The Building He’s Constructing

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Transcript:

Glad to see you here this morning. We’re going to be in the book of Ephesians, the book of Ephesians, chapter 2. And for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been walking you through what I’ve called pictures of the church, some of the word pictures, some of the metaphors that God uses to describe the church in the New Testament.

And I’ve explained to you that we use word pictures all the time to understand things. And I know I’ve told you this story before, but it’s my favorite example of a word picture. So I’m going to tell you again, the time that Benjamin asked me, what are taxes?

Because that’s a hard concept for a kid to understand, especially he was probably five at the time. He asked me, what are taxes? We just sat down for lunch.

So I picked up his hamburger. I ate 40% of it and handed it right back to him. And then he understood.

That was a picture of how taxes work. Okay. We use things like that all the time.

And I know some of you think I’m mean for telling that story. I bought him another burger. Didn’t starve my child.

But we use word pictures all the time to understand things, to describe things to other people, and God does that throughout the New Testament. We’ve looked at a couple of these so far. We’ve talked about last week the church being a temple.

We’ve talked about the church being the family of God. We’ve talked about some of these ideas already. And each of these word pictures, each of these metaphors for the church in the New Testament, explains something to us about how God views the church.

It tells us something about how we’re supposed to operate. They tell us something about what we’re supposed to be. They tell us something about how God relates to us.

And so by looking at these, we can get a better idea, I think, sometimes of what we’re supposed to do. Because we get it in our minds culturally. A lot of what we understand about church is the picture that church culture has painted for us.

And so we think the church is about this tradition or that tradition, or we come in and we sing three songs in an offertory, no more. And I’d love it if we sang more songs. I hope you don’t take that as a criticism of you.

I enjoy it when we sing together. Sometime Brother Ken could lead us in four songs, and that’s okay, right? If we deviate from the plan a little bit.

or, you know, that we have church, you know, we think of it, it’s something we do between these certain hours on this day of the week. Well, the picture that God paints throughout the New Testament with some of these images is very different from the way we understand church. We get these ideas in our brain about what church is supposed to be from the picture that culture and church culture has painted for us, and sometimes the picture that God paints throughout the New Testament is very different from that.

And I’ve told you before, some of the things we do not see are that church is a place we go to. We don’t see a picture of church being an activity that we do for a couple hours a week. Now, with all these pictures that God paints in the New Testament, it’s always much more involved than that.

There’s always more of a commitment than that. So this morning I want to look at the book of Ephesians, chapter 2. And we’re going to look at another picture that God paints of the church in the New Testament.

it. And I’m going to start by reading the passage to you from Ephesians 2, 13 to verse 22. Ephesians 2, starting in verse 13, and going to verse 22.

It says, But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who made both groups one, and tore down the dividing wall of hostility. In his flesh he made of no effect the law, consisting of commands and expressed in regulation so that he might create in himself one new man from the two, resulting in peace. He did this so that he might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross by which he put the hostility to death.

He came and proclaimed the good news of peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

In him, the whole building being put together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you are also being built together for God’s dwelling in the Spirit. Now, there’s a couple of different pictures that are shown in this, a couple of different pictures that he uses to describe the church.

One of those is what we talked about last week, the church being a temple. And if you remember back to last week, I explained to you that doesn’t mean the church building is the temple. It doesn’t mean that the church building is extra sacred than any other spot.

Now what happens here, the worship of God’s people, the corporate worship of God’s people, that is a sacred activity, but it doesn’t mean that there’s anything magical or mystical about the building. When God talks about the church, he’s talking about the body of Christ. And we looked at what it means last week to be a temple. And in the description that we’re given, it doesn’t mean that we as the church isolate ourselves from the world.

We are supposed to be in the world, but not of the world. So we don’t isolate ourselves from the world, but we are supposed to be distinct from the world. We’re supposed to be in the midst of the world and stand out and be different because that’s what God’s called us to be.

And he mentions the household of God. We talked two weeks ago about the church being God’s family. And that explains to us how God sees us and how God relates to us, that we’re no longer slaves, we’re no longer enemies, that we’ve been brought right into the household and we’ve been adopted as his sons and daughters.

That gives us an idea of how God sees us and really how we ought to see one another. But in addition to these things, this passage builds on both of those ideas to present the church as a building. Now you may be saying, wait a minute, you just said the church isn’t a building.

The church is not a building. The church is the body, it’s the group of people. But God here, writing through the Apostle Paul, does compare this body of people to a building, and specifically to a temple.

