"One Holy Church" Ephesians 4:4 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Ephesians 4, verse 4.

Ephesians 4:4

I'll read verses 4 and 5, or 4, 5, and 6 together.

We'll be looking at verses 4 tonight and verse 5 next week.

The word of God says, there is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

This is the Word of God.

We're studying on Sunday nights through the Nicene Creed, and I'm sure you noticed that most of the Creed is spent on the doctrine of the Trinity.

And rightly so, because the origin of the Creed, remember, was to kind of suss out what was happening in the Roman world and uh even beyond the Roman world as the empire moved from Rome to modern-day Istanbul.

Constantine moved it to Constantinople, which he humbly named after himself, and then summoned the bishops together to craft the Nicene Creed.

So the historical context of it is it's going to be largely about God, who God is, and how the Trinity as a doctrine came to define Christianity.

But that's not the entirety of the creed, of course.

As you near the end of the creed, you see statements on Scripture, which we looked at last week, and then you see statements on the church that we'll look at tonight that we believe in one holy Catholic Apostolic Church.

That's a line from the Creed that I want to unpack for us tonight.

And so I'll give you an outline to follow along as we study the Church, one holy Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

What that means, that's the phrase from the Creed.

And as the Creed describes it, it's kind of a circular reason here.

The church is bound together by the Creed.

The Creed describes what it means to be a true church, and by its description, it binds us together.

Everyone inside of the creed is defined as a true holy Catholic and apostolic church.

But there's seven descriptions you can kind of pull out of that.

I know I have more points than there are actually words in our text tonight, but two of them I'm importing from other passages.

First, the true church is spirit-drawn.

The true church is spirit-drawn.

In the context of the creed, the doctrine of the church comes after the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

And that's not coincidental.

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, is true God, a very God.

As the Son is light from light, the Spirit is the joy and the delight and the love and the fellowship of the Trinity in a personal form, personal subsistence.

The Spirit then brings the Word of God to earth.

We'll look at that in a second, but the Spirit is the one who builds the church.

And you remember the last few weeks we've been talking about the boomerang aspect of the Trinitarian theology, that all things are from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.

So the gospel comes from the Father, it's incarnate literally in the Son, and then it's applied to our hearts by the Spirit.

And then that works back up to God.

As the Holy Spirit builds the church in earth, which he does by regenerating people and drawing them to faith, the Spirit brings people to faith in Christ so they can worship the Father.

So all things are from the Father, through the Son, and by or in the Spirit.

And then everything that we experience in the Spirit is through our faith in Christ and back to the glory of the Father.

And so this is true with the church.

It is fair to say that the church is, this Holy Spirit is the one who builds the church.

And you see this even more than just generally in a Trinitarian way.

It's true personally.

The Father sends the Son, the Son redeems his elect, the Spirit then applies that redemption to people and draws them to faith.

No one can come to the Father except through the Son and by the agency of the Spirit.

Jesus says it this way: no one can come to the Son unless the Spirit draws them.

And that word for draws is a very common word in the Greek world for pulling water out of a well.

And think about how water comes out of a well.

It doesn't come reluctantly out of the well.

You don't beckon and woo the water out of the well.

You drop the bucket in and you pull it up, and the water is drawn towards you.

This is the way the spirit builds the church.

The spirit comes into people's hearts and draws them to faith in Christ.

And the spirit changes their identity.

They go from living for themselves to living for Christ.

They go from being citizens of only one kingdom to having a dual citizenship there, as we talked about this morning, a kingdom on earth and a kingdom in heaven.

The spirit draws the church and builds the church by regeneration.

That's what Jesus says.

The Spirit blows where he wants to blow.

No one knows where the you can see the wind.

I mean, it looks like fall in our hallway because the doors are open and all the leaves flew in the hallway tonight.

You can't see the wind, but you feel it and you experience the effects of the wind.

And so it is with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit builds the church by saving people.

He doesn't save them against their will, he saves them by changing their will.

Their will is contrary to God, and they are born again, taken from death to life.

They have their spiritual eyes opened, they are spiritual corpses, and the Holy Spirit takes those dry bones and raises them up.

And when he raises them up, this is the key.

When he raises them up, he raises them up into the church.

That's the point.

There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

We are all called to one call, verse 4 says.

And then verse 3, we have the unity in the spirit and the bond of peace.

That's what Paul is arguing for here, that in the church you are bound together, heart to heart.

