The Eternal Dwelling of God

Well, church when? When Jamie and I travel, we

always like to pick a random book that is somehow relevant to

wherever it is that we're going, but something that we would

never read otherwise. So when we were looking toward

going to visit Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, in the back

corners of the 4th floor of the bookstore, Hatchers found a

little book called Building Saint Paul's by James WP

Campbell. So picked it up and read that.

And I got to read for the first time the story, the amazing

story of Christopher Wren, the chief architect of one of the

greatest building projects in history.

And I didn't have to read long before I realized that the story

of how Saint Paul's was built was a story of adventure.

It's a story of courage. It's a short book.

If you ever like to read it, it's upstairs.

It's of wealth and loss. It's of scientific progress and

breakthrough, A story of mutinous workers and pirates,

patients and endurance. And there's points where he's

building this cathedral where the masonry doesn't exist yet,

the technology doesn't exist yet to physically hold up the

structure. And so as they're going, Ren

invents it. And that there's points where

they need wooden beams to uphold the structure so long that trees

are not that tall in England. And so he's having to

communicate with foreign countries and bring in import

all of this lumber. And as he's doing it, pirates

are stealing their wood and their materials.

It's it's amazing this this thing ever got built.

The timeline kept getting pushed back.

But over 35 years, Saint Paul is built.

And if you've ever been there, you know, it's a work of art,

magnificent to behold. A legendary building that housed

worship, a legendary building that is now the resting place of

statesman and heroes. And this was the same building

that in World War 2, Winston Churchill was preoccupied.

He said this building is so important.

He would wake up every morning in the war.

And the first question out of his mouth was, is it still

there? That building is what we're

talking about. And one of the most beautiful

structures in the world. He needed it to have glory says

when you see this building, you need to understand that it's

glorious. And so he built 3 domes.

He says when you see it as on the hill there in that one

square mile of London, he says you need to see its glory from

the ex externally. So he made a a beautiful Dome

and then something had to hold up the building.

So there was a a non visible Dome that's in the middle that

no one has ever. You cannot see from the outside

or the inside. And he said, and there needs to

be a glory in from the interior. When you look up, you need to

behold the glory of God. And so as you go in and you look

up, there's an interior Dome painted and beautiful.

And so a dog lover all his life, it's a humorously.

He quoted Christopher Wynn said. Wynn said the chief architect of

Saint Paul's said the secret of architectural excellence is to

translate the proportion of a dachshund into bricks and mortar

and marble. And so for fun, somebody took a

picture so you can see the glory of God's created order in the

glory of this church. And so this was Saint Paul's,

was Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece, and he was buried

in a crypt there in a coulombarium beneath the church.

And there's a simple monument of stone where it says simply in

marble in Latin, reader, if you seek his monument, look around

you. And what that means is if you're

looking for a memorial for Christopher Wren, you're

standing in it. Look around and see the glory of

what he accomplished. And and take your Bibles turn to

Ephesians chapter 219 to 22. We're going to be going through

those few short verses this morning.

And what I want to do about my goal again, in every sermon

here, the goal is so you understand what these words of

Scripture mean, but communication and truth is not

only housed in the words, but what Paul is doing with those

words. And so I want to tell you what

the outset before we ever dig into it, what Paul is doing with

the words he's saying. He's telling local churches in

the region of Ephesus, and by extension us all these centuries

later, our local church. He says if you want to see the

legacy of Jesus Christ, look around you.

Look at what he accomplished. Look at what he's building.

Look at the glory of the church. Jesus is the cornerstone of a

building that is being constructed to the glory of God

the Father. And Scripture says that this

building is eclectic with God as the chief architect.

It says that he's taking raw material from all over the

world, choice stones and materials from the world over,

and he's fastening them together, putting them together,

assembling them together into this church.

And though it's eclectic from all over the world, it's unified

because this is done according to the will and plan of the

chief architect, who is God. He's actively fitting together

every piece as he builds, and even more than Saint Paul's,

God's Building is a has an amazing story of courage and

bravery and life and death and loss and heroism and victory and

adventure. But construction is ongoing.

