What is the Church? Part 2

[0:00] Ephesians 5. Now we are in between two series. So for about a year we were going through the book of Mark, and we're beginning an Advent series next Sunday because it's December 1st.

[0:12] But between those two, we've been doing a short mini-series, and we'll do one more week at the very end of the year. And what we've been looking at is the series is called What is the Church?

[0:22] And so every week we're looking at a different picture that the New Testament gives us to explain to us what the church is. So last week we saw how Paul said the church is the body of Christ, and this week we're going to see how Paul says the church is the bride of Christ.

[0:40] So we're in Ephesians 5, starting at verse 25, and reading to the end of the chapter. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

[0:57] that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

[1:13] In the same way husbands should love their 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 Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

[1:29] Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

[1:42] However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Amen. This is God's word. Now normally, so if you wanted to know what Ephesians was in just two sentences, the whole first half of Ephesians is an explanation of the gospel, and the whole second half of Ephesians, which is what we're reading in right now, is all about how to live in the light of the gospel.

[2:07] So he's got rules for husbands and wives and servants and masters and even children. And so usually when you come to a passage like this, the point is about how you need to be as a husband.

[2:20] But we're going to look at it from the reverse today, and so what we're going to look at this passage, the reason we're looking at this passage is to say, what does this passage tell us about the church, not so much about what it means to be a good husband, even if we'll talk about that some.

[2:33] So what is the church? It's the bride of Christ here, and what we're going to say, what I want to talk about this morning is three ways that Jesus loves the church as his bride.

[2:44] That's what Paul shows us in this passage. Three ways that Jesus loves the church as his bride. And the first way is, and this is the main one, he becomes one with her. So in verse 31, Paul says a quote from the book of Genesis that you've heard before, and we say it at all the weddings that I do at least, he says, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

[3:14] So Paul, here's his logic. He says, husbands, you need to love your wives because you two are one in marriage. And the reason we know that is because in the book of Genesis, it says right there at the beginning, the husband shall leave his wife, leave his, excuse me, not leave his wife, leave his household and cling to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

[3:36] Okay? He said, that's why you should love your wife as yourself because you are one flesh in marriage. But then he adds something that we've never heard before in the whole Bible. He says in verse 32, he says, this mystery, he says, this mystery is profound.

[3:52] Now, we talked about this a few months ago when we talked about marriage and the meaning of marriage, but Paul uses this word mystery here. And normally when we think of mystery, we think of something that's, something you're trying to figure out, that if you just, if you could just search long enough, like Sherlock Holmes, you could understand the mystery of the thing in front of you.

[4:14] But whenever Paul uses the word mystery in the Bible, he uses it in a different way. When Paul says something is a mystery, he means something has been hidden from us and it will be revealed by God.

[4:29] So a mystery in the Bible is something that God reveals to us that we never could have known unless he showed it to us. So Paul says, you know, at the very beginning of time, God gave us marriage and he told us that it was, when you're married, you become one flesh.

[4:43] But we never, there was always a mystery to it. We never knew what the deeper significance was. And here he says in verse 32, he says, this mystery, marriage, the unity of marriage is profound.

[4:54] And I am saying that it refers to Christ and his church. So Jesus is saying, Paul is saying here, and Jesus refers to it as well, if you want to understand marriage, you've got to understand that marriage was always meant to point to something beyond it.

[5:11] It was always meant to point to the relationship that Jesus Christ was going to have with his church and the way that he was going to love his church. And if you've ever thought about it, you know, when Jesus shows up in the gospels, you ever thought about how many marriage references there are in the gospels?

[5:30] Think about this. In John chapter three, John the Baptist, you know, John the Baptist had a huge following and he was losing his following at one point and his disciples come to him and they say, John, all of our followers are now going to follow this Jesus as if to say, what are you going to do about it?

[5:49] This is not good for business. It's not good for us. And what John does is he says, you know, I am, I am the friend of the groom and when the groom arrives, I stand aside because the groom is here.

[6:02] So right at the very beginning of Jesus's ministry, John the Baptist refers to Jesus as the groom who we should owe all of our attention. And then do you remember what the very first miracle in the gospels are?

[6:16] If you read the book of John, the very first miracle that Jesus performs, what does he do? He goes to a wedding and he turns the water into wine and everything, everything in the gospels is significant.

[6:27] And I think it's significant that the first thing Jesus does, the first miracle he performs is he makes a wedding festive again. And it's his way of saying that the groom is here.

[6:38] The great wedding is on the verge of about to happen. And over and over again in the gospels, you have this image that Jesus Christ is he is the groom that all earthly grooms point to in the end.