But he goes in a little bit different direction from the passage we looked at with the temple last week, where he was emphasizing how we’re supposed to be set apart and holy. This time he’s emphasizing, by talking about this building, he’s emphasizing the work that he does in us. That we are a temple.

We as the church, we as the people of the church are a temple because of the work that Jesus Christ does in us. That’s what he emphasizes throughout this whole thing. And he uses the picture of a building to do it, especially as we get toward the end of that passage.

Now, and it’s only, it’s clear throughout this text that It’s only because of Jesus Christ and the work that he does in us, that we have any use to God, that there’s anything holy about us, that there’s any purpose. All of those things are not because we’re so good. They’re all because of the work of Jesus Christ. He’s the one that gets credit all throughout this.

And we have to be very careful as a church and as individuals in a church. When we go out in the community, we have to be very careful about the message we portray. Because a lot of times what the world hears from us talking about our faith is that we are better than them.

We have to be very careful. We have to be very careful that we do not portray a message that the message of this church is not about how good we are. The message of the church should always be about how good Christ is.

And we could blame them for misunderstanding, but really, I mean, if we’re communicating something that we don’t intend to communicate, we need to communicate better. And we need to be mindful to communicate to the world to give him all the credit that the message of the church is not how good I am or how good Trinity is or the people, how good Christ is, is the important thing. And he gets the credit in all of this.

So we see this building metaphor. And in verse 13, he talks about gathering people from various places. And so when I looked at the end of this passage and he’s talking about the building and I start going backward, then I can see how he started on the metaphor before.

He started on the picture before he even mentioned the building. But he says in verse 13, But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. If you look earlier in Ephesians chapter 2, he’s talking about the divisions between the Jews and the Gentiles. Because there were believers in the church at Ephesus who were from both backgrounds.

Some of them had been saved out of a pagan Greek background. Some of them had been saved out of a legalistic Jewish background. And they all had come to faith in Christ. And now they’re learning how to live and work together as a church.

And sometimes it’s difficult because these were not groups that particularly liked each other. There are groups in our world that don’t particularly like each other. But when you come to Christ, what did I tell you the first week?

All of those other identifications and all those other things, all your previous identity, it’s not eliminated, but it’s eclipsed by our identity in Christ. It all becomes secondary. So you had Jews and Gentiles who didn’t particularly care for one another, but he’s saying it doesn’t matter because you’ve been brought into one thing by Jesus Christ. You’ve been brought into one body. You’ve been brought into one fellowship through Jesus Christ. Galatians talks about this.

It says there’s neither Jew nor Greek, nor bond nor free, nor male nor female, for you’re all one in Christ Jesus. All the old divisions start to melt away. That’s why we should be able to.

. . And I’ve talked about this already during this series.

I’m going to repeat myself, and that’s okay. God doesn’t have to tell me something just once for me to get it always. We should be able, because of Jesus Christ, to come together regardless of what our differences are on the outside.

Jew and Gentile should be able to sit together and work together in the church as fellow believers in Christ, because Jew and Gentile become secondary to our identity in Christ. In that day, they had slaves and free people. Slaves and masters sitting together, part of the church. It doesn’t matter what our social standing is, what our economic standing is.

We should be able to come together as one in Jesus Christ because that identity is eclipsed by our identity in Christ. You can apply that across the board. Black, white, Native American, Hispanic, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat. It doesn’t matter.

Any of these false secondary labels that the world tries to use to divide us, those things should melt away. and they become of secondary or less importance when it comes to comparison with our identity in Christ. And he says he gathered those who were near and those who were far. He brought those who were far away near.

When he’s talking about being near, he’s talking about the Jews. And when he’s talking about those who were far away, he’s talking about the Gentiles. Because the perception among the Jews was that the Gentiles were far from God.

Look at them over there. they’d have to put two stamps on a letter just to mail it to God. They’re so far away.

And the Jews thought that they were better. Now a great deal of the New Testament is devoted to the idea that you don’t get closer to God when it comes to salvation just by having the right ancestry. That you had the Pharisees and many of the Jewish leaders, their hearts were so full of sin and so distant from God, they were just as far away as the Gentiles, if not more so.

But there was this perception the Jews were close to God, the Gentiles were far away, and Paul said it doesn’t matter, because through the blood of Christ, those who were far away have been brought near. And I thought about this idea that he uses of the building, and how somebody, when they’re building, they’re going to gather materials from wherever they need to gather materials, and it doesn’t matter where they came from. And if I’d had time, I thought about that.

I hate when I have great ideas five minutes before church starts. Why couldn’t it have been five days ago? I wanted to go through this room and look at labels on some of the things that room and see where they came from.