The number of people in the New Testament that are Christians about regeneration, zero.

The Holy Spirit saves people and he saves them into a life of faith by placing them into the church.

Every Christian is a brick built into the body of Christ.

That's the idea.

The Spirit is the one who builds the church.

The Spirit raises the dead spiritually speaking.

He finds us as orphans.

He adopts us, he gives us a home, and the home is his own house.

We were homeless, and he adopts us and makes us part of his family, brothers and sisters with the Lord.

That's why the church is called the body of Christ.

Then you join the body of Christ, knit together by the Spirit, built by the Spirit.

And so the true church is spirit-drawn.

That's what it means to be a spirit-filled church.

It doesn't mean to be a church that speaks in tongues or as I joked this morning, gargles snake venom or anything like that.

People at 9 30 thought that was funny, and 11 o'clock I just got eye rolls.

That's not what it means to be a spirit-filled church.

It means to be a spirit-filled church that you are knit together by the bond of peace, which is the working of the Holy Spirit.

Verse 4: one body and one spirit.

He unites the church together.

Secondly, the true church is not only spirit-drawn, but word-ordered.

And again, going through the context of the creed here, the creed goes to the Holy Spirit and then moves to what Dan preached on last Sunday, spoken of by the prophets.

The Holy Spirit builds the church through regeneration, but understand this: the Spirit builds the church through regeneration, but he uses another means also, not as a part from, but regeneration always happens by means of the word.

Nobody is saved without the word.

And the word is always effectual.

It always accomplishes God's intended purpose.

And so it's not God's purpose to save every individual who hears the word, because there's the external call of the word that hits, you know, the external ears and doesn't penetrate the heart.

But it is the will of God to save everyone whom he plants the word in their heart.

So he regenerates them by the drawing of the Holy Spirit and the washing of regeneration, the washing of the word.

So much so that in Titus, regeneration and washing of the word are synonymous.

The new birth is the same thing as having your heart cleansed by the word.

They're synonymous.

But how can you call upon someone you haven't heard?

And how can you hear unless there's a preacher?

And this is why preachers go into the world.

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the words about Christ.

So the Spirit builds the church, but he builds the church through the working of the Word of God in the world.

And of course, the objection, what about so-and-so who got saved without ever having opened a Bible before in their life?

And of course, that's that's true and that's possible, but think about it in this context.

They got saved by placing their faith in an object, their faith in the person Jesus Christ.

How did they know about the person Jesus Christ?

That was information given to them, and if it is true information, it is truly from the Word of God.

There's a crazy one of a homeless guy on the street, and a dog walks up to him with a McDonald's bag and drops the McDonald's bag at his feet.

Inside the McDonald's bag is a Gideon's Bible.

All kinds of stories like that.

And you open the Bible and you read the word and you believe the word and you're saved.

What if the dog brings your neighbor a Gideon's Bible?

And your neighbor reads the Word of God and doesn't get saved, but tells you about this Jesus they found in the Word of God that they don't believe in, and then you go on someday, and you even have a dream about Jesus or something like that, and you recognize that Jesus in my dream is a true Jesus because he corresponds to the Bible.

That is still faith from hearing and hearing from the words about Christ.

Salvation only comes through the agency of God's word.

And of course, Jesus is the word of God incarnate, but the Spirit is building the church by drawing people, saving them, and equipping them with His Word.

And it's not just that the Spirit builds the church through the Word, it's that the Word of God then orders the church.

You join the church through regeneration, having your heart washed to the water of the Word, and the Word of God then builds the church.

The Spirit is building the church through salvation and then sanctification, which is word-filled.

And so that's why the Word of God designs and structures the church.

The Word of God is the one who binds the church together.

Verse 3, we're eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace.

The unity of the Spirit is built around the Word of God.

The Word says what the church should do.

The church gathers for worship and it scatters to do the work of the ministry.

When it's gathered, it's gathered around the Word.

And this is a great contrast between the Puritans and the Church of England, because the Church of England was placing communion at the center of the worship service.

And even IBC, we have a center aisle because of, you know, weddings or whatnot.

But you can often tell, if you visit historic churches, you can often tell the difference between a Puritan church and an Anglican church because the Anglicans have the center aisle, because the focus of the worship service is the communion.

It's the body of Christ that's presented.

The sermon leads to communion or the sermon flows from communion.

But whatever it is, the communion elements are what's placed front and center, and the service revolves around that.

