The Church Is... - Week 4: July 5, 2026

Well, good morning, Connect.

I'm Nate Rovenstein, lead pastor.

I'm really glad you're here in live stream.

We're really glad you're here as well, joining us.

And I uh I just um so grateful whenever I get a chance to hear from my friends Isaac and Amy to watch them hear God's call to go uh on glow to serve to the ends of the earth as Acts 18 calls us to from our church, you know, 20 years ago, uh when they started attending and to see that journey in their life has been fantastic.

In fact, uh Karas, who was on the video, some of our church family was down when they were in Ecuador when the day Karas was born.

So that's always a marker.

Uh my daughter was on that trip, so she's 13 years old.

I couldn't believe that.

So it's awesome to partner with people around the world.

So I want to ask you a question today, and you know, living here in Lawrence, I think we know the answer to this question, but I wanted to run it by you.

This will be uh really uh easy for some of us, and some of us will be like, I don't know, but like I want to ask you what's the cathedral of college basketball?

Alan Fieldhouse.

Alan Fieldhouse, right?

Yeah, it is.

That's at least what uh remember when the Algerian soccer team here wasn't that fun, wasn't that fun when the football team, I guess, was here from Algeria in our community and they visited Allen Fieldhouse.

And in that in that visit, there was a social media post that went out.

I don't remember exactly who originated it, probably folks from KU, uh, but it talked about the Algerian team visiting the Cathedral of College Basketball.

Right?

So that went out and it got a response.

Can you imagine?

I'm gonna read this whole response.

I've I've cleaned it up for you.

Uh but it's long, but listen to this.

This is this is someone's response to that tweet or social media post.

Don't you have enough Kansas?

Nationally recognized brand, major conference, tons of NML money, national TV games, final four runs, merch sales, MBA alumni, personal dibs on top recruits.

All that's not enough.

You must try to steal the label of the Cathedral of College Basketball from the Palestra.

Some of you haven't even heard of the palestra.

There's only one Cathedral of College Basketball, and it's on South 33rd Street in Philadelphia.

No one cares about your huge, renovated corporate fog.

You sold out, your big business now, you're Coca-Cola, and the palestra is still the timeless, authentic, real hooper gym that Kansas hasn't been since the 70s.

I think somebody's jealous.

The Palestra is the heart of Philadelphia basketball culture and has been since 1927.

It's a living basketball museum.

You can feel it when you walk through the doors.

The stands are wood, benches that are a thousand years old.

It smells like a gym.

Alan Fieldhoff looks like the new wing of an airport.

Premium boxed seating for millionaire donors and corporate sponsors.

Wow.

People have strong feelings about their cathedrals.

I mean, how silly of those people in Philadelphia.

Ecclesiastes 3.11 says, yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time.

Now listen to this phrase.

He has planted eternity in the human heart.

But even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end.

Part of what it means to be made in the image of God is this desire to understand and connect with eternity.

And the writer goes on to say, even so, people can't figure it out.

I love a God that I can't figure out.

I love that there's mystery even to the revelation that we understand about.

I love what the Bible teaches us.

I love that Jesus has shown us who the Father is.

And I love the fact that we can learn more and more about that and never mine the depths of understanding that.

But there is something in every human heart that desires to connect with the divine.

Even though, as this verse suggests, there's much about God that remains beyond our ability to fully comprehend.

But we're on this search.

Every human being, whether they know it, acknowledge it or not, is on a search to understand the eternity that's been stamped on their heart.

We think it's important.

It's kind of in our name.

Connect church.

One of the things we want you to think about when you hear our name is we think we can connect with God.

We also think because we serve uh because we're making disciples that we can connect with one another and we serve our world because we want to connect with our neighbors.

But part of what, maybe the major part, worship Christ, like we want you to connect with God, and we believe it's possible.

There's something special about the places where we connect with God.

I whenever I you know travel and I'm I'm near one of the towns that I grew up in, whether that's Bartlesville or Winona or Salina, I often make an effort to drive by the church in that community and just remember the connections I had with God.

Now Bartlesville is is uh anyway, it's these places have meaning for me.