But, you know, I’d suspect maybe we’ve got carpet that was woven in India. We’ve got curtains maybe from Vietnam, and maybe the wood for this pulpit came from Canada. Maybe the chairs were made in Taiwan.

Somebody brought all the materials together from the far-flung corners of the world to build this auditorium and to furnish it. When we’re building a house, or you’re putting up a shed, or you’re doing some kind of building project. Very rarely is somebody going to go to Lowe’s and say, no, can’t buy that.

It’s got to come from America. Now there are people out there who do that. But those of us who don’t have millions of dollars, okay, it’s Canadian lumber.

That’s fine. The screws, maybe they were made in Bulgaria. We’re going to get this house built.

And you gather the, you know what, forget countries, you might even have to go to multiple stores. I’m trying to do some repairs on my truck. And none of it’s things that I can go by.

Everything that goes wrong with my vehicle, it’s never anything I can go to O’Reilly or AutoZone for. That’s something I have to order and send off for. And I’ve ordered parts from four different places and four different parts of the country.

God bless the Internet. And gotten them there. I don’t care where they came from.

I’m gathering parts from Florida and parts from Fort Smith, Arkansas and parts from California. And they’re all going to come together eventually, God willing, and be part of my truck. Okay?

A builder gathers parts from wherever they are and brings them to the worksite. And that’s exactly the image we get here of Jesus as he’s talking about building this building for God’s habitation. Just as the building materials are gathered from all places far and near, Jesus, through his blood, gathers people from wherever they are.

Far and near. Gathers to himself people from all kinds of different backgrounds. Now, we probably come from a lot of different backgrounds in here.

And I can ask you some questions this morning. I’m not going to, but I could ask you, how many grew up in church, how many didn’t? And we’d see there’s a variety in here.

How many grew up with both your mom and dad at home? And who didn’t? We’d have a variety.

How many of you grew up in the city versus the country? We’d have a variety. Even today, our demographic patterns are all over the map.

And yet it doesn’t matter because through the blood of Christ, We’ve been gathered in like the builder. He doesn’t care as long as it’s the right materials. He gathers in the materials wherever they came from so that he can use them.

And God has gathered the people of Trinity together from wherever he’s found them, and he’s put us here together for a purpose. And that’s one of the great things that we can learn from this picture of the church as a building, that he’s gathered us by his blood. And it’s not that we’re good.

It’s not that we’re moral. It’s that the blood of Jesus was shed for us, and we’ve entered a new identity in Christ. Now look with me at verse 14. He goes there from talking about gathering the Jews and the Greeks together. He says in verse 14, For he is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility.

He goes on in verses 15 to 16, talking about getting rid of the separation caused by the commandments and the law, all these regulations, and taking the two building materials, the Jews and the Gentiles, infusing them together, putting them together in a way that would work. He even says at the end of verse 15, creating one new man from two, resulting in peace. And he did this, verse 16, so that he might reconcile both to God in one body.

So his goal is to put us together into something that will function and something that he can present to God. A master builder, somebody who’s really good at what they do, can take pieces and overcome the obstacles and make them fit and make them work together. And you can tell that they’re good at what they do because they can overcome those obstacles.

Yesterday, I tried to replace an actuator for the power locks in my truck. And I ordered this actuator. I think that might have been what came from Fort Smith.

I ordered this and it came and I took my door panel off and I took off that waterproof sheeting that’s in there and I started looking. There is nothing in my truck that looks like this part that they say is supposed to fit. I’m looking around.

As a matter of fact, I came in the house and told Charla, I’m not even sure there’s an actuator in there. I saw nothing that looked like it would have pulled the rod on the lock. She said, well, how is it open?

For all I know, there’s little gremlins that live in the door of my truck. All right. and if I were more of a master craftsman if I were my grandfather and in some ways I am but not not to this extent I mean he would have had it soldered and jb welded he would have found a way to make it work I looked in there I spent about 10 minutes looking through the door of the truck and said yeah I’m not I’m not good enough to tackle this and I just put everything back together so we’ll take I’ll learn to live with you know the I’ll learn to live with it until I can’t What I’m saying is if I were a master builder, if I were a master at this, I would have found a way to make that actuator work.

And I think he could have. But I know my limitations. Somebody who’s really good at it, and I watched him do this for years, we’d get a part that was, this part wasn’t off by just a little bit.

Like I said, I saw nothing that even looked like it. But a master at this craft could get a part that was just a little bit off and could modify it and sand something down or maybe put a screw in here and make it work. And he did that many times with stuff on my car.

That’s what Jesus does with us. See, we come in with all these rough edges. And I don’t mean just into the church membership.

