What I Believe about the Church

Until such time as I update my Bible Study notes here, I thought I would pass along some meditations that fit with my current sermon series on the tasks of the Church. Here are fourteen things I believe about Christ's Church...

1. God saves individuals, but He never saves us in isolation. The church is involved in bringing each person to Christ, and every person thus brought to Christ is grafted into the body of believers. This is the truth in the old line, "no salvation outside the church."

2. The church is both a divine institution and a human institution. God creates His church and God causes her to grow (God the Father is the gardener, God the Son is the builder, God the Spirit adds to the church daily those who are being saved), but God also delegates freedom and responsibility to us as His human instruments.

3. As a divinely created body, the church is made up of all who have truly placed their faith in Christ, and whose names are thus written in the Lamb's book of life. These true believers are known with perfect accuracy only to God, and they represent the "church invisible" as contrasted with the human institution we see on earth as the "church visible."

4. As a divinely created body, the church will endure; the gates of hell will not prevail over her. There may be times or places where a local congregation "dies," either through martyrdom or apostasy, but the church will never pass from the earth because God has promised never to leave Himself without a witness.

5. The true church exists only so far as its members are in living connection to Christ, who is our life. Jesus is the head of the body, the groom of the bride, the shepherd of the sheep, the vine of the branch, and the cornerstone of the building. The Spirit of Christ is the life's breath of the church (in both Hebrew and Greek, all the words are the same for wind, breath and spirit). Without this connection, we have no life in us.

6. With Christ as the head, all the diverse members of the body are joined in mystical union with one another.

.....more to come!