As a district superintendent and giving guidance to churches across the district, I've had the sad opportunity or necessity to, because churches have life cycles, to oversee the funeral of eight churches.

We've seen eight churches birthed, so we're even Stephen, but but two of those churches, uh we had to sell the buildings, and I was over this seeing that, and and to just watch the angst in people, and to to watch, you know, the the sense of losing that connection to the place where those folks connected with God and with each other.

I I could relate to that, I could feel that with them.

People are doing this all around the world.

It's not unique to Connect Church, it's not unique to the Wesleyan churches in Kansas, it's not unique to me.

Um, people around the world are are searching for and finding meaning in places, places where God met them.

Just some examples from our trip to Scotland last summer.

Um, just some pictures.

This is, you know, uh I can show you more of these if you come by the house.

I'll do your whole, you know, slideshow and tell you details about all these.

But here's just a few.

Here's an old cathedral.

It's long, then it's been torn down, but it's still a place that draws people.

Here, here's here's a place where people seek to connect with God.

This next slide is uh St.

Andrews, the first golf course.

Um I took a picture of that and sent it to some of my golfing buddies.

I said, I've never, I have no idea why this is so important to you, but for some people, places like this.

And here's another example of a cathedral more modern than the other one, or newer than the other one, but still ancient and beautiful.

And you can see even in the construction of it, a desire to show the beauty of the God they're connecting with.

And here's another picture of where people connect with God nature.

Where for a lot of people, that is a sense and a place where they connect with God in a deeper way than they can in a cathedral or a or a golf course.

And here's here's another place, ancient, ancient place, because this isn't just for Christians.

There's all kinds of temples and remains and ruins of cairns and you know, monoliths, uh, megaliths like this all across the world, where people in all kinds of ways, from all kinds of cultures, through all kinds of history uh periods, time periods, are seeking to connect with God.

And here's another one.

This is the Loch Ness monster.

That really is Loch Ness, and I drew that myself.

And so some people are on some adventure to find something.

Isn't that a great metaphor there?

Okay, move on from that.

And some people, it's hard to capture a picture that's trying to.

I decided not to capture a picture, just a blank screen.

Some people are looking inside themselves, they're they're they're they're seeing something of divine inside themselves and looking to see that maybe I am divine myself in some way, and there's a whole branch of religion that sort of looks inward to find this connection.

Sometimes this connection is related to a place and sometimes it's not.

It's not, but Ecclesiastic nails it.

Humans, even if they don't fully understand it, have eternity written in their hearts, and apparently people from Philadelphia have turned a basketball arena into a place that's called a cathedral.

And we would never do that here.

The New Testament takes us on this same journey.

Excuse me, the the whole Bible takes us on this uh new journey, this journey.

And in the New Testament, Paul wants us to see, he's trying to help us understand what the church is.

This new thing called the church.

And as Paul is describing the church, he's talked about family and household.

And today he adds another metaphor to this.

He talks about the temple, the place where God meets his people, where people worship their God, where that connection is made, where that eternal yearning of the heart is met.

And again, the temple is not a concept exclusive to Judaism or Christianity.

But Paul picks that metaphor up, and we want to look at it today as we're trying to understand what the church is, these called-out ones, these ecclesias.

And so if you go through scripture, you can see the Jewish nation, and then as Christians, we pick up the storyline of God's presence on earth.

It comes in a variety of forms.

We're going to go through the whole Old Testament pretty quick here, looking at this idea.

We start in Genesis.

In Genesis chapter 3, verse 8, we see the original place where God met with his people.

Genesis 3:8

Genesis 3.8 says, When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden.

So they hid from the Lord God among the trees.

Now, this is where God met his people.

This was before sin entered the world.

And there is this sense, this place where the divine, where the eternity in the human heart had had a place to connect with God Himself walking close to them.

But we know that Adam and Eve sinned and separation happens.

But God doesn't leave them.

He initiates a rescue plan right there in Genesis chapter 3 that's played out in the Old Testament.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

He brings Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his descendants, and God creates a people, a family first, and then a clan, and then a tribe, and then a nation.