We come into the faith out of the world with these rough edges and these pieces that don’t fit and these pieces that bump up against someone else. And somehow he’s in the business of reshaping us and sanding us down and smoothing out the rough edges and drilling a hole here when it needs to be and making us fit together into a church that functions and glorifies him. That’s what’s supposed to happen.

Say, but so-and-so in the church irritates me. Watch out, because he may be about to glue you together. He may be about to drill a hole and put a bolt there.

So, you know, God has a way of causing us to work together. And that’s one thing with the way my grandfather worked on trucks or buildings or anything. You’d look at it and think, I don’t see how that works.

I don’t see how he did this, but it works. Okay, I’m not going to question too much because it works. A master builder can take all those pieces, all the rough lumber, all the screws, all the nails, and put it together into something that works.

That’s what Jesus does. That’s the end goal. You say, well, maybe what we have isn’t working. Maybe it’s you Jesus needs to work on some more.

Maybe it’s me. but he’s this workman who makes the building materials fit together the jew the gentile the slave the free the male the female rich poor doesn’t matter he puts all those pieces together so that we can be this building that’s fit for god’s habitation we see on verse 20 in verse 20 he says that we’re built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with christ jesus himself as the cornerstone. So the church, given this picture of the church as a building, we’re supposed to be built on a solid foundation.

You can tell the difference over time of a building that was built on a good foundation versus one that was built on a poor foundation. You can drive through our town and you can see some homes built in the 20s that were built on good foundations and still are basically sound depending on how they’ve been kept up. And you can see some other buildings that were built around the same time using the same building materials, but you can tell the foundation’s not good because half of the house is sloping forward or something like that.

The foundation is everything. The foundation is everything. And he says that the church is not built on a wavering foundation.

We’re built on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles. He’s talking about the Word of God in the New Testament. And when he refers to these prophets and apostles, he’s talking about those who came and spoke under the inspiration of God and wrote under the inspiration of God so that we would have this treasure in front of us to learn directly from the voice of God.

The prophets and the apostles, that refers to this word of God that we have in front of us. And this is our foundation. This doesn’t change, all right?

Sometimes we have to figure out ways to apply it to new situations, and that’s what we ought to do. Here’s God’s unchanging word. Here’s a changing society.

What does this unchanging word say to this changing society? That’s the correct approach, not society’s changed, so we’ve got to figure out a way to revise this to make it fit. We’re building on the wrong foundation.

The church is supposed to be built on the foundation of God’s word. Everything we do, we ought to go back and say, what does God’s words say about this, because this will not steer us wrong. He said, we’re built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

Now, I know cornerstones are important, but I’m not a builder in that sense. I’m not a stonemason, so I had to go do a little research this week on what that meant. And in their day, especially when you didn’t have laser sights and levels and all that, you had to lay everything according, you had to orient everything according to the cornerstone.

So yeah, the foundation is everything, but even the foundation is aligned with this cornerstone. And if the cornerstone is not right, then the walls are going to be crooked. The floors are going to be crooked.

Everything’s just going to be wrong. You need a cornerstone to orient everything too. And so the church, he says, is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

This word of God is our foundation, and Jesus is our cornerstone. Everything has to be oriented to Jesus. Everything we do should be about Jesus.

Glorifying Jesus, leading people to faith in Jesus, helping people grow to follow Jesus, should all be about Jesus. Folks, even when we read the scriptures, we should be looking for Jesus. We should be looking for how does this improve our walk with Jesus?

How does this help me glorify him? He’s the cornerstone. And here’s the bottom line.

If we’re out of line with the If we’re not aligned with it, then we’re in the wrong spot, and the building’s not going to be right. It takes every stone in the wall being aligned with the cornerstone for everything to be in the right place. You say, what does that mean for me?

Look at God’s Word and see whether or not you’re aligned with Jesus. If my beliefs and my attitudes are not aligned with Jesus, then I need to get back in line with that cornerstone. Well, the whole rest of the wall’s crooked.

That’s fine. Those other bricks will need to move too, but you move where you need to be. And this happens to me all the time.

I’ll have some kind of attitude. I’ll be mad about something. Usually it’s in traffic.

You all know that. I’ll be mad about something. I’ll be about to mouth off.

Sarcasm is my second language. And the Holy Spirit will say, it’s like there’s a little red light inside me. The Holy Spirit will set off that warning.

Are you where you’re supposed to be? And I’ll realize that conviction of the Holy Spirit will nail me and I will realize I am not in alignment with Jesus at that moment. And at that point, whether or not every other brick on the wall is crooked or not, it becomes my job at that point to look back to Jesus and get back in line with Jesus.