And maybe you've seen pictures of the Sagrada Familia in

Barcelona, Spain. It's being built since 1860.

And though it's not yet complete, the tourism department

is working 24 hours a day because the whole world wants to

come and see the glory of this building.

It's not done yet, but even now there is a certain glory to it.

The same with Christ Church. It's still being built, it's

still growing, and yet it's glorious.

And so the wonder for you is that the glory of the building

being constructed on the cornerstone of Jesus, on the

foundation of the apostles and the prophets.

This is so important. It is our glory, and it's our

glory because Scripture teaches we are that building, we are his

temple. So the building is Christ

Church, the architect is God the Father, the foundation is the

apostles and the prophets. The chief cornerstone that's

upholding the whole enterprise, that's got the whole structure

supported is Jesus Christ our Lord and our Savior.

John's going to go on in Revelation to say that this

building a God is putting lamps to illuminate it.

That is the pastors and the teachers of the church, and it's

all for Jesus Christ. It's being fit together as an

inheritance for him. And so with that, I want to

introduce to you this metaphor of the building.

Read with me Ephesians 219 to 22.

Paul says so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but

you are fellow citizens with the Saints and members of the

household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and

prophets. Christ Jesus himself being the

cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together

grows into a holy temple in the Lord.

In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place

for God by his Spirit. Raleigh Sadler was here last

week. He taught us verses 11 to 18 and

he said to to appreciate that where you're standing now, to

appreciate where you are, you have to look back and understand

where you came from. He said remember who you were.

Verse 11. You can go back, remember who

you were. Verse 12, remember where you

came from to understand now. And he says and now

understanding that, you need to understand that you are no

longer you anymore. This is the beauty of being

baptized by the Holy Spirit. You're placed now into a church

and the moment that you're born again, it's no longer about you.

It's about us laying down our lives for the Lord of glory.

You don't have an individuality anymore.

You're 1 stone in this massive structure.

And when we read scriptures like this as as a Western church, we,

because we tend to read not in the church, we read on our beds

or we read in our closets or wherever it is on the

individually on the way to work. We tend to read passages like

this individualistically, and this is a reminder this morning

that we're supposed to read these at least with the mindset

of this new identity that we have in the church.

Part of what he's doing with what he's saying is taking us

back to he's building an identity.

All these metaphors, all these words are saying we have a new

identity. And so we read this not as you

verse 19, you are no longer strangers.

Verse 19, you are fellow citizens.

Most strikingly, verse 22, you are being built together into a

dwelling place of God. Or even in First Corinthians, as

RJ said, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

All of these you's are plural. This is together, This Is Us.

You plural are no longer strangers and aliens.

You plural our fellow citizens with the Saints and members of

the household of God. You collectively church are

being built together into a dwelling place for God forever.

Ephesians 210 says we are his masterpiece.

He has created us new in Christ that we should do the good

things he planned for us long ago.

This is collective and corporate, and even the word

together, if you skip down and look ahead to verse 21 together

is an emphasis in this passage. This is in verse 21, in whom the

whole structure being joined together.

Look at verse 22. In him you are also being built

together. And so to emphasize this

corporate nature of our new identity in this church, he

gives 3 metaphors. And these are going to be what

what guide us through all of the verses in this passage, 19 to

22, three metaphors for the church.

Number one, he's going to say we are citizens in God's Kingdom #2

we are children in God's household and #3 we are living

stones in God's temple. So Kingdom is going to

communicate a shared place that we now have together.

It's going to communicate our shared values and our shared

King, Jesus Christ. And you move on to the

household. Household implies that we've

been given not only a place but a people.

And part of this people is now we have a shared Father, God the

Father, and you move on to this shared temple, this building and

it communicates a shared foundation and shared goals and

the shared presence of the Holy Spirit, Father, Son and spirit.

