Vision Comes As We Love As Jesus Loves…

The Church

Text: Ephesians 5:15-32

Proposition: Jesus loves the church aware of its spots and wrinkles and His choice, His desire, is to give Himself up for her.

Introduction: Who doesn’t love a good restoration story? From furniture to houses to tractors to cars seeing something brought back from a place of ruin or being run down has a transformative joy to it. When we lived in Dawson City the entire town was one big restoration project. The restorations varied from the high end Palace Grand Theatre built in 1899 by Arizona Charlie Meadows to the saloons and even a place of ill repute called Bombay Peggy’s. Restoration is often about nostalgia, typically it’s something that begins with a vision that can see past the broken window panes. It is long term in planning and demands persevering hard work. Then there’s the most challenging kind of restoration, the restoration of a soul, the restoration of a person dented and damaged, burnt and torn. Whenever you talk about the Lost, the Least, the Lonely and the Unlovely its call and challenge is restoration. Every church is a work of restoration in progress, a restoring of the image of God in them, a restoring of eternal life lost at the fall. The work of Christ on the cross for us is the highest kind of restoration, it’s called Redemption. This morning I’d like to talk with you about the seventh thing that Jesus loves that we too are called to love. Jesus loves the church. When we say that Jesus loves the church it’s not just an affection for it from the sidelines, it’s a love that has vision to see what can be, a love that steps forward and picks up the load, a love that that is willing to be tired, to go hungry and even to bleed and die for this person that barely knows Him. In Ephesians is a passage that describes what this love looks like. Pastor Kenny Stokes from Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis   (http://www.hopeingod.org/sermon/love-christ-his-church) developed a message on this passage and I’d like to use some of his thoughts as we look at how Jesus loves the church. Turn with me to Eph.5:15-27.

I. Christ Loved the Church.                                                                                                    

To be sure this passage is about marriage and the way wives and husbands are to love each other. In fact the first 15 verses are about Christian conduct and then comes these commands about wives submitting to their husbands and husbands to love their wives. It’s at this point that the passage shifts to a higher gear and accelerates to the great restoration, the cross. Look at how Paul puts this in verse 25, “ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church…”. That word ‘loved’ is translated into English in the past tense yet in the original Greek is was written in the Aorist tense. There’s a good reason for that, we don’t have anything that can compare to that grammatical construction. If we were to take the verb ‘run’ we could say ‘he ran a good race’, past tense. We could also say, ‘He’s running as fast as he can’, a present tense expression. Then we could even say, ‘he will run in the race tomorrow.’, a future tense expression. The thing is the Aorist tense in the Greek does all three, past, present and future. It’s a statement of Christ’s love for the church that existed in the past in the same way as it does this moment and will continue always into the future. Jesus loved the church before it was born, when it grew and became His bride and then He continues to love the church when it is with Him past death, transformed. So how can we love the church like that, what could we do that even comes close in comparison? The point would be to love the church just as you did when you first believed in Jesus. Do you remember those words of caution to this very church at Ephesus church many years later? It’s in Revelation 2:4, “Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works…”. Jesus calls us to love the church in an Aorist tense kind of way, to love irrespective of worthiness, to love with a view to restoration whenever ruin comes upon it, to love it with an eternal perspective.

II. Jesus ‘Loved’ the Church and Gave Himself Up For Her.                                            

It’s this latter part, the ‘gave Himself up for her’ part that is also a verb describing how Jesus loves the church. It has the same inference as the person who gives themselves up as a physical ransom in order to secure the release of others whose lives are at stake. Jesus gave Himself up, willingly surrendered Himself for those whose lives were captured. That’s me, that’s you. Then to this we add the phrase, ‘for her’. Jesus gave Himself up for her. The ‘her’ refers to the church but it also refers to a select group of people. Jesus only gave Himself up for one select and chosen group of people, the church. That’s you, that’s the people around you that you now call your brothers and sisters in Christ. If Jesus makes that distinction in how He loves the church much more so are we called to love the church uniquely. We aren’t instructed to love organized religion, to love the evil that marks up any church but to love the people who are in Christ in an enduring way, the people He gave Himself up for. Just as husbands are called to love their wife and not all wives so Christ loves and gives Himself up for His chosen wife, the Bride of Christ, the church.

