(based on Romans 11:13-15, 28-32)
You’ve undoubtedly already done it if you’ve seen the image (“Church Is…”). You’ve finished the statement with some word or phrase that expresses your view of what the church is. Church is… what? Just what is the church? Is it a place? An event? Does it invoke positive feelings or negative? And it may very well be that the past 5 months have forced us to revisit previous thoughts we had about church and see if they have changed. Some churches have worshiped exclusively online during that time; many have at least in some way returned to a hybrid form of worship, and still others have closed their doors permanently. What, then, is church, and what role does it have in your life, my life, our lives, today? We will be spending five Sundays exploring the church’s identity and its role in our lives today.
I personally have at least one specific outcome I will be praying for as a result of our time in the Word these next few weeks: that more eyes and hearts would be opened to see church less like a toothbrush and more like a phone. Sounds like a pretty weirdly specific prayer, huh? What I mean is this. The toothbrush has pretty much one specific purpose. You use it for brushing your teeth. You don’t grab it for anything other than that. People who view church as a Sunday morning gathering are viewing it like a toothbrush – while an important part of what church is, that’s not even close to tapping into the full potential of what church is for! Church is far more similar to a phone, which does much more than just make phone calls. Your phone is your calendar, your personal assistant, your search engine, your weather forecaster, your photo album, your camera,… etc. You get it – it does so many things! So does church, and I hope that becomes clear today and in the coming weeks.
My encouragement to you is this: be willing to challenge your own personal views, no matter how long-held they may be. If church has never even been on your radar in life, at least be open to hearing a clear picture of what you have (or haven’t!) been missing. If church has always been a part of your life for as long as you’ve lived, be open to the possibility that somewhere along the lines the routine and regularity of it may have allowed its role to become somewhat blurry over time – after all you aren’t the same person you were years ago, and chances are, neither is your church in some respects. If you’re somewhere in-between, where church has held varying degrees of importance in your life through different seasons of your life, perhaps the time is ripe for it to play a more consistent role.
This morning as we seek to fill in the blanks, we want to focus our attention on who the church is for (disregard the grammar, because saying it the right way just sounds goofy these days). You probably have at least some idea of the type of person you think of in connection with church. Maybe your description of those you associate with church is positive, or it may very well be negative. The church might be the last place you’d expect to find hypocrites, but I assure you, there are plenty of us here, and you might even be surprised to find that we’ll quickly admit it. We know as well as anyone that God wants us to live a certain way, and we know as well as anyone that we fail daily. You may think of the church as being made up of a class of people who are pretty decent – so much so that you could never see yourself belonging, as your past record would somehow disqualify you. I totally understand that, and admit that sometimes we Christians are even guilty of making you feel that way, unfortunately. Some may loathe church-going people as small-minded caricatures of everything that is wrong with our society today. Others joke about lightning striking if they ever set foot in a church, and sadly, they’re only half-kidding in their own minds. So who is church for?
A man named Paul provides us with the answer in the letter he wrote known today as the book of Romans in the Bible. Paul is well-suited to spell out who the church is for, as he experienced two vastly different types of “churches.” One church, the church in which he grew up, was fixated on rules and regulations, last names and lineage. The essence of church to him was based on who you were and how you lived. This church was made up of the Jewish people, who could trace their ancestry all the way back to the family tribes that would eventually make up the part of the world that we call Israel today. Only Jewish people belonged to this church.
Those outside of this church – everyone who was not Jewish – are referred to as a Gentiles. There was a point in Paul’s life that he was so zealous for the Jewish church that he persecuted and hunted down Gentiles for speaking against it or believing a different message. Paul thought he was doing the right thing, until the Lord made it clear to him that his view of church was all wrong. In these verses from Romans this morning, Paul shares how he better came to understand who the church is for, and he shares his observation of the Lord God’s brilliant plan to ensure that it would be know that the church is for everyone. That’s right – everyone. Including you.
The way Paul explains it in these verses may be somewhat challenging, so permit a bit of a modern day parable to clarify. A man wanting to start his own business needed to hire some employees to work for him. Wanting to do things right, and to show them how much he appreciated them, he went above and beyond in taking care of his employees. They were paid well, they received generous benefits, plenty of time for family and vacation, and had the best working environment possible. On top of that all, the company was growing and enjoying great success. The employees were thrilled… at first. No one else enjoyed the level of compensation they did. But eventually they got used to it. They saw what others received and wondered what it would be like to work there. Either out of indifference or being enamored with others, eventually they left.
Their departure, of course, meant the owner needed to hire new employees. He had no problem finding new employees, as word of his generosity and appreciation as an employer spread quickly. Others were hired and soon enjoyed the same wonderful compensation that the very first employees had. After some time elsewhere, the original employees realized how good they had had it and saw it in the lives of the current employees. They longed to have their old jobs back and to be welcomed back into the company again. Of course they were delighted to find that the growth and success of the company meant that there was more than enough room to take on more employees, and they were rehired to enjoy the same outstanding benefits once again.
Of course this analogy limps greatly in this – there is no work or effort whatsoever required for one’s salvation! But the rest of the parable hopefully helps us grasp the point Paul was making in these verses from Romans. “Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I take pride in my ministry in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of them” (v.13b-14). Paul didn’t hesitate to make a big deal about his ministry to the Gentiles – not shying away from pointing out that God wants them to be saved, too, and that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection were all the proof they needed that God wanted to include them. In generating that kind of excitement about the one-of-a-kind good news found only in the Christian faith, Paul longed for his fellow Jewish people to be stirred up by the seemingly radical idea that everyone could be saved. HIs people then would be drawn back to the true God and find salvation in his Son, Jesus Christ, the very Messiah they had rejected, but who nonetheless died and rose for them, too!
Naturally, the Lord’s determination to take the good news to the Gentiles had the potential to fill them up with pride. Paul addressed that. “Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you” (v.30-31). Paul is reminding his Gentile hearers to remember that they were once the ones on the outside looking in, but that God opened up and extended his loving arms to embrace them with his grace, his underserved love, too. Now, the same is true for the Jewish people. Just as they turned away from the Lord’s mercy through the Messiah and were suddenly on the outside looking in, God’s plan in welcoming in the Gentiles was not to exclude the Jewish people, but to win them over again and see his heart for them, too.
Paul summarized God’s approach in verse 32: “For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” This sounds irrational, doesn’t it? Why turn everyone to disobedience and not just to obedience? However, if you are an unbeliever, would you be OK if I forced you into believing? Of course not. So why should anyone turn around and take issue with God’s plan to let us have our own way, especially when his purpose for doing so is 100% purely noble – “so that he may have mercy.” God wants to extend his mercy to all people, and so he leveled the playing field and disregarded all of the different ways we humans have of categorizing and casting people to determine status. God did away with that and put everyone in the same sinking Titanic of unbelief and sin – everyone in the same boat. That way, as everyone comes to realize their grave situation, they would see their need for rescue and deliverance, and see that the Lord is always waiting with his mercy to extend to everyone who realizes their need of it.
Church is for everyone. Everyone. Yes, that means church is for you. Now that we’ve established that, and that you know our doors, like Jesus’ arms, are open to welcome you, stick around for a few weeks to discover more about what church is.