And I tell you what, I don’t care if it’s a church of thousands or a church of tens. I don’t care if it’s a church with money or a church with a whole lot of no money. I don’t care if it’s a church with lots of problems or a church where all churches have problems, but some of us just sweep it under the rug, right?

If it’s a church with problems or a church that pretends not to have problems, if each person in the church would just look regularly and say, am I aligned with Jesus right now? And then do something about it. Our churches, all of our churches would be a whole lot healthier.

He’s the cornerstone. And we see in verse 21, verses 21 and 22, he does the work. Again, I said earlier, he gets all the credit.

In him, verse 21, in him, the whole building being put together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you are also being built together for God’s dwelling in the Spirit. He said this temple, this building takes shape so that it can be a habitation for the Spirit of God, but who does it say is building it?

It’s Jesus. You and I don’t become anything to crow about because of our efforts. As we grow spiritually, it’s because of the work of Christ in us.

Because of the work of Christ at Calvary, it’s because of the work of Christ that continues in us to this day as He changes us and He’s given us His Holy Spirit. It’s the work of Christ. He’s the one building the building. And really, when you get down to it, our job is to get out of the way.

Our job is just to be where He puts us and function the way he put us. You’ve got every brick in the wall where it’s supposed to be and doing the job it’s supposed to do. The wall works.

Our job is to. . .

Now, our problem is we’re bricks that can move. In a spiritual sense. We can move.

We can get out of alignment. Our job is to be where he put us, performing the function he called us to. And now Jesus called us to be part of this project, part of the building that he’s building.

Because Jesus, it’s his will. It’s his goal. It’s his mission to reconcile us to God. I like using that phrase.

It’s a biblical phrase. And I think sometimes it’s easier for people out in the community to understand. It’s easier for them to understand than when we say saved.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the word saved either. But I’ve talked to people before about, have you ever been saved? Well, yeah, there’s a tornado that came through one time and somebody grabbed me into a cell.

Not what I’m talking about. Have you ever been reconciled to God? And they may have never thought about that, but we know what reconciliation means.

Reconciliation means you were out of sorts with somebody, you were on the wrong side of somebody, but peace has been restored between you. Jesus, his whole purpose in coming to earth was to reconcile sinners to a holy God. And Jesus wants to reconcile us to God so that the Spirit of God can dwell within us and he can transform us into what he wants us to be.

That verse from Romans 8 that I quote all the time, for whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his son. That tells me that God’s plan for us from eternity past was not just to save us so we could sit and soak. God’s plan was to save us so that we could be made to be more like Jesus Christ, to the glory of Jesus Christ. So he wants to reconcile us to God so that he can dwell in us and transform us into what he wants us to be.

And so now we see in verse 17 that he offers the gospel to those who are both near and far. Some of you may have come in this morning and you feel far from God. Maybe you know you’ve never been reconciled to God.

You’ve been to church a few times. You’ve tried to give money. You’ve tried to be a nicer person.

And you thought maybe that would get you closer to God. But you don’t feel like God is even listening at this point. Jesus came so that those who were far off from God could be brought and made near.

Not only brought near, but brought right into the family of God. Now I’m mixing my pictures here, mixing metaphors. But brought right into the family of God.

To be reconciled to Him, to be in a relationship with Him. And He offers that salvation to you this morning. Even if you came in here feeling like you were far off from God, that message of salvation is offered to you.

And He offers it because of His work on the cross. All throughout this passage, we see that Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins. He shed his blood and he died on that cross, not to pay for anything that he had done, but to pay for every wrong thing that I’ve ever done or thought or said, and every wrong thing that you’ve ever done or thought or said.

He died to pay for us and our sins so that we could be reconciled to God, so that we could be reconciled to the Father, so we could be welcomed into God’s family. And this morning, if you’re a believer and you’re listening to this, my challenge to you is to look and see whether you’re in alignment to the cornerstone or not. And if you’re not, ask him to move you and be willing to be moved.

Now, to those who’ve never trusted Christ as their Savior, and you came in this morning, like I said, feeling far from God, you need to understand that you feel far from God because you are far from God. Our sin, every wrong we ever commit, our sin separates us. from a holy God.

And there’s not enough good that we can do to bridge that gap. There’s not enough good we can do to undo the wrong that we’ve done. That sin had to be punished and it had to be paid for.

And you and I could spend all of eternity in hell and would still never suffer enough to pay for our crimes against an infinitely holy God. What it took was God loving us enough to send his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to come to earth, to take responsibility for