And the Puritans said, no, thank you.

Communion is an ongoing part of worship, of course, but the word of God is central.

Preaching is central.

So the Puritans built, you know, pulpits and they they put sight lines towards the pulpit and they made the service revolve around the preaching of God's word.

Michael Spiegel is a professor at Dal Seminer, has a wonderful book about this called Retro Christianity, where he traces the development of just the church around the pulpit as a returning to the spirit building the church through the word of God.

And he has some funny lines in there, like a plexiglass pulpit lets you know you have a plexiglass preacher, see-through, shallow, no substance.

Yeah, I love it.

Keenan made me a wood pulpit.

Go to war with this thing.

You know, and the verse of the pulpits is often the side to make room for the communion table kind of thing.

There's a lot of things that go into that, but the point is the word of God is the one that is ordering the church because the word of God is central to the church.

The word of God determines the structure of the church with elders and deacons, the ordinances of the church, with baptism and communion, the participants of the church, namely members, the practice of the church, singing, praying, giving, and then, of course, preaching.

The means of grace, the fellowship of the church are all defined, described, and prescribed by the word of God.

A true church is ordered around the right practice of the right things in the right way according to the standard of the word of God.

And of course, church discipline is part of that.

The word of God gives the church discipline.

It's the Lord's house and the Lord's body, and it's ruled by the Lord's word over his people.

An acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by Christ Himself.

We're getting to this in Matthew 18, but it is so common today for churches to stay away from church discipline because it, you know, quote, doesn't work or whatever, it's too complicated or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But the word, it's one of the most fundamental ways you see of your church is truly ruled by the Lordship of Christ.

Do they subject themselves to the Word of God and do what the Word of God says?

Is it his body or their body?

That's the question.

Does a membership of the church belong to Christ or does a membership of the church belong to the who's who of the church?

A key distinction between if the church belongs to Jesus or if it belongs to men.

The church follows this fad or that fad.

If they chase their tails because of what works.

I saw a church growth guru many years ago say the best way to grow a church is to look around and see what kind of methods the Lord is using in other parts of the world or in other churches.

What growing churches have in common?

Find that and do that, he said.

Man, that was that's the picture of immaturity in Ephesians 3, isn't it?

Being tossed to and fro.

In Ephesians 4, it's somebody who lacks the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, who's not mature, but is tossed this way.

Look at Ephesians 4, verse 14.

Ephesians 4:14

You're open to it.

Little children are the ones tossed this way and that way by the waves, carried by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.

That's not true in a church that is ruled by the word.

A church that has the reading of the scriptures with godly fear, sound preaching, hearing of the word, obedience in the congregation from the hearing of the word, faith and reverence, singing psalms that are from the word, the ordinances that are from the word, the religion and worship built around the centrality of the word.

And when worship is according to the word, Christ is magnified and exalted.

When worship is according to the inventions or the preferences of man, Christ is neglected and sidelined.

And so many people always try to design novel ways to do church or to grow church.

And they're not from the word, they're not built around the honor and the glory of Christ.

Number three.

Now we're going to go word by word through.

These are the two, the spirit-drawn and word-ordered is what's leading up in the creed to the phrase one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church.

And the word one there, it's in the creed, of course, but it's also the repeated word here in verse four, one hope that belongs to your call.

Verse 5, one Lord, one faith, one baptism in verse 6, one God and Father.

It is the repeated phrase.

And of course, even beyond the word one, it's this concept of unity.

The church has a union or a unity to it.

That's verse 3, eager to maintain the unity in the spirit and the bond of peace.

There's union in the church because every believer is bound by the Spirit of God.

That's union in the church.

Union is an objective reality, not a subjective experience.

Every believer, whether from Libya or Lancaster, every believer has union with every other believer in the world.

Annandale or Algeria.

Every believer is knit together, one to the other, because every believer has the same spirit dwelling in them.

We're all participants in the body of Christ.

That's what union means.

Unity then, as a church experiences unity, notice to maintain the unity.

That's an ongoing process, maintaining the unity.

Unity then is not something that is seen superficially, but something that is expressed externally, revealing the internal reality.

Unity is not in externals.

You can be in a body of believers who disagree in things.

That doesn't mean that they don't have unity.

You can disagree about whether or not pastors should wear suits or not, or maybe only on Sunday morning and not Sunday evening, which is the right answer.