And I want to go through just to, to show you how rich this is

and how dense this is. If this was a, a chocolate cake,

it'd be heavy to carry. You can't there's I don't even

know how to preach how dense this passage is.

He starts by saying there's three metaphors for the church,

given we're citizens in his Kingdom, we're children in his

household, we're living stones in God's temple.

And every one of these metaphors images is telling us something

unique about us as the church. And these metaphors are

bolstering our new identity and and unity as followers of

Christ. And then there's the Trinity and

the Trinitarian formula that that moves us through these

verses. And so you see that the church

and the building of the church is from God the Father, and it's

done through Jesus the Son of God, and it's by his Holy

Spirit. There's a dynamic role played by

each person of the Trinity. And so he's saying, not only is

there unity for us as the body of Christ, but there's unity in

the Trinity as they're working out the building of this church

to the glory of God. God's eternal plan is is worked

out in time by Father, Son and Spirit.

And more than the metaphors and more than the Trinitarian

formula, there's a, there's movement in these 5 verses.

So you begin in the past and you're moving from past to

present to future. In the past, it says that Christ

was the cornerstone. He's the, the beginning of this

passage, his death, his resurrection, and his prophets

and his apostles laid the foundation after him.

Then you come to verse 21, and in the present it says that the

Holy Spirit is, is building this church, building us together

actively. And finally, verse 22, in the

future we grow into a permanent and eternal dwelling place for

God. And the whole movement, there's

movement in the whole passage from past to present to future.

He's teaching that history is progressing towards something

that God has strengthened you with power and given you gifts

and given you a ministry. All of this is moving in history

toward a goal. And the best way that Paul knew

how to communicate that goal was through the image or the

metaphor of a building. And finally, that's why he comes

to this last point, that there's an architectural metaphor that

spans all four verses. And there's four different words

for building that are going to come up as you move through.

And all of them have as a root word the word oikos, which if

you go to the grocery store and you see oikos, you may think

yogurt in the original Greek, oikos is a house.

It's a house. And so when we come to these 4

words, your your interpreters and translators have have

translated these words built and building and built together and

dwelling, emphasizing over 4 verses the grand biblical vision

for humanity that the God who was separated from his people

because of our sin in the Garden of Eden has now made his eternal

dwelling place with his people. This is the, the undoing of

Eden, the the fulfillment of Christ's work, the the finished

work of Jesus Christ, God dwelling eternally with us.

So Paul's premier metaphor to illustrate this truth is that of

a building. They will be his people.

We will be his people. He will be our king, He will be

our Father, he will be our God. So if you look now to verses 19

to 22, what amazing verses we get to dig into and on this

foundation, Paul's going to start to to pile up next week

application in chapter 3. And he's going to say, now

because of this, you have boldness through your faith in

Jesus and he's going to say you minister now according to the

gifts given by the working of his power.

And he's going to add to that the riches of his glory,

strengthen you with power, because the Trinitarian work of

reconciliation that began with the apostles and the prophets

continues through us both as individuals and corporately as a

church, and it will persevere until God's spiritual temple is

completed. And so as you come to these

verses, again, there's three metaphors that are going to

guide us. We're citizens in God's Kingdom.

We're children in God's household, and we are living

stones in God's temple. We'll start in verse 19 with the

first metaphor. We are now citizens in God's

Kingdom. Read verse 19 with me again.

He says so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but

you are fellow citizens with the Saints and members of the

household of God. So he states it first in a

negative way for emphasis. You are no longer strangers.

You are no longer aliens. A stranger is the typical word

for a foreigner. You used to be foreigners.

You were vulnerable. You had no permanent home.

You may be here, but you were not of us.

And the same word for alien, or it's a different word for alien.

It's a more specific word. Alien was a technical word in

the Old Testament to describe a Gentile who is living among

God's people, the Jews. So you have foreigners and you

have Gentiles who are there, but again, who are among them, but

not truly of them. This is a complaint that

churches here today, and we're not exempt from it, where they

say we've come into this church and we're trying to work our way

into inclusion and into this body.