And that nation finds itself being formed in slavery in Egypt, and it becomes a multitude of people in Egypt.

And God raises up Moses, who leads the people out of Egypt to establish this new thing, this new entity.

And this new thing, as they go through the wilderness on their way to the promised land, has a has a need.

God provides a place for them to meet God.

It's called the tabernacle.

Exodus 40 says, Then the cloud covered the tabernacle, this place that was given direct instructions or clear instructions on how to be built.

And the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

God met his people there.

Ecclesiastes was being played out in that moment.

And Moses could no longer enter the tabernacle because the cloud had settled down over it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle, this temporary place that moved with the people as nomadic people in these 40 years through the wilderness.

And then God gives them the promised land as he raises up Joshua and they conquer the land and there's judges, and God gives them kings, and David solidifies the kingdom, and Solomon builds now not the tabernacle that moves, but the temple that is permanent in Jerusalem.

And it says in 1 Kings 8, when the priests came out of the holy place, that is in this temple that they had built, a thick cloud filled the temple of the Lord.

God was meeting his people in this space.

The priests could not continue their service because of the cloud, for the glorious presence of the Lord filled the temple of the Lord.

Now God's presence was in this space.

We know that it wasn't contained in this space, but it was a special connection where God met his people, where ecclesiastes was being played out.

The longing of the human heart was being met because God showed up in this space and in this place.

But as in the garden, when he walked through the cool of the garden with Adam and Eve, the folks, the temple, the Jewish people, like every human who would have been there, could not keep the rules.

They could not remember the holiness of God.

And they, because of their human brokenness, walked away from that and they began to chase after other gods.

Even gods that they had conquered, they began to chase after.

The Bible uses a word, they hoard after them.

And over and over again, we see this play out in the story of the kings, the good kings, the bad kings, the prop the pre the prophets who came along, and finally there was a captivity into Babylon, and there's this 40 years of silence between the New Testament and the Old Testament because there was not a place for God to meet his people anymore.

And then God sent Jesus, who becomes the fulfillment of all of this, who brought in the most glorious and full and complete way the very presence of God to earth.

Not in a temple, not in a tabernacle, the temple permanent, the tabernacle moving through, but in a person who could walk and who could see and talk and heal people and see people that others overlooked and see the poor and the broken and the downtrodden and could confront evil and yet love those he confronted.

It's Jesus showing us who God is in his fullness.

John 1:14, of many places it says this, but probably the best.

John 1:14

So the word became flesh and made his home among us.

He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness, and we have seen his glory, that same glory that descended on the temple and on the tabernacle and walked with Adam.

That glory, we could see the glory of the Father's one and only Son.

And Jesus brought the presence of God to the people without the need of a building to contain his glory.

The temple as a physical building to be the meeting place of God and his people is now no longer necessary.

And we know that Jesus died because the only way that that gap between us and him that was initiated in the garden and never solved by the tabernacle or the temple was solved by the death of Jesus Christ, but not just his death.

No, his resurrection and not just his resurrection, his intervening for us on behalf as he sits at the right hand of God the Father, his sending of the Holy Spirit to empower us and the promise that he will someday make it all right in the future when he comes back.

So he sends the Holy Spirit in this gap between the time he revealed himself completely for who he is and until we will live in the reality of that revelation completely.

He sends the Holy Spirit.

And I want you to catch this language now because we read this, we read it, but I want you to have a sense of how important it was to hear this progression in the passage in 1 Corinthians.

Hear this.

Don't you realize that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?

Think about that in light of everything I've just said.

Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who lives in you and was given to you by God.

You do not belong to yourself.

That's a phrase we need to remember.

For God bought you with a high price, so you must honor God with your body.

Jesus accomplishes what every longing heart is searching for.

Eternity is written on their hearts, and the Holy Spirit, through this whole story, brings that eternity to every longing, willing, open, repentant, confessional heart.

What you're searching for is found union with God through Jesus.

And our bodies are the resting place for the glory of God.