You can disagree about whether communion should be once a month or once a week or four times a year or whatever.

You can disagree on that and still have true unity.

And there are those that very often don't understand this, and I hear it around election time.

Every four years I hear from people how can how can we say the church has unity when we know there are people in the congregation who vote for different people than I would vote for?

There's no unity if they're pulling a different voting lever.

That's not unity, my friends.

Unity is not expressed in external voting actions.

Unity is expressed in an internal union with the Word of God.

Unity is expressed by being ruled by the Word, not by how you dress or who you vote for.

Unity is a spirit-filled reality.

You want to threaten unity in the church, stop doing what the Word of God says.

That tears apart unity.

Not voting for different people or dressing differently.

Or I say voting and dressing, those are just two examples.

You can think of a hundred different examples of externals that do not threaten unity.

Unity is a spiritual reality.

Unity is seen by the bond of peace as people subject themselves to the Word of God.

And that is why, by the way, that at the most foundational level, believers' baptism is such a part of unity of a local church.

But we can say we have true spiritual union with Presbyterians.

The fact that there's different denominations actually strengthens unity.

By letting people who are convictionally infant Baptists have their own church that practices infant baptism.

Great.

And we have true spiritual union with them.

We recognize them as brothers and sisters in the Lord.

But if you tried to force everybody into one congregation to agree on it, that would tear apart unity.

And so even the existence of different churches facilitates unity.

People have often said if the church is united, this is a standard Mormon knocks on your door.

This is what they say.

If there's only one church, you know, the whole story is that Joseph Smith was at an intersection, remember?

I'm sure you've heard this at an intersection, whatever New York town he was in, and you know, he had a vision from the Lord that if there's true unity in the church, how come there's a different church on all four corners of the intersection?

And how does the Lord solve that in Joseph Smith's encounter?

By having him build a new church.

So I mean, it's logically incoherent at the get-go.

But you recognize that different churches, as long as they're under the Lordship of Christ, can have true unity.

And I'm telling you, there is a danger to the idea of unity if you think that unity is unanimity.

They're not the same word.

Unanimity is everybody agrees on everything.

And if you think unanimity gives you unity, you're wrong because unanimity freezes everybody at the lowest common denominator.

I mean, take a family that wants to go to dinner.

If you need to be unanimous on where you go to dinner, then I'm telling you the four-year-old is going to win every time.

It freezes you at the lowest common denominator, and that is a threat to unity.

I mean, the New Testament describes one church where there is a divergence of opinion on even substantial things.

Like, can you eat meat that had previously been offered to idols?

You can disagree on that with other believers and still have union in the body.

The example Paul uses in Romans 14 is the day to worship.

That's a huge deal.

But you can have union, Paul says, with people that disagree even on that.

Romans 14, verse 5, one person esteems one day as better than another, another esteems all days alike.

Romans 14:5

Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.

And then Philippians 3, Paul has a wonderful prayer to them.

I love this prayer.

Where Paul says, I pray that you would agree with what I'm saying.

I pray that you would be like-minded with me, he says.

But if you aren't, don't worry, the Lord will reveal that to you one day, too.

So Paul's not denying the unity of the church because there's people who disagree with him, he's embracing it.

Because he's not demanding unanimity.

He says, I press forward to the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Let those of us who are mature think this way.

But you recognize that everybody in the church is mature.

The church has immature people in it.

That's the nature of the church because there's always new life.

Being added.

A growing tree always has immature branches, doesn't it?

If it's not producing new growth every year, it's not growing anymore.

So praise God that the church is one church with mature and immature people together.

1 Thessalonians 5, verse 14.

1 Thessalonians 5:14

Be at peace among yourselves while you admonish the idle, encourage the faint-hearted, and help the weak.

Be patient with them all.

That seems to imply there's a range of maturity in the church, from the weak to the strong.

The mindset that says God only leads people by creating a community where there's no weakness is going to be unbiblical and tear at the unity of the church.

But there is one church.

We all have unity with every believer in the world.

One church.

Second, holy.

This is one of the most distilled descriptions of the church.

There's one church, and we are now living out a life of holiness.

We're bearing one another, verse 2, in love.

Verse 1 of chapter 4, we're walking in a manner worthy of the calling which we've been called, the text says.

We're supposed to be walking in holiness.

Acts 9, verse 31.

Acts 9:31

The church is spread through all Judea and Galilee and Samaria, and it had peace, and it was being built up in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

That's a cool phrase, isn't it?