But it's it's so hard to get past the clicks and it's so hard

to get in and actually be among and included in these people of

God. And this was what he says of the

Gentiles. They're they're outside the

citizenship of Israel. And so they were foreigners.

And he doesn't just state it negatively, he states it

positively. And this is where he gives us

this metaphor. He says, but now you are

citizens, fellow citizens, Jews and Gentiles, two different

classes have been brought new into this fundamentally new

identity, the church. The two have become one.

And Ian Hamilton, a commentator, puts it beautifully this way,

says in the new covenant, the nationalism and Jewish

particular ISM of the old covenant have been replaced,

brought to their gospel fulfillment in quote, beautiful

way to say that. And so now we are a church that

is transnational, and by that we mean we are part of something

that is global. And now we are a church that is

trans historical, which means that we are part of something

that is very, very ancient. This is bigger than any of us.

This is bigger than our local church.

This is bigger than you or me. This is transgenerational.

And it's transdenominational because this is bigger than us.

And we confess that God has made a way.

Though you were strangers, though you were aliens, you may

become citizens. You can become citizens through

the work of Christ. That word citizens, that for us

comes from an old French word that means literally a dweller

in a city. And so for us, a citizen is

somebody who lives in a specific country.

But the the metaphor is the same.

We've been given a place. We've been given a place and it

is heaven. And so scripture saying we are

fellow citizens with the Saints. Saints just means believers and

Scripture saying not only do you have a shared people to belong

to, but you have a place to belong.

And in this Kingdom we have a shared king and citizens are

given. You could think even to what

your citizenship as an American holds for you.

When you're given citizenship, you're given provision, you're

given protection, and you're given inclusion.

And so you're given provision of all of the freedoms that come

with being a citizen of the United States and all the

benefits federally that come to you from being a citizen.

This is just like with the Kingdom of heaven.

There are benefits, there's protections.

That's what US embassies are. There protections for you

everywhere you go abroad. There's protections for you.

There's the protection that's afforded to you from the

Constitution of the United States of America.

There's protections in the form of a Navy and the military and

army and the Marines and the Coast Guard and the National

Guard. They are here to defend you.

And then there's inclusion, the most beautiful of all.

You're given a new group identity and you're given a

place to belong. And so Paul saying that your new

Christian identity is not primarily your worldly

citizenship, but your heavenly citizenship.

Your heavenly citizenship comes with membership in a local

church because the metaphor for the local church is this is an

embassy. This is an embassy of God's

Kingdom on the earth. And we are proud to be members

of this embassy, this expression of God's Kingdom.

And so he adds, not only are you citizens of his Kingdom, but he

gives us the second metaphor in verse 19.

You also have membership in the household of God.

So we are members in God's household.

And this again is communicating shared life, fellowship.

We like to do things with one another.

We're ontologically united by the Spirit in Christ and we get

to fellowship with one another. It's communicating even more

than the metaphor of citizenship that we've been given a people.

That's why we we say over and over again, you belong here.

This is a home for you. It's a homecoming.

You always have a place here and members of a household

communicates a family. We're the family of God and God

is our Father. Which is why as a staff and as

pastors, when we send out any communication to the church, it

always begins with the same 2 words, church family.

All right, this isn't voting members or tithing units, giving

units like sometimes church likes to use those languages.

No, you are, we are family members, church family.

That's why our our meetings are not they're family meetings.

They're not business meetings. These are family meetings where

we worship and also engage in business together.

So membership in this household, you can look down to verse 22.

It culminates as a dwelling place for God and men for

eternity. And as you work your way into

verse 20, it's going to remind you that this household of God

is a precious gift of God according to the activity of God

made possible by not only his work.

This is why I love verse 20. This is an amazing realization,

But by the activity of the church, by our activity.

And so there's a consensus among commentators when it says the

phrase, the church is built on the foundation of the apostles

and the prophets. This is not talking about the