And I was often taught as a child a lesson that I think is incredibly valuable, but sometimes if we if we if we say it flippantly, we might miss it.

I hope you've felt the weight of the statement when Paul says your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

That means we should care about our body.

Now I grew up rightfully understanding that means that I shouldn't drink too much and smoke and and and those kinds of things, and those kinds of physical things that happen, and that's absolutely true.

But also means I need to be careful about what I eat, how much I exercise.

And that's a that's a that's an adequate understanding of that passage.

I think that's a better motivation for you to give attention to your health than keeping up with somebody else because they have a better picture on Instagram, or because you feel guilty, or because the doctor told you should.

Now, those all like I think motivation to take care of our physical bodies should come from this idea that we're housing the Holy Spirit.

Understanding our bodies are frail and they're all gonna die, right?

But we often stop there, and that's extremely unfortunate because Paul had more to say about this.

In an individualistic culture like ours, where me, myself, and I are the Trinity.

We take that to mean I need to give attention to my health and my well-being, and uh again, it's a good application, but just not enough.

Because Peter picks up this idea, and Paul says it in other places as well.

In fact, we'll get to where Paul says it later.

Peter says, You are coming to Christ who is a living cornerstone of God's temple.

He was rejected by people, but he was chosen by God for great honor, and you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple.

What's more, you are his holy priest.

Through the mediation of Jesus Christ, you offer spiritual sacrifices that please God.

You let me go back to verse 5.

You are living stones.

You are not a living stone.

There's a temple, there's something in this metaphor trying to describe the church that says, giving attention to your physical well-being is part of it, but you are part of something bigger.

You are the temple, you are the church, is the place where God meets his people, not just you.

We.

You as part of we.

Not sure if that was really good English, but right?

I am part of we, but I am not the totality of we.

We are individually temples of the Holy Spirit.

Yes, but Christians together form a holy temple to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit in this creation, declaring the praises of God who called us out of darkness and into his glorious light.

The church is not a location, it is a redeemed people.

It's a redeemed people that meets in spaces.

And those spaces can and should have meaning to us.

Just like all the spaces where good things happen, bring good feelings to us.

But the church is so much more than a space.

We are a redeemed people.

We're not redeemed persons, we're a redeemed people collectively in this thing called the church that's being built together.

We've been tracking this idea of the church through Ephesians 2 a little bit here, and I'm going to go back to Ephesians 2.

In Ephesians 2, Paul has been emphasizing the power of the gospel, right, to bring Jews and Gentiles together.

He starts by talking about how we're individually reconciled to God, and then we're brought together into this new thing called the church.

He's used a metaphor, as I suggested earlier, of family and household.

And now in verses 19 through 22, he adds temple to the list.

So now we're going back to the passage we've been working our way through.

And he picks up this metaphor of temple and he says something very similar to what Peter said.

When he says, So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners.

You are citizens along with all of God's holy people.

You are members of God's family.

Together we are his house.

There's family and household built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, and the cornerstone is Jesus Himself.

And we are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord.

We are joined together, becoming this place where God resides.

A holy temple for the Lord.

Through him, you Gentiles are also being a part of this dwelling where God lives by his spirit.

Again, Peter, or excuse me, Paul in this passage is largely trying to help the Jews and Gentiles understand how they fit together.

It's not you Gentiles come a little ways, you Jews come a little ways, compromise, have some bylaws and figure out how to get along.

He's saying this is a new thing.

You're a family, you're a household, and you're a temple where the presence of God resides.

But this is not just, this is not just any old temple.

Jesus, uh Paul describes it.

He says, God is the cornerstone of the church.

The teaching of the apostles and prophets is the foundation, and we are the living stones.

Paul gives some specificity to how this temple is to be constructed.

We can't just make it up.

We can't just say, hey, we're the church.

What y'all want to do?

What should we be about?

He said, Christ is the cornerstone.

And that means Christ has some things to say about what the temple should look like.

The cornerstone is not only the first foundational piece of the temple, like physical cornerstones.

It is.

It is that.

It's the one that goes in first, it's the strongest one.

