Building in Love

The one in Christ. Therefore, remember that at one time you were Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision, by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you were, at that time, separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility.

By abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And He came and preached peace to you who were far off 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 strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In Him you are also being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Well, we're speaking today out of a series that I've been doing along with Jono in Redlands called Six Steps for Loving Your Church. I don't know if you've ever done this. It's usually part of a small group or community group study series that churches go through on six steps to loving your church. It's a fairly self explanatory title, I think. We chose to turn it into a bit of a preaching series.

It's a bit more of a topical series, but we're going to be delving into the passage you just read. If you could keep your Bibles open to it, that would be great. And we'll be focusing on verses 19 to 22 in particular. And the question throughout this series and particularly today is what is church? What is church, and how should we think about church?

If you're new here, welcome. It's great to have you. You'll already be asking the question, what's all this about, and what am I doing here? Others of you may have been coming for years, maybe most of your lives, walking into the same place, doing the same thing, sitting, standing, singing, listening, praying, a little bit of sleeping, maybe, talking, having a cuppa afterwards. The thing about people when we do things over time is we get into habits.

And once we're used to doing something, we stop thinking about it. I don't think about how to brush my teeth anymore. It just happens. And church maybe is the same. If we're going to be doing this same thing for several hours a week, it's worth thinking about how we do it well.

What is church? It's a good question to ask. And as we ask it, examining our own hearts and our attitudes and our thinking on the subject, we see that in the church, Jesus is building a community. He's building a community.

The work of Jesus enthroned in heaven, carried out through the elders and the deacons and all the people of the church, is the work of bringing people together. In verse 14, He said, He Himself is our peace, making two groups that used to be Jews and non-Jews, Jews and Gentiles. He's making those two groups one. In verse 16, it says that Jesus has reconciled them both to God because through Him, through Jesus, we have access to the Father. In verse 19, He says that we're no longer foreigners and strangers here.

We're no longer categorised into Chinese here and Indian over there and Jews over here and Australians over here. Instead, we're all called citizens of the kingdom of God. We're not split into blue collar on one side and white collar on the other, but we're one people. We're not baby boomers and Gen X and Gen Y and millennials and all the rest. We're members of a new kingdom, God's kingdom.

Not only does Paul call us members of the kingdom of God, as if that weren't enough, he calls us members of God's household, His family. We're brothers and sisters with each other, brothers and sisters with Christ. And in verse 15, Paul talks and he says that God's purpose was to make one new humanity out of previously divided groups. And we see that He's building the church into something. He's building the church into a community where barriers are torn down.

Jesus has removed any dividing walls between us, making peace, putting hostility to death, and preaching peace to people who are now brothers instead of aliens and strangers. We're doing this series, how to love your church. Well, we're doing one out of the series, how to love your church, because we acknowledge that sometimes it's really hard to love your church. I won't ask for a show of hands, but some of us will find it really hard to love this church. The thing about pulling together different people, different cultures, with different childhoods and different upbringings is that every single one of us thinks differently.

Even if we didn't, we're still sinners. We're greedy. We're selfish. We're proud, and we're going to rub each other the wrong way. We're going to misunderstand each other.

We're going to sin against each other. But God has made us one. These people in this room are your brothers and sisters. As different as you all are, God has brought you together. Maybe one of the challenges today is to love the person who has sinned against you on the other side of the room, to be reconciled to them.

Because the point here is that as diverse as we all are, we are one. Where did page three go? There it is. Jesus lived and died to make us one, and we are therefore all on team Jesus. We're all on team Jesus.

Now I'm not much of a sporting person. That's probably evident to anyone who's met me for more than a few minutes. I'm not much of a sports guy, but I get the idea of teams. A few months ago, I was cheering for the Maroons. Who else cheers for the Maroons?

Oh, come on. Oh, alright. Okay. There's a few others. And others are cheering for the Blues.

Boo. And if you go to a game, you see the passion in the crowds. Right? In fact, I grew up in Victoria, so I grew up with AFL. And if you go to an AFL game, you can see some passion, and not all of it is healthy.