The church is built up in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

Why does the Holy Spirit need to comfort people that are being built up in the church?

Because they're broken and grieving over their sin.

They're being set apart from the world.

Remember when Aaron ordained his sons to be priests?

And they approached the altar offering strange fire.

And Nadab and Nabah were not novices.

They had been with Moses up the mountain.

They had seen the glory of the God, the glory of Yahweh on the mountain.

They had seen it firsthand.

And they came down to the temple and they offered strange fire at the temple.

They were set apart as priests, and they took fire from their house and brought it to the temple because that seemed appropriate for them to do.

And the Lord struck them dead.

And do you remember what he said after he struck him dead?

He said, Moses, tell Aaron to stop crying.

And he says, Among those who approach me, I will be treated as holy.

Among those who approach me, I will be treated as holy.

And so it shouldn't surprise us when the Lord builds his church, he's building a body that is set apart.

Christians are those who are crucifying the flesh.

It's Hebrews 10, 14.

They're being sanctified in the Spirit.

Later on in Ephesians 5, the church is connected as the bride of Christ, and the Lord is laboring in his church to present his bride as holy and blameless, without spot or wrinkle.

You think of all you do to get ready for your wedding day.

And choosing the clothes and wanting the perfect body.

And I'm only talking about the guys here.

That's the labor of the Lord in his church in Ephesians 5.

And he's laboring not for a tie that really goes with the flowers, but he's laboring that the church would be holy and blameless, set apart from the world.

That's why church discipline is so central.

The goal of discipline is to purify the church, not to fix problems in the church, except that the problem is sin in the church.

It's called out in the Nicene Creed that the church would be holy.

Acts 20, verse 28.

Acts 20:28

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock.

This is Paul's pleading with the elders in Ephesus.

Be careful.

The Holy Spirit has made you overseers.

Care for the church, which he purchased with his own blood.

There's of course a personal and progressive element to our holiness.

We're always growing, we're always putting off sins.

But the church is holy because it is bought by Christ.

It is holy because it's being made holy.

And there are always tares planted in the church.

The enemy plants tares in the church.

Jesus says that.

The enemy scatters weeds in the field, and weeds grow up in the church.

That's why Matthew 18 gives church discipline to the church to ferret that out as much as is known.

You know, in church discipline, Jesus says this.

You can't be ripping up everything that looks like a weed, or you're going to end up hurting the wheats, right?

If you go on a rampage, you'll hurt the immature, the immature plants.

Like you're not the maturity police.

But the church is called to pay attention to their life and godliness so that it's set apart from the world, or as the creed says, that it would be one holy church.

Holiness gives way to the word Catholic.

The word Catholic.

Catholicos is the Greek word.

It's not a New Testament word, at least I know of.

I don't think it's in the New Testament.

But it is a common Greek word, and it is a word that means, we don't have a word that means exactly this in English, honestly.

The best way to define Catholicos is a word that means a part that pertains to the whole.

So we have that logical concept.

Like if it's a part that relates to the whole, that word for the whole, that's the word Catholicos, Catholic.

It means the whole that the part is from.

And so that's why I said we don't have an English word like this.

Sometimes we say it means universal, but that's not really what universal means either.

Universal means, well, universal, everything.

That's not a part that pertains to the whole.

Catholicos is more specific than universal.

It doesn't just mean everything, it means everything of a certain kind that has parts that relate to it.

That's the word.

And so in the Creed, that's the word they used in the Creed.

One holy Catholicos church.

One holy Catholic.

It's just, you can transliterate right in English.

One holy Catholic Church.

In other words, what it's saying here, and you connected to the word one, that every believer has union with every other believer.

That union is expressed through churches.

And every church is part of the same invisible Catholic Church.

We've always distinguished between the visible and the invisible church.

Every believer is a member of a visible church, and every visible church is joined to the invisible church.

Or you can say it in the reverse way.

It's much more popular for Americans to say it in the reverse way.

Church Father is always invisible to invisible, but American evangelicals always go invisible to visible.

It works both ways.

Every believer is a true believer because their faith in Christ, then they should join a local church.

It works both ways.

The idea of Catholicos here is it's not a manual Bible church.

It's the idea that a manual Bible church is part of the whole, it's part of the whole body of Christ.

It does not mean Roman Catholic.