It goes in the corner, it's the first one, it's foundational, but the cornerstone then becomes the stone that all the other stones are majored from.

Have you ever done construction?

You need to have, like if you're majoring and cutting boards and framing, you need to have one that has the words pat written on it.

Because if you're majoring boards and it's the same thing and you use this board and you cut it and you cut it again and use that same board, that next board and use that one.

Like if you don't use the one you started with, pretty soon your boards are going to start getting shorter.

You've got to have a pattern.

The cornerstone is the one that everything else is oriented towards.

This is what it means to be being built together.

We're being built together around Jesus.

And in this temple, we find our place and function in relation to Jesus as we build into him and into each other.

And it's, and, and the, and Jesus is the cornerstone, and the foundation is the teaching of the prophets.

The foundation is that line of stones in this temple that is closest to the cornerstone, historically, perhaps, and also the one who carries the teaching forward.

So we can't, not only do we need to understand that Jesus is the cornerstone, but the apostles' teachings, the scriptures, become our pattern for life.

It's how we build this temple.

Our unity, excuse me, holiness.

Jesus is our holiness.

He's the one that makes us right.

He's the one that takes our stones that are so misshapen and shapes them into something that fits into this temple.

And the unity that we share is not just because we all get along because we don't.

We don't.

It's not just because we all look alike, we don't.

The church, unfortunately, we try to make those what brings us together.

Let's find a group of people that we get along with and let's let that be our little part of the church or the people that look like us.

And Jesus says, No, that's not your unity.

Your unity is the teachings of the apostles who are taking the teachings of Jesus and applying them to us.

Jesus is our cornerstone and the apostles are our foundation.

Years ago, I was a painter on a construction crew.

And I was pretty good.

It's gonna get, I'm gonna, it's it's gonna get not good here in a moment.

But I was a pretty good painter.

And you know what I you know what I had to do?

I had to cover up the mistakes of the drywaller.

They didn't always sand really well, so I had to fix that.

Then I became a drywaller.

Still did some painting, but my boss said, Hey, why don't you try to drywall?

And guess you know what I had to do as a drywaller?

I had to fix the mistakes of the framers.

I did.

You put that, I didn't hang the sheetrock, but I get up there and there's a gap.

I'm like, okay, you know, mud, tape, pit, and ever, fix it.

And then for a summer, guess what I became?

A framer.

And you know what I had to do as a framer?

Fix the mistakes of the foundation, guys.

I did.

We would come, the corner wouldn't be straight, so we had to make the line there.

Oh, we'll figure that out.

And then for one day, my boss let me help him lay a foundation.

And I realized I've got some pressure on me.

Because I know if I get this wrong, the framers are gonna have a problem, the drywall is gonna have a problem, and the painters are gonna quit.

By the way, my skills got worse as I went backwards down that line.

If we don't build on the foundation of Jesus, the farther we go in life, the harder it is for us to get it right.

And those around us will experience that as well.

And so maybe if there's a way to say what I want to say today in sort of one sentence, I would say the church is not so much a place for seekers to come to find the divine presence, but a people united with a divine presence that moves towards seekers.

Because here's the cool thing about the temple now it's not bound to a place.

It's not bound to a season.

I think I think sometimes we think the church's role is to protect ourselves from an evil society.

And what if we viewed ourselves as Christ bearers collectively moving towards broken people?

Now listen, we gotta do it based on the foundation of the apostles and the cornerstone of Jesus.

Moving towards people means sometimes we move towards people whose lifestyle choices or lifestyles we don't agree with.

Maybe they disturb us deeply.

We can't compromise the cornerstone.

And sometimes in your discipleship journey, there's some things you need to put boundaries around in your own life so that as you move towards people, you don't move towards people and become a part of the problem again.

There's some places you shouldn't go.

Perhaps.

But it's not because those places are too evil for someone to go there.

Just maybe you're not ready for that moment right now.

Does that make sense?

But let's not get in a mentality of protecting ourselves.

The church, not the building, not the institutions, not the Kansas district that I happen to be over, not the structures, not the bylaws and all the stuff we do that's necessary, I think, to just keep the people kind of heading in the same direction.