You get some people in some coloured scarves and other people in different coloured jerseys, and they are angry at each other sometimes. You see people yelling and screaming, spittle flying out, red faces, angry faces at each other. And as a kid, I at first thought that they were joking. Like, it's just a bit of friendly rivalry, but it's not. Right?

Sometimes it's really not. And as a kid, I remember seeing my first punch up as a kid in the sporting oval. But those same people who fight against each other at the State of Origin, who have vehemence and passion against the other people, those same people are cheering together as Australians at the Olympics. Right? Those same people against each other in one context are cheering together as Australians at the Olympics.

We're not enemies. We all have differences at the state level, but we're all on team Jesus in the end. We have the same Saviour, the same goals, the same citizenship in heaven, and that's where it matters. And as team Jesus, we're called to work together to build something because the church is a building project, not a consumer product. It's a building project, not a consumer product.

Paul shifts from talking about citizenship and family to talking about a building project. He's talking about the temple. It's a massive multimillion dollar undertaking that he's talking about. The site being all cleared and prepared beforehand. And the first most important thing, Jesus, the cornerstone, has been laid.

It's the start of the foundation. The first stone placed which all the other stones reference. And the apostles and the prophets, in here, the apostles and the prophets, they are the rest of the stones that make up that massive foundation. They didn't have poured slabs back in the day with all these machines. Stones are the foundations, and Jesus and the apostles and prophets are the foundation.

And we, the people of God, become all the other stones in the building, being built by God into His temple, into His dwelling place, the place where people come to meet with God. Paul imagines the church as a construction site or maybe more as a working bee. I was in a church as a kid that had a campsite, like, two hours away that they had a hundred year lease from the government on. And two or three times a year, we used to go out to a working bee. There was so many of them, heaps of them.

And you would think maybe that as a kid, I resented that. But, actually, I really loved it. I have fond memories of those working bees. Kids working with adults. I mean, as a kid, isn't that amazing to work with adults and feel like you're deeply involved and working together?

Adults working with kids, digging trenches in the rain together, burning off paddocks to clear land, making mud bricks together, building buildings. They were ugly buildings at the time. Mud brick has not grown less unattractive. It was unattractive back then. But it didn't matter about what the buildings looked like.

It mattered what we were doing together. The church has a purpose. It's not just sitting around waiting for Jesus to come back. It's supposed to be being built together. Now Paul talks about in the chapter that we've just read, Ephesians chapter two, but Paul is more explicit a couple of chapters later in Ephesians chapter four where he says, so Christ Himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers to equip His people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up.

See, all the people of the church are supposed to be being equipped by the apostles and the prophets in scripture, as well as by the evangelists, the pastors and teachers so that the newly equipped church will serve each other so that the body, the church, might be built up. Scripture along with preachers like myself and the elders that we've just put into office and a deacon, they are all there to build each other up. We equip you to build each other up so that the church can be a working bee, not a consumer product. So you might never have thought of church as a consumer product, but actually many people approach it like it is one. One consumer product is a car.

Right? Most of us have all gone out and looked for a car. And when you're looking for a consumer product like a car, you've probably got a list of things that you look for in it. We find out what car, what size works for us, for our family or our needs, our tastes, and maybe we want a really big one, really big car or a really big church that we can rattle around in. Maybe we look for a bit of a dressy car or a dressy church, or maybe we look for one that makes a statement or maybe one that doesn't make a statement at all.

Maybe you want a car. This was a big one when I was younger. Maybe you want a car with a ripping stereo system. Right? A big sound system.

Maybe you want a church that's the same, or maybe you want just a simple tape deck that plays the old classics. Maybe you want that in a church too. Maybe you don't quite approach church as a consumer product like a car, but maybe there's a bit of a Google review mentality. Right? You can imagine the church reviews on Google.

Fun fact, there's also Google reviews on prisons. You can go look up the Google reviews on prisons. They're great. Go and do it. It's hilarious.

But you can imagine the Google reviews on a church. Well, I went, but the preaching wasn't really speaking to me. It felt like it was more for older people. Three stars. Someone else, the music has too many drums.

