here talking about the vine. It's a lot written about plants and fields and good and bad ground. I didn't include that. That can cause us a lot of opportunities to reflect and think more about the church and how it operates in our lives and how we operate within it. John 15 starting in verse 1.

I am the true vine and my father is the vine dresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that bears fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You're already clean because the word which I spoke to you abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches, he who abides in me and I in him bear as much fruit, for without me you can do nothing. I think a lot about these types of analogies when I'm doing yard work. I was out probably five, six years ago now doing some work and we've got some marsh area behind our house where there's some pretty tall trees and people don't usually go back into it. It's not our property, it's common property, but we were starting to get some poison ivy that was encroaching on the yard and in a certain tree in particular it was probably a 30-40 foot tree. I could see the vine wrapped around it and you know how you can see the poison ivy sometimes just exploding off the branches and I thought I've got to do something about this. I'd noticed it late the previous summer and so I went out early in the year and what did I do? I went to the tree and there was a vine, I mean it was an inch and a half in diameter, just snaking its way up the tree with this poison ivy. So I just took an arborist saw and I just cut a few two to three inch chunks out of that vine. We haven't had problems with poison ivy on that tree anymore.

This is exactly what it says here, isn't it? You know, you think about our connection to Jesus Christ. You just have to sever one small segment of that connection. The entire vine is dead. We understand that when we look at plants, especially vines and how they they grow and they go all over the place, but you go to the source and you cut off that connection to the source and life is gone. It's only a matter of time. It takes a little while, especially for those leaves on the edge to wither away, but they do. It's predictable and it's going to happen.

That's what Jesus Christ is getting across here when he's talking about it. The attachment to Jesus Christ, again, that's essential for the church, for individuals, for the body as a whole, but also the need to bear fruit. He was talking probably here about a grapevine. I don't think he was talking about poison ivy. Yeah, that'd be interesting to think about. If poison ivy bore fruit, what would it look like? But he's talking about the vine, the fact that grapevines are pruned back. You take off the deadwood, the unproductive parts of it. I don't know grapes well enough to describe exactly how it's done, but I know that by cutting back the vines in the right way, when an expert does it, you're able to get much more fruit out of that vine. You're harming the plant. You're chopping off pieces of it, and that's certainly how it is for us sometimes as we go through different experiences in life, isn't it? We feel like there's whole pieces of us being hacked off sometimes, but that's God pruning in order that we can bear more fruit. And that's really my lesson as I thought about it and reflected on this analogy and the working of God's Spirit, which is that a life free of trials is not possible and as hard as it is to say, it's not desirable. When times are difficult, it's that much more important to seek the close attachment to God, to Jesus Christ as the vine, and to really focus on bearing fruit and asking for that pain, that cutting back to be productive in our lives, that we can learn from it, that we can develop, and that we can grow. The next one. Oh, there's a lot of these, aren't there?

A city or Jerusalem or Zion. Another analogy that's used for the church. We're going to go for this one to Hebrews. You might remember that a city is mentioned several ways in Hebrews 11, a chronicle of faith. We'll read just a handful of verses here. We'll start in verse 10, talking here about Abraham, who waited for the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Makes me think back to that foundation of the apostles and the prophets as part of God's spiritual building. Talks in verse 13 about all those who died in faith and they confess that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Not citizens of the earth, but strangers. And so the way that people who are part of God's spiritual family view their existence on earth. Not bought into in a part of the society and the culture in the way that everybody else is. Verse 15, or verse 14, those who say those things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And that's how we feel, isn't it? We seek that homeland, that kingdom of God, which is a true and literal kingdom as we understand it. A different country that we seek. In verse 16, they desire a better that is a heavenly country and therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God for he has prepared a city for them. That ultimate city is of course his kingdom. The precursor of that city is God living within all of us and us collectively as a church through his spirit, exercising his will through us in the way that he will throughout his entire kingdom when that comes in its fullness. Philippians 3.20 also, as we know, talks about our citizenship being in heaven. Again, using this analogy as a city. A lot of different directions we can think on this one. You know, cities have their own cultures and values, don't they? Got their own food. You know, if you go to Philadelphia, people are going to tell you, go get a cheesesteak, right? People go to Alleria. People don't tell you to go get the Alleria cheesesteak. It's not part of the culture. Each place has its thing, right? Their sports teams, their food, their terminology, their leisure activities. I tell people I come from Minnesota and I thought ice fishing was a normal thing in the winter until I left Minnesota, right? Regional differences, it's the way things are. God's city is no different. It has its own values. It has its own culture. It has its way of interacting. It has completely different things and we need to put ourselves within that city, within its values, within its culture. It also comes with different rights, responsibilities, laws, and privileges. Different things to reflect on. My lesson as I think of that analogy and the working of God's Holy Spirit is how do I need to more fully align my values and the culture that I really adhere to and how I make my decisions to the heavenly city. Not to the culture that I live in day to day. The values perhaps in my workplace or my company or a club I belong to or something else, but how do I align my values and culture to the heavenly city that God has called each and every one of us to? I'm just scrolling ahead. This really is my last one. Last one. Priesthood. This is another analogy that's given to the church as a priesthood. Let's go to 1 Peter 2. We'll read verses 5 and 9.