[6:54] And, you know, if you think about it, whenever I do wedding vows, sometimes I will look at the bride and groom and I will say, I'll explain to them that their marriage is a symbol, it's a shadow of the love of Jesus for his church.

[7:07] And I'll look at them and I'll say, listen, we, we, all of us here, we need you to show us Jesus in the way that you love one another. And if you think about the healthiest marriage that you know, the great, the longest lasting, the most stable marriage you can think of, the most loving marriage, think about that marriage and just remember the fact that that marriage, the deepest meaning of that marriage is to point people to Christ and to say, if you look at that and you say, that's love, then you, you need to realize that's just a shadow of the kind of love that Jesus has for his church.

[7:46] And I'll admit it, sometimes this language of Jesus as our husband is kind of odd and it's because we often think we equate marriage with physical intimacy. But if you think about it, physical intimacy in and of itself is really just a way of, it's a sign of what is true even apart from the physical intimacy, which is the fact that when a husband and wife come together, they are one in a way that is spiritual, that we can't see with our eyes.

[8:15] And so what does it mean? You know, what is, what is the promise that's being made here whenever we say Jesus loves his church in the sense that they become one? Well, you look at verse 29 and that's where you see what it means.

[8:28] He says, he who loves his wife loves himself for no one ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church. So Paul's saying what it means that the church and Jesus are one is that Jesus has committed himself to the church as if it were his own body.

[8:48] He loves it like he loves himself. And that means that everything that belongs to him, every blessing that he has from the Father, he gives to the church as if he were giving to himself. He loves it with that much care.

[9:00] And, you know, if you think about it, the ancient world was not a safe place for women. And one of the reasons why the Old Testament has so many laws about protecting women in marriage is because if you were a single woman in the Old Testament, it was hard to make it by.

[9:17] It was hard to make it out on your own, not just because it was dangerous but it was hard to provide for yourself economically. And here, Jesus is saying, he's saying, I am the true groom.

[9:27] That's what Paul is saying here. And he will provide for his bride in every way that she needs to be provided for. He will nourish her. Think about it like this.

[9:38] There is no human relationship that's more fundamental than a husband and a wife. That's why at the very beginning of time it says a husband will leave his parents to join with his wife.

[9:50] And Paul is saying, think about the closest relationship that you know and that's the closest we can get to the way that Christ relates to his church. And so I think maybe the first question for you this morning to think about is, is this how you think about God and Jesus?

[10:08] A.W. Tozer was a famous theologian who said this. He said, what comes to our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. what comes to our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

[10:22] And he says that because, you know, how you think about who God is will take the way that you live your lives. Some of us, some of us, I think, think about God more as a landlord than a lover.

[10:33] And we think about God as someone who you just have to pay your dues to. And if you just give him what he wants, pay the bills, then you can live on his property and kind of do your own thing. And that's not the picture that the Bible gives us of the God that we have, the actual God.

[10:48] The picture that the Bible gives us is of a God who wants to live in the closest of relationships with us. He wants to be close to us. And one of the points that he makes to us over and over again in Scripture is if you go anywhere else for the kind of love that only God can offer, you will find yourself thirsty and unsatisfied.

[11:10] And you will spend your life looking for satisfaction where it can be found nowhere else but God. Augustine put it like this. He said, our hearts are restless until they rest in me.

[11:21] And that's what Paul is saying here. He's saying, Jesus Christ has come to love his church in a way that only he could love his church. Okay? The last time I did a wedding was last night, 12 hours ago.

[11:38] We did a wedding for part of our family. And one of the great things when you're where I get to sit at the wedding is, and you'll think about these things until you're there, but every time I've done a wedding, it's always the groom that's standing right here at the beginning of the service.

[11:56] And then whenever the bride, whenever those doors first swing open, inevitably, you begin to hear these grunting noises from the person right next to you. And it's because, right, they're trying to hold back everything that they feel.

[12:10] and they usually do a terrible job of it, and so they end up making all kinds of noises, trying to cry without anyone knowing. And, you know, maybe that's not what it looks like when you see Jesus love his church, but what I can promise you is Jesus' love for his church, and you and me as a part of it, is not less than that.

[12:32] You know, whatever you've done, whatever you've been through, if you are in Christ, he looks at you with more love than the most loving groomsman does on his wedding day, and that's good news.

[12:45] Okay, so how does Jesus love his church? Well, you see, he becomes one with her. Okay, and then, but the next thing is, you see, he gives himself for her. You see that in verse 25, and Paul makes a passing reference because he's already explained it so much earlier in the book of Ephesians, but in verse 25, he says, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her and he gave himself up for her, and he goes on.