Two and a half stars. Well, the coffee service was good, but I'd rather they didn't use disposable cups. The sound guy seemed to sleep at the wheel. We've all seen that one, haven't we? No one talked to me or too many people talked to me.

I couldn't get out of there. One star, won't be back. And that's the consumer mentality in a church. And maybe the one thing worse than the person that thinks that type of thinking about church and won't be back is the person who thinks that way and stays. Because a Google review mentality of church ruins and distracts from the building of the church.

Now I want to be gentle here because we all have preferences. Personally, I don't always like Phil's preaching. That's my preference. Supposed to be a joke. Not a lot of jokes going on here.

Well, sometimes I don't. And it's okay to have preferences, whatever they are. It's okay to have needs as well. But if the goal is for you to consume your spiritual food for the week, to power your own life, then, of course, have a Google review mentality. Shout out the haters.

If the goal is your advancement, then you should ignore anyone or anything that's holding you back. If the purpose of being here is for your healing and to make you feel good, then everyone here and everything that's done should be done to your liking. Don't get me wrong. There's certainly a time and a place to assess whether a church will broadly meet your spiritual needs, and it's important to join a church and to stay in a church that will build you up and grow you. But when we join a church, we're looking first for a place to serve rather than be served.

Our personal spiritual growth is maybe just as much a product of us serving others as it is a product of the preaching and teaching and the music and the atmosphere and the dress code and the behaviour of its people. It's hard to make definitive statements on these things, but I suspect that your ability to serve in a church is only second place to the preaching of God's word. We need to be able to serve. Church is a working bee, and aren't we seeing four men this morning step up and serve in a very special and particular way? Praise God.

They're joining a working bee. A working bee where we're equipped to build up each other. And that's going to mean that we come with a shovel long before we come with a feedback form. If the goal is a beautiful temple where God meets with His people, if that is what we come here for is each other, then that actually changes everything. If we come looking to fuel others spiritually, we come to advance the people on the other side of the room.

We're here to bring healing to others. And, yes, I hear some of you say, but I need healing too. Yes. You do. And some of you need that a lot.

And I hope that the preaching and the singing, the whole service, the coffee afterwards, the welcome you receive, and everything else that this church does brings healing for you. I don't deny that there are even seasons in our lives where we need to be cared for more than we need to care. We need to receive sometimes far more than we can give, and that's normal. And if that's you, then I hope that this church can pour into you and build you up. But in general, we are here to build and to invest in each other and care for each other.

And that type of attitude really pushes back against the idea of consumerism, of turning up to get a spiritual feed and then leaving. Now this raises something fairly obvious. Well, it did for me anyway, and maybe this is a bit of a different church. Maybe you don't have this same problem. But watching church online is not church.

Now hello to the people watching church online. Please don't click away. Online is great if you are sick or if you're disabled, if you're travelling overseas or something similar. It's a wonderful way to stay connected. And how great was it during COVID?

Right? How much of a blessing was online church for particularly the fellows areas that were really locked down in a significant way? But if you're healthy and well and mobile and yet still find yourself logging into church week after week after week in your pyjamas because you can still do church while folding the washing, then you might really need to think about what church actually is. It's not online. Church is not a replacement for church community. You can't log in, can you, to a working bee?

I saw you actually have one once a month. You don't put a video camera up outside and say, well, log in, guys. At the end of it, great to have you with us. Here's the sausages you all ate. I don't know.

Do you guys do sausages at a working bee? You should. Anyway, you don't. That's not what a working bee is. We're not consumers looking to be nourished and built up from a distance. We're joyfully expectant of being part of the whole church, of being built into something wonderful, and of doing some good building work.

And ultimately, that good building work is going to come down to our attitudes and expectations of church. Our last point is that church challenges our expectations and our motivations because those things really matter, don't they? Expectations and motivations really matter. So we can intellectually assent to the idea that church isn't a consumer product. We can nod our heads to the fact that Paul is telling us to serve each other and to build each other up.

But in order for that to have any effect, it has to change what motivates us and our expectations. So I really have one basic question to ask, but it's a question that we're going to think about slowly and carefully so that we can examine what's really going on inside us. The question is, consciously or not, do we walk into church expecting this to be a spiritual day spa where we get pampered, or do we come in with our sleeves rolled up for a working bee where we contribute with brothers and sisters to the building of the church? That's it. That's the question.