Again, it's funny if you go with an English teacher's eye towards these things. It's pretty funny somehow how all these metaphors get mixed together in some of these passages. 1 Peter 2.5, you also as living stones are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.

How exactly a house and a priesthood fits together is a single analogy we could figure out, probably because the priest served in the temple, house was referring to a temple, living stones building a temple, and the priests that serve there. But it talks about us offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. And in verse 9, you're a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his special people, that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness to his marvelous light. Just as priests in their linen garments were white and clean and sparkly, and they could be seen from a distance as what they were, is what we're supposed to be, living sacrificial lives, offering spiritual sacrifices, as we read in other places in the New Testament. And Hebrews 4.16 talks about us coming boldly to the throne of grace. And if we remember in the Old Covenant culture, it was only the priesthood that could come actually to offer sacrifices in that place that figuratively, like, was God's throne. We're told that as individuals with God as Holy Spirit, we can come right before that actual throne of grace and make our petitions directly to God. So we, as those who have been born of the Spirit, have the right and the ability to come right before God's throne. We also have with that the need to live our lives as spiritual sacrifices and to live with purity and holiness. You think of all the washings that the priests had to do, all the things that they had to do in order to create sacred and holy space, and we need to think about that in a spiritual context as well. So here, my lesson in context of the priesthood was the need to live by God's Spirit to be set apart for holy use as a priest of his new covenant. You'll come away with different things to focus on and think about, and I hope you'll give some thought to it. So I didn't count how many that was. I think maybe it was nine or so. Raise your hand if you had other analogies that I didn't have. All right, we've got one or two. I'll be interested in hearing about those over lunch, and I would challenge you as you read the Bible, as you read the New Testament and the days and weeks to come. I guarantee you you'll find more because there are others. So the Day of Pentecost marked the dawn of the Church of God, as we know through the outpouring of God's Spirit, and the writers of the New Testament spent a lot of their time, the remaining years of their lives, working to understand and express what this meant for everybody who would come after, including all of us. This thing called the Church that nobody had experienced before, that they were to build. And these often scattered metaphors are used to express this elusive spiritual truth in human words. So for a very concise definition, what is the Church?

It's a bodybuilding temple, family, bride, mother, flock, garden, vineyard, field, city, priesthood, as we all know. And there are more. But at the end of the day, the Church is all these things.

And we have our individual role to play as well. Like anything spiritual, it's impossible to really capture. A few commonalities that came out as I was thinking through it that I'll just leave you with. One, Jesus Christ is the key. You know, so many of these analogies go back to Jesus Christ, the cornerstone, the vine, the head of the body. It's impossible to escape the centrality and just the dominion of Jesus Christ in all of these things that have to do with the Church. The other thing that comes across over and over and over again is a combination of many different things into one. You think of the body, you think of the temple with the different stones and so forth. The city has the different components. And the third one is the idea of absolute commitment and attachment. You think of those analogies of mother, of shepherd and flock, of family, that commitment, that binding together that happens and is enabled through God's Holy Spirit. So each of these metaphors shows us something unique or different in nature. I've shared with you the observations I had as we've run briefly through this wide array of metaphors. And I encourage everyone to dig more deeply into these to understand more about how it is that the Holy Spirit is working individually in each one of us and probably even more importantly collectively as a body through all of us and how it can work more powerfully as we go forward as a church, the Church of Jesus Christ.