III. Jesus ‘Loved’ the Church, Gave Himself Up For Her, To Make Her Holy.              

That word ‘holy’ in the NIV is also translated as ‘Sanctify’ in other translations. It means to separate both internally and externally from sin. To sanctify or be made holy is to free a person from the guilt of sin because of the one who gave Himself up for her separates her sin from her to Himself. To be holy also means to separate on the outside from influences and actions that are toxic and destructive to holiness. So to be holy is both an identity in Christ and a function of the bride who belongs to Him alone even as He alone is hers. She has experienced the restoration of the Master, a restoration where once you were dead in your trespasses and sins and now you are made alive in Him. We have looked at the Lost, the Least, the Lonely and the Unlovely and when you think about it that’s the church, it’s where we came from and it’s a work in progress, a painting not yet finished. Jesus loves this church! He washes her with His word, separating the ruin from the righteousness. By the Holy Spirit he applies truth to our minds, bodies and spirits.

IV. Jesus Presents Her to Himself As a Radiant Church.                                            

To present, it’s the Greek word, ‘paristemi’. Other translations put it like this, “to present to Himself a glorious church”, “the church in all her glory”, “the church in splendor’. What do suppose the splendor of the church is that is so beautiful to Christ? Let me suggest to you a few of the effects the church has had on the world because of the power of Christ at work in her.

In Human Rights.. The concept of universal human rights and equality comes exclusively from the biblical idea that all people are created in the image of God. In the Rights and Roles of Women… these were first elevated by the church in honoring widows, Christianity was the first religion to not force widows to marry. It was the church that led the way in forbidding fornication and creating the standard of marriage, in declaring the equality between men and women.                    

In the Value of Life and of Children…. It was the church that helped end the Roman practice of infanticide. Even today it’s the church that leads the way in the stand against abortion.                                                                                                

In the fight against Slavery… Christians were the first people in history to oppose slavery systematically. Early Christians purchased slaves in the markets simply to set them free." A 5th century monk, Telemachus is credited as being the pivotal force ending the gladiator spectacles.                                                                                      

In Compassion and Mercy… the church leads the way over the centuries in giving and caring for the weak. The highest per capita levels of charitable giving come from the ranks of the church. Organizations like Samaritans Purse are still today some of the first on scene with crisis and disaster in the whole world.                             

In Education….For the first 200 years in America, children's reading texts emphasized biblical literacy. The emphasis on literacy was so intense in colonial America, that John Quincy Adams said in the early 1800's that the illiteracy rate was only 4/10th of 1 percent. By comparison, it has been estimated that in America today, 40 million people are functionally illiterate. All but one of the first 123 colleges in colonial America were Christian institutions.                                                     

In the structure of Government… America's foundational idea of The Rule of Law rather than the authority of man traces back to the Old Testament, beginning with the Ten Commandments.                                                                                                 

In the development of Science and Medicine…nearly all the founders of modern science were Christians. These include men such as Keppler, Boyle, Pascal, Pasteur, Newton.

These not to mention the countless contributions to art, music, literature, free enterprise, work ethics are part of the splendor of the church. The great force that resists evil in the world today has its origin in the church as Holy Spirit restrains the spiritually inspired wickedness of man against man until the time when Christ comes again. These things and the fact that the church being indwelt by the Holy Spirit alone proclaims the truth of the glory of Christ, the glory of the Father from generation to generation is what makes up the splendor of the church.                                                                (http://www.faithfacts.org/christ-and-the-culture/the-impact-of-christianity)

Jesus Christ loves the church, He will present her to Himself without spot or wrinkle, holy, washed and cherished in all her splendor. Just listen to these closing words in Ephesians 5: 28 to 32 and ask yourself if these were not indeed radical transforming words for their day and ours ….

“So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.                                                         This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

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