But the church, this living temple is where the presence of God meets his people.

And we have nothing to be afraid of when we go to places that are dark.

And T.

Wright says it this way: the church exists, in other words, for what we sometimes call mission, to announce to the world that Jesus is its Lord.

This is the good news.

And when it is announced, it transforms people and society's mission in its widest as well as its more focused senses is what the church is there for.

God intends to put the world to rights.

He has dramatically launched this project through Jesus.

And those who belong to Jesus are called here and now in the power of the Spirit to be agents of that putting to rights purpose.

The word mission comes from the Latin for send.

And as the Father sent me, said Jesus after his resurrection, so am I sending you.

Blow things up when we celebrate big.

It was fun.

And as a great-grandson of Pancracius Wormadom, an immigrant who had to sneak his way into this country, I want to say unequivocally, I am so grateful to live in this country.

I love the rights that we are allowed to gather, together freely this morning.

I love the rights that we have to vote, to speak our mind, and many other rights that we have.

As those of us that are American citizens and celebrate our birthday, we should do so with very grateful hearts.

Many people would long to have our freedoms and opportunities.

I love visiting historic sites and hearing stories of courage and grit, determination to shape the country that has shaped me.

And many of those sites I also am grieved by the mistakes, the greed, the misappropriated power that even our greatest leaders displayed.

Our country, like every other country, is a mixed bag of success and failure, a tension between conserving the past and progressing to the future with a significant amount of conflict about how to interpret our history and how to move into our future.

But here we are, 250 years old and going strong.

So how does the church, who at least according to the Apostle Paul, is tasked with the purpose of revealing God to the world by bearing God's presence in the world, behave in our current cultural context?

How do we take what it means to be the temple of Christ, the temple of God, into our current cultural context?

Well, that's a very big subject with a whole wide array of ideas on how involved the church should be in politics, business, art, sports, and with even more disagreement about what that involvement should look like.

But I think the answer at least lies in part by the reminder that our ultimate citizenship is not in America or any other country.

One of the most damning things in the whole story of Jesus' crucifixion is when the Pharisees and leaders could no longer figure out a way to get Jesus hung on a cross, and they had to resort to the phrase, we have no king but Caesar.

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine how hard that would have been for the Pharisees to say, who knew they had no king but God?

But in order to accomplish their purposes, they resorted to that statement.

And that put Pilate in a pickle and they knew it.

For Pilate to say, ah, no, he knew, and they did that to get what they wanted.

Because they forgot their ultimate citizenship.

My friends, I want to tell you, we have no king but Jesus.

And he showed us a way of life that is vastly different than any kingdoms of the world.

And while I am deeply grateful that my great-grandfather Pan Cracius and on the other side of my family, they all came to America, and I was born in this wonderful country.

I have no king but Jesus.

And I have to live with whatever that means in my current cultural context.

Curtis Chang is the first, is a first-generation immigrant in America, and he writes something that I want to wrap my sermon up with.

He is one that's uh part of the curriculum that this folks are studying right across the hallway right now, and he says this, listen to this.

Today it seems that the statement, I don't recognize this country anymore, could emerge from any demographic, from any point on the political spectrum.

Might this widespread sense of alienation point to a necessary spiritual truth?

We Christians ought to ask every country in which we reside, but do I fully belong to you?

The biblical answer is no, not really.

This is the answer for every one of us, the adopted and native born alike.

The former may long for a national belonging, the latter may assume it, but we will both be disappointed, which is why America or any historic historical nation can never serve as our final destination or permanent home.

Spiritually, we are all immigrants, all seeking our place of full and final belonging.

Our story does not come to a satisfying conclusion until we arrive at a better country, and our entrance there will be saluted by the truly glorious songs.

The church is a temple of God, I'm saying, built on the cornerstone of Jesus, bearing the truth of the teachings of the apostles, being built together as living stones who are not retreating into our buildings and organizational structures, but moving forward together to be a place where humanity can meet divinity simply because the church shows up.

And my prayer today is the church would be the church.

Let's stand and sing about it.