The Roman Catholics took the word and made it, you know, the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman expression of the Catholic Church, and then it became its own kind of more technical meaning of the Roman Catholic Church over all other churches.

The Mother Church, so to speak.

But even inside of Catholicism, there's other Catholic churches.

There, I don't know, seven of them or some number that all are in some kind of fellowship or communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

But that's not how we use the term, and that's not how the Creed used the term either.

By the way, the creed, I can prove it's not how the creed used the term, because the creed was written under the direction of an emperor who moved the capital out of Rome.

So he doesn't mean by this the Roman Catholic Church.

And he definitely doesn't mean, you know, Mary is a co-redemptrix or the Immaculate Conception of Mary or the doctrine of purgatory or the celibacy of the priesthood or anything like that.

It does not mean any of those things.

It means the invisible union of the body of Christ.

And so it's all Bill Price and I talk about how to translate it when we do the Creeds reading Sunday mornings, how we translate it.

And I think Christian is the best way to translate it because that's what we mean by it, just one Christian church.

But I can see the argument for translating it universal, but that just sounds like so much like universalism to me, like everybody's saved.

Or I can see the argument for translating it as Catholic and explaining that the word Catholic there just means every true believer.

We're all joined together.

But then you have to explain it every time you do the creed, or I have people ambushing me in the hallway wanting to know about purgatory.

And so we just end with Christian, I guess, and then we forget and do it differently next month anyway.

So what does it mean when we say it's a universal church or a Christian church?

What does it mean when we say the church is universal?

Well, several different things.

It means it's universal by place.

The true church is represented in every nation, every tribe, every language group.

You'll find this out in Revelation.

Every tribe, every nation, every tongue.

Revelation 5, 9, there's saints from every tribe, nation, and tongue before the throne.

It's a global body.

Persons.

We're all built into one body.

You have more in common with a believer in Christ than you do with your twin brother if he's not a believer.

You know, there's there's a distinction there.

Your family is reoriented.

Jesus reorients family around himself.

Times.

It's universal as regard to times.

From the apostles to today, geographic, political, cultural boundaries are all transcended.

Christians belong to the oldest and most diverse global institution on the planet.

That's what the word Catholic means.

The you are in partnership with every believer from Pentecost to today.

And even the believers before Pentecost, in Hebrews 12, it says they're apart from us not being made perfect, they're waiting for us to be made perfect before the Lord together.

It's astonishing to think about.

And it's universal as regard to truth.

The word Catholic here is those that subscribe to this creed.

It's a hot debate right now in the inner website are Mormons rightly called Christians?

And the Nicene Creed is kind of the most basic element of what it means to be a true Catholic church.

Do you subscribe to the Nicene Creed?

And if not, then no.

And this isn't this, this is what I meant by it's kind of circular.

It's the creed that says that we are part of one holy Catholic church, and here Catholic is defined by those that believe the creed.

But this is not invented in the fourth century.

This comes straight from the New Testament.

Jesus builds his church on the preaching of Peter in Acts chapter 2 and then passes it on from Peter to others.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

You even see the narrative change in the midpoint of Acts, Acts 13 or so, as it goes to Paul.

You see the truth handed to James, who's overseeing the church council there in Acts 15, who encourages Paul and sends Paul out.

And you see Paul going out, training up Timothy and then other faithful men, 2 Timothy 2, 2.

What I entrusted to you, give to other faithful men and pass it along.

Jude 1, verse 3, the faith was delivered once and all for the saints.

Jude 1:3

Contend for that, Jude says.

It's a qualification for an elder, 2 Timothy 2, verse 25, that you're able to teach.

2 Timothy 2:25

And check this out.

Elders, a qualification for elders, you're supposed to be able to correct your opponent with gentleness.

Why would you want to correct your opponent in the church?

It's not talking about people outside on the street.

Why would you want to correct your opponent in the church?

Because you're building the body in holiness.

It was handed to you by somebody else.

Paul tells Timothy to charge people, 1 Timothy 1, verse 3, charge them not to teach a different doctrine.

1 Timothy 1:3

Guard the doctrine that was handed down to the saints and the apostles and bring it into the world.

And this gets us into what we mean when we call it an apostolic church.

It's one apostolic church.

It goes from Peter and the apostles.

They are the foundation.

That's what Jesus says.

The apostles are the foundation of the church.

Jesus himself is the cornerstone, and their preaching begins to build the church brick by brick, level by level, layer by layer, century by century.