But I think it's a big question. And if it's happening in the subconscious, how are we going to know if those are our expectations or not? Well, it's really an issue, I think, of the heart. See, when there are too many drums or not enough drums, certainly, couldn't have been too many this morning. But when there are not enough drums for your preference, are you upset for genuine gospel reasons, or is it because it's all about you?

When someone takes your seat, we all know that there's someone in every church who has their seat, and if someone takes it, they're in trouble. Right? When someone takes your seat, are we grumpy because we're not respected and we've been here for twenty years, or are we grateful that someone else who's probably too new to church to know how grumpy you are has come in for the first, second, or fourth time and found a wonderful seat? Which one is it? When the kids are crying, are you thinking about how much better parents you would have been or have been, or are you thinking about how maybe next week you could man the creche to give those parents time to be built up and equipped themselves? So it's an issue of expectations.

We need to think about what we're anticipating will happen. So we could expect to step into this building and flop on the floor emotionally and spiritually, expecting everyone else to serve us and lift us up. Or we could come as rested as possible, expecting to find others we can listen to and pray for and who we can lift up. See, some weeks you will leave here spiritually lifted up and invigorated. Praise God.

Wonderful. Other times, you should leave feeling exhausted after listening to others, encouraging others, and praying for others for a couple of hours straight. If you come to church expecting to leave with a list of people and things to pray for instead of coming with a list of burdens to unload, that is going to change so much about how the work of building goes here in this church. And it's going to grow us too. I don't know if you thought about this, but we've been built to build.

It's who we are. It's who God's made us. God's made us to tend and care for the world, to tend and care for each other. Verse 10, actually, the one verse before what we started reading, is a really well-known verse. It says, for we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

We've been made new creations through Christ for the purpose of serving. Now I'm not sure when you think about this verse, it's really common and popular verse to quote. When you think about this verse or pray for the good works that God has prepared in advance for us to do, what do you think they are? What are you expecting when you pray that God would give you good works to do?

Because I suspect that many of them happen or should happen here. Building each other up and serving each other are definitely some of them. He's prepared people here this morning for you to build up. He's prepared phones in people's pockets and on their walls this week for you to ring. Maybe this week, one of those people is really obvious.

He's prepared small groups of people for you to join and get to know deeply and carefully so that in three years' time, you can build them up and serve them out of your deep knowledge and love for one another built up over the years. Now this question that I'm talking about asking about isn't supposed to polarise us into get help or help. It's not as black and white as that. But Paul challenges the idea of passive consumerism in the church. He challenges individualism where we come for us, consume what we need in a way that's convenient for us.

And instead, he reminds us that we are a body full of all sorts of people and all different parts. None of us function alone. Every part of the body has something to do to support the rest of the body. Every stone in the walls of the temple carries the stones above it and around it. And as they do, they become something beautiful.

They rise to be a holy temple to the Lord. The big idea here is that church is a team of brothers and sisters on a working bee to build each other up into a dwelling place for God. And it's beautiful, isn't it? Isn't it beautiful? All tribes and peoples and tongues, Jews, non-Jews, Australians, people of white skin, brown skin, black skin, all the rest gathered together where the barriers are gone, working together, loving God, enjoying Jesus, celebrating what He's done and what He's doing amongst us and through us today.

Wonder if you'll pray with me. Thank you, Lord, that you have prepared good works in advance for us to do. Thank you, Lord, that you have called us together. You have removed the barriers between us so that we can work together. We can work for something eternal, a building of your church and your kingdom.

Lord, we acknowledge that we have different expectations and attitudes and motivations as we come in here, and sometimes they're unexamined. Father, we ask that you would challenge those motivations that are unhelpful and that are not gospel oriented. We pray that this church would be a church of people with such great love for you and for each other that every week when we come here and every day throughout the week, we would be expecting and motivated and trying to love each other and build each other up. Lord, we pray this because that type of church is beautiful, and we pray this because you are beautiful, and we love what you love. So we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.