Sermon Tone Analysis

We Are...The Body of Christ

#1 The Nature of The Church – based on a message by Tom Shepard

Over the next several weeks, I am going to speak to you about the church…the body of Christ!

That is just one of the metaphors that is used to describe the church in the New Testament.

You probably are aware that the word church is not found in the Old Testament.

The concept may be there and the foundational ideas for the church are there but the word church is never used in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament talks about “a holy people”, a nation set apart for God.

But the first person to use the word “church” in the Bible is Jesus himself.

He is the one who founded the church.

In fact the Church belongs to Him.

Jesus, in this passage calls the church, my Church.

The church belongs to Jesus Himself.

That means that He considers the church to be important – How important?

It is not possible to grow to full Christian maturity – without involvement in God’s church.

There are many commandments in the Bible that you cannot fulfill without being involved in God’s church.

They are commandments like, “Love one another, encourage one another, serve one another, accept one another, greet one another … and the list goes on and on.

Who do you think the “one another” is?

When the scripture speaks of “one another” it is speaking of fellow believers – The Church.

The point is you cannot fulfill the commandments of Christ without being involved with His people – without being involved in The Church.

This morning we are going to examine The Nature of the Church.

Before we look at what The Church is – let us understand what The Church is not.

It is not a social club, although there certainly are social activities.

It is not a business, although we certainly need to operate with good business sense.

It is not a museum.

It is not a fraternity.

The Church is not even a building even though we often speak of it in that manner.

The church is not your church or my church or even our church!

The church is God’s church!

As I said earlier, the Bible gives us several metaphors of what The Church is.

This morning we are going to look at four of them.

From these metaphors we can gain a greater understanding of The Nature of The Church.

The Bible tells us that The Church is: 1.

A FELLOWSHIP. 2. A FAMILY. 3. A BODY. & 4. A FLOCK.

1.

The Bible says The Church is a FELLOWSHIP.

What is fellowship?

When I was a teen, I traveled with the Akron district IMPACT Team and sang at churches around our district.

One of the songs in the musical that we sang gave this definition: “Fellowship, that’s a bunch of fellows in the same ship.”

You’re headed in the same direction, so you get to know each other and you associate because you’re going in the same direction.

That’s what fellowship is.

Fellowship is all of us together heading in the same direction.

As Christians, we’re all headed to heaven.

The song went on to say “get along, that’s what they’ll do if they tarry very long.

We really do need each other, so there needs to be understanding and compromise to get along!

The Bible teaches that anything that causes disunity is sin.

When you cause conflict in church – when you get Christians mad at other Christians – what you are doing is disobeying God’s word – what you’re doing is destroying the fellowship – what you are doing is sinning.

If you destroy the fellowship, you don’t have a church.

Follow along with me as I read from 1 Peter.

We were called for this – building fellowship with one another.

2. The Bible says The Church is a FAMILY.

When you were born you were born into a family.

When you accept Christ as your savior, you are born into a new family – The Church.

Our sins have been forgiven – We are given a purpose for living – our relationships change.

Paul describes this in Romans 8:16-17

A top priority in family is RELATIONSHIPS, so in the family, we need to TREAT EACH OTHER WITH RESPECT.

I get it—relationships are complicated.

That is not just a relationship status on Facebook!

The truth is that every relationship is complicated!

In the Old Testament, we find that the relationship between God and His people is described by the covenant formula: I will be their God and they will be my people.

But a study of the Old Testament reveals that the people of God were not always faithful to that covenant.

There were times of great renewal and change, but they were followed by times of unfaithfulness and failure.

Timothy Green in Holiness Today said: “In the midst of the greatest of all reforms depicted in the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah recognized that something much deeper was at stake than the people’s feeble attempts to try harder, change, and renew their ways.

Concluding that it was as impossible for the people to change their ways as for a leopard to remove its spots or an Ethiopian his skin.

Jeremiah announced that the people’s infidelity to the Lord—their sin—was deeply engraved upon their hearts with a diamond pen.

It appeared that the covenant relationship was headed for utter failure.”

But Jeremiah doesn’t stop there!

Green continues: “The God who had called this community to whole-hearted love and undivided faithfulness would not stop calling.

The Lord who had conceived and given birth to the people by grace would also transform them by grace so that they would indeed love the Lord with all their heart and all their soul and all their strength.”

And that love for God will result in a changed life that will affect our lives and all of our relationships.

Look at what 1 Timothy says:

The Bible says we’re to treat each other like a family because the church is a family.

Nobody elected you into your family.

You’re not there because some committee asked you to be there.

The Bible says we are family because we have been born again – born into God’s family.

God has called you and placed in His family.

3. The Bible says The Church is a BODY.

Paul writes to the Corinthian church in chapter 12 of 1st Corinthians:

We’re a body, not a business.

We are an organism, not an organization.

Therefore whatever your gifts and talents you have are needed by the body.

You have been placed here to help the whole body.

What is the most important part of your body?

Certainly, there are parts that we deem as more important than others, but all have a task to do!

The body of Christ is like that – it can function without everyone doing their part – but the truth is it will function much better when all of us are involved – using the gifts and talents God has given us to build His church.

Now, you can have unity without having uniformity.

Have you noticed we’re all different?

We have different colored hair.

We have different color eyes.

We have different finger prints.

We have distinctly different DNA.

We’re different ages.

We have different likes and dislikes.

We even like different styles of music.

That’s the way God has made us.

God loves that.

God loves diversity.

Thank God we’re not all alike.

The point is, whatever you’re gifted at, that’s your part in the body of Christ.

We need you.

4. The Bible says The Church is a FLOCK.

This was Jesus’ favorite description of the church.