And that's where you really start to appreciate where Paul says, I'm giving this to Timothy, and I want him to pass it on to others.

It is an unbroken chain.

Or Judigan, content.

What I've given to you, I've delivered to you.

The faith isn't growing as far as content, it is growing as far as numbers go.

And so what does it mean to be an apostolic church that you correct those who deviate from apostolic doctrine?

Titus 1, verse 9, an elder qualification.

Titus 1:9

Give sound instruction and rebuke those who contradict it.

There's a theme in this.

I hope you're seeing a theme through all six of these so far.

We've got one more, but I hope you're seeing a theme in all six of these.

That it starts with the Spirit who's using the word to set the church apart, a union of spirit-indwelled people who are holy.

The church then guards that holiness, which guards its unity, by staying close to the apostolic doctrine.

And when churches do that, they are joined to the long legacy that has been handed down from Peter straight through others to us.

That's the theme.

So don't break it.

Don't break it.

And number seven, the most obvious one.

It's a church.

Amen?

It's a church.

I don't want to neglect the most obvious part of it.

A church means a gathering.

It's the word ecclesia, called out of.

It's the word for a gathering.

The church gathers together for worship.

This means that a church is publicly identifiable.

It's not an amorphous body, it's not an amoeba.

It's got people that are in or out and maybe not.

And this is the superiority of the Baptist worldview, I would say, from the Infant Baptist worldview, is the Infant Baptist kind of theology lends itself to the more amorphous, you don't know who's in and who's out kind of thing.

You've been baptized in the church, but you're not following the Lord yet, and then one day maybe you will follow the Lord confirmation, I don't know, and then you see what happens.

And it's just so ambiguous because it's done geographically and whatnot.

That's not what Catholic means.

The church is a visible manifestation of the gathered saints for worship, built together into one body.

Think of all the analogies in the New Testament for the gathered body: spiritual gifts, hands, eyes, mouth.

There's speaking gifts and there's serving gifts, and the body exists with all of them.

God gifts the body with the people that it needs.

And so the Lone Ranger Christian, the nobody but me, Jesus, and my Bible kind of Christian is foreign in the New Testament.

There's no Christians like that in the New Testament.

But you can't exercise spiritual gifts unless you're part of a body, and you can't say you're following the Nicene Creed unless you're part of a church.

Fifteen times in 1 Corinthians, Paul describes the church as a group of people that come together.

I was reading 1 Corinthians this week and I saw that phrase, and so I did a quick word search and found that it's 15 times.

The church gathers, it meets on the Lord's Day for the purpose of all of the other six.

And if any one of these seven points is out of whack, it really, or any one of the first six points is out of whack, it hurts the ability for it to be the seventh point.

The church is not a gathering of people, it's a gathering of believers.

It's not a gathering for the world, it's a gathering for the saints.

It's not a gathering for the curious, although of course the curious are welcome.

It's a gathering for those who've been drawn by the Holy Spirit with their eyes open in faith.

It's not a gathering for like a rotary club or a speech club or a political activism club, things that are united around some third party.

It's not any of those things.

The church is united around itself because it's the body of Christ that's united around the word of Christ.

And so now you see how the doctrine of the Trinity plays through all of this.

It's from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.

The Spirit builds us and binds us together back in faith to the Son.

The Spirit sets us apart from the world, but gives us, it's just a wonderful thing.

The Spirit sets us apart from the world, but doesn't leave us as an island.

The Spirit sets us apart from the world and then unites us to every believer through the church age.

And so we are alone in that sense.

We're different in the world.

But we are never alone because we're united to the invisible holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Lord, we're so thankful for your word which binds our hearts together.

It truly does.

And we pray that we don't mean that it binds us just together with those here tonight, but we mean your word casts a scarlet cord into our heart that binds us to the hearts of all of the believers around the world right now.

And of course, it leaves the confines of time.

We have union not just with the believers in the world right now, but through the saints, all the redeemed who've been washed by the blood of the Lamb.

They are our brothers and sisters.

In the future, we will reign with you in the kingdom and then the eternal state, where there will be twelve thrones and twelve pillars, twelve for the twelve tribes and twelve for the twelve apostles, the elders of the church.

You've built your church as your bride.

We are washed by your blood, joined to you in faith.

We're so thankful, Lord, for the gift of Christ.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, iBC.church.

If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to tms.edu.

Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.