[13:12] And on our Wednesday night prayer meetings, we've been going through the fruit of the Spirit, and I, you know, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and I kept putting off love.

[13:24] I skipped love because love is so hard to talk about because it's really hard to define if you actually think about it. You know that famous passage, 1 Corinthians 13, that everyone says at every wedding, love is patient, love is kind.

[13:38] You know, Paul's really getting at the fact that love is hard to define. All you can do is give all these synonyms for it, but love is hard to define, but what the gospel tells us is it's often, it may be hard to define, but it's easier to measure, okay?

[13:53] You, sometimes, you know, for you to describe the love that you have for someone is really difficult, but someone can see it in the way that you love them. And 1 John 3, 16, John says, this is how we know what love is.

[14:08] Do you want to know what love is? This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. Over and over again in the New Testament, Paul and John and these other writers, they're always trying to convince the audience that God really loves them because sometimes we struggle to believe that God loves me.

[14:29] And what they often come back to is just a common sense argument saying, listen, this person laid down his life for you, that is love. That's how you know that he loves you is that he actually laid down his life for you.

[14:44] And we all know that on the wedding day when you make all these vows in sickness and in health and in joy and in sorrow, all these vows, that's probably, it's easy to make the commitment on that though.

[14:57] But the measure of the love is something you learn as you go on when real sacrifice is required and when you're asked to lay down your happiness for the sake of your bride or your husband, can you forgive the person when they hurt you?

[15:16] And what you see is Christ loved them to the point of laying down his life for them. And you can't really appreciate the wonder of that until you realize, you could say that the whole Bible is the story of a wedding.

[15:32] It's the story of God coming to be with his people at the beginning and over and over again in the Old Testament. The Old Testament prophets used marriage imagery to say, listen, God loves you like a faithful husband and Israel, you Israel, you've gone astray, you've been unfaithful to your husband.

[15:51] And the story could have ended there. God could have said, you know, Israel, you unfaithful bride, I'll go find a lover somewhere else. But the story of the Bible is how as unfaithful as you and I are, as unfaithful as all of our ancestors have been, God keeps coming back.

[16:08] The groom keeps coming back for the bride and drawing her to himself. He chases her and calls her back to himself. And, you know, part of what's amazing about that is, you know, you and I, when we choose a spouse, we choose someone who to us from the, we choose someone who to us is lovable.

[16:33] You know, you see someone across the room and you say, that's the most beautiful one I've ever seen. Or you get to know someone and you say, you know, maybe they were rough around the edges, but once I saw their heart, I had to be with them.

[16:45] Right? We love someone because they're lovable. And yet what the gospel says to us is, the wonder of the love of this groom is that he loved us while we were unlovable.

[16:57] You know, he looked at this bride who had run away from him and who had been unfaithful and who had chased other lovers and he says, even so, I am going to set my love upon her and that will make her lovable.

[17:11] I will make her lovable. You know, I heard this from R.C. Sproul a few weeks ago. He said, there's two great husbands in the Bible. You have the first husband who's Adam and you've got the second husband who's Christ.

[17:26] And if you think about it, you could summarize the whole story of the Bible like this. The first husband, Adam, looks at his wife after she has done wrong and he says, don't blame me, blame my wife.

[17:38] That's what he said to God, right? And yet, but Christ looks at his bride, the church, looks at God and says, don't blame my wife, blame me. He lays down his life for his bride.

[17:52] And that's the gospel. And you have to look at that and say, that is the measure of God's love for us. That's the measure of this groom's love for us. Okay? So how do we, how does Jesus love his church?

[18:04] Well, he loves her in becoming one with her. He loves her in giving himself for her. And then finally, he loves her by making her beautiful. And you see this in verse 26.

[18:18] He gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word. Now, obviously, he's talking about something that's much deeper than physical beauty, right?

[18:33] In the book of Revelation, there's all kinds of wedding imagery and there's a great scene that I'll read in just a few moments where the church as the bride is finally made beautiful.

[18:46] And in Revelation, they describe her dress. And it says here, it says, her dress is, it says, the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

[18:58] So, he's talking metaphorically here and yet, we all know this church, this bride, has to be cleansed. She's not beautiful as she is because of all that she's been through and all that she's done.

[19:09] And anyone who's been a part of a wedding knows that one of the most important elements is that the bride be beautiful, right? You know, they say there's no such thing as an ugly bride at a wedding and it's true, right?

[19:22] Every bride is beautiful on their wedding day but it takes work, right? So, at the rehearsal dinner we did on Friday, they announced all the times for people to show up to start getting ready on Saturday and for a 6 p.m.

[19:35] wedding, they said they wanted all the bridesmaids there at 8.45 a.m. to start getting ready. It takes time to be beautiful, right? And, and, that's, I mean, that's just as true in the Old Testament as it is today and one of the things you learn about Jesus is how patient he is making his bride beautiful and it's not, he doesn't just do it over 12 hours, he does it over thousands and thousands of years and, you know, think about all the people and you know people like this who look at the church, maybe the congregation they came out of and they say the church is so ugly and the things that go on there are so, so wrong that I could never be a part of a church again.

[20:19] It's, the church is irredeemable and it's true. Any, any denomination you look at, almost any church you look at, there's some hidden sin and there's some scandal in every denomination and yet what Jesus tells us in Ephesians 5 is the groom, the true groom never gives up on his bride and slowly, little by little he cleanses her and he makes her more beautiful day by day until sometime long in the future or maybe tomorrow he presents that bride to himself beautiful, perfect, without wrinkles and without blemishes.

[20:56] He's patient in that and the real wonder is, is not that on the wedding day she's beautiful. The real wonder is that he makes her beautiful.

[21:10] You know, in weddings, sometimes the best you can do is hide the blemishes, right? Put just enough makeup on so they can't see the imperfections and they can't see the wrinkles. But what you have here in this passage is, is a groom who removes the wrinkles and who makes this person totally spotless.

[21:28] And if you think about it, you know, maybe you're a guy here and you don't care about makeup and you don't know all these things, I don't know all these things. But if you just think about outside, when you go out in this door and you look at the mountains and you look at the stars in the sky and you become overwhelmed with the beauty of this earth and with the beauty of God's creation and you think about the fact that what God cares about in this universe more than anything else is his bride, the church.

[21:59] And you imagine what will it look like one day when that God who made the heavens and the stars and the mountains and everything that's beautiful, when he pours all of his energy and all of his creativity into the church and makes her perfect and spotless and she won't just be beautiful, she'll be the most beautiful thing that this world has ever seen.

[22:18] Okay? Now as we work towards a close, let me just finish with a few thoughts here. How does he do it? How does Jesus make his bride beautiful?

[22:28] And you see it in verse 26. He says, he gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.

[22:39] So it's not makeup. He says the washing of the water and the word, which is, he's talking about baptism and he's talking about the word of the gospel. And in our church, we use a phrase a lot called the ordinary means of grace.

[22:56] And what we mean by that, the ordinary means of grace are the ways that God has promised to show us his grace. Where do you expect God to meet you in your day-to-day life?

[23:08] And what the Bible tells us is the place where you can most expect God's grace to be working in you and among us is in the word, whether you're reading your Bible or you're hearing it preached, in the sacraments, the Lord's Supper and baptism and in prayer.

[23:24] When you're speaking to God and you may feel like you're just in an empty room, God is working in that. And that is how day by day, little by little, over hundreds and then thousands of years, God is renewing his church and making her beautiful.

[23:41] He's giving his grace in those things and helping to make her clean. And what does that mean for our church? One thing it means is anything we do as a church, the first question should be is, before we say what should we be doing, we should be asking, well, what does Christ do and what does he promise to do so that we can be a part of that?

[24:04] That's why we want to put prayer and the word and the sacrament at the center of who we are because that's where God has promised to meet us and that's where he's promised to work. And when we come together every Sunday and whenever you have your worship, the promise that we have is all of these little events, they may seem so ordinary to us, but this is Jesus Christ getting his bride ready for the great wedding day.

[24:29] Okay? Now, I want to close by reading Revelation 19, which is where John talks about that final wedding day. Just listen to how beautiful this is. This is a vision that John receives.

[24:42] He says, Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, Hallelujah!

[24:53] For the Lord our God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready.

[25:06] It was granted to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and pure, for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, Write this, Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

[25:20] Isn't that beautiful? Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Now one thing I forgot to say and I'll close with this. How do you get an invitation to that marriage? What is required? A lot of times we think I need to get myself pretty to get an invitation to the marriage of the Lamb.

[25:37] And what Paul is saying here, and this is the point that I was trying to make earlier, is you don't become Jesus' bride by making yourself pretty and showing up to the wedding day.

[25:48] You become Jesus' bride by Him cleansing you and Him making you beautiful. And so the hope for all of us and the promise for all of us is if you will come to Jesus as your great groom, He will do the work.

[26:03] He will cleanse you. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, how beautiful marriage is and how great it is the promise that you've given us that in the best marriage that we've ever seen is simply a shadow of the marriage that you've promised all of your people to be a part of one day when we will truly be one with you and you will look at us with all the love of a groom and you will make us clean.

[26:34] Help us in your son's name we pray. Amen.