What I Would Do Differently
Letter 3: Inactive for Less than Three Years Dear Church Member,
A. To Detail the Excellencies of God’s Character
1. To “proclaim” is to announce or tell. God’s “excellencies” would include all that He is and all that He has done. (Including creation, redemption in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ)
2. Both word and deed are implied. (Responsibility is collective as the people of God.)
B. To Display the Effects of God’s Calling “out of darkness into his marvelous light”
1. Language of creation reminiscent of Genesis 1 and applied to the new birth in the New Testament. 2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
2. Language of conversion as seen in Colossians 1:13-14 “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
3. Language of compassion revealed in God’s mercy. v.10 These scattered believers who were suffering persecution may have felt they didn’t belong
anywhere or among anyone. Being Gentiles, they may have felt the weight of never having the promises of their Jewish brothers and sisters. They as a people had never known mercy.
Peter gives the wonderful news that they did indeed belong. They belonged to God.
They were His people. God’s mercy had made them such. They like us did not deserve it. God, however gave them their standing based on grace.
Application: We truly live in a dark world. I need not detail the darkness that surrounds us every single day. You live in it and feel its effects. But as dark as it is, the opportunity to fulfill God’s purpose as the people of God has never been afforded any more clearly than today.
• God has given us the responsibility to tell the world who He is! More than just with our mouth but with our life. That really is a simple way of making decisions
• The same could be said of our church. The church is the people of God. We have no business doing anything that does not properly reflect the God who has not only saved us as individuals but the God who has made us his own special possession as His people. He has transferred us from the darkness to the light.
Conclusion:
It seems the modern church tries its best to be anything but the people of God. We want to accommodate “seekers” so we adjust. We want to promote social justice, so we add that to our message. We don’t want to offend so we analyze everything so as to remove every offense.
After all the responsibilities are great. What would happen though if churches all over our land stopped adjusting to the culture, stopped accommodating the latest trend, and
focused on being who God says they are and doing what God has said they should do?
More importantly, what if we began to plan and carry out the activity of the local body with a focus on showing the world Who God is and what He is like?
Week 3: Building the Temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:9-17) Introduction:
The two skyscrapers were built in the time between the late sixties to the early seventies.
They were considered at the time to be an engineering marvel. They represented a new approach to skyscrapers in that they were to be very lightweight and involve modular construction methods. That doesn’t mean they were poorly constructed. They were built in a way that could be described as a large cantilever vertical column. Some have described the structural process as an egg-crate construction which made the two
buildings redundant in their structure. This was considered to be a good thing because if one or two columns were lost, the loads would shift into adjacent columns and the building would remain standing. The buildings were designed to withstand tremendous wind, up to the winds of a 140-mph hurricane.
But the winds of a hurricane are not what brought them down. On September 11, 2001 both the twin towers were brought down before the eyes of a watching nation as terrorists flew planes into the structures. The impact of the aircraft did not and could not have brought the structures down. It was a physical impossibility in that the impacts only brought about 1/3 of the stress the buildings were built to withstand. The energy of the impacts was easily absorbed as every video of the event shows.
The buildings were brought down by the very thing the engineers didn’t plan for and shouldn’t have planned for. They were, of course, designed with the possibility of fire in mind. Their design should have allowed them to support themselves for three hours in a fire even if the sprinkler system failed to operate. That amount of time should have been long enough to evacuate the occupants. But the WTC towers only lasted for one to two hours. Someone has said “No designer of the WTC anticipated, nor should have anticipated, a 90,000 L Molotov cocktail on one of the building floors.” They were brought down by temperature of the fire that resulted in the weakening of the structural steel and by the distortion of the same steel in vulnerable places. The complete collapse occurred because of a perfect type of fire that no one could have anticipated. (Thomas W. Eagar and Christopher Musso)
It occurs to me that churches have often been built to withstand all kinds of storms.
(False teaching and down-grade). Perhaps churches are built to withstand fire.
(Persecution, and inner conflict).
But I’m afraid we have forgotten that there is coming a fire of judgement one day so intense and pure that one cannot imagine its effect. It is that fire that our work in the church must withstand. And I am afraid it is that fire for which we are least prepared.
I want to share with you Paul’s beautiful description of the church of Jesus Christ as a temple. The building of this temple is our greatest priority. Building this temple to withstand the fire of God’s judgement is our greatest concern. Paul reveals our place in the building of the church by revealing three important aspects of the church as the temple of God.
I. THE IDENTITY OF THIS BUILDING AS THE TEMPLE OF GOD vs. 9b, 16a Paul has just used an agricultural metaphor in v. 9a. He has called the church at Corinth
“God’s field.” It is very tempting to develop this statement on our own, to expand the metaphor as we are wont to do. Paul, however, stops and changes metaphors. He very
Later in the passage he specifies what kind of building he had in mind. In v. 16 he tells them that they are “God’s temple.” Both Jewish and Gentile Christians in Corinth would have understood this language. There are two very important truths about the identity of this temple that arise from Paul’s metaphor. These truths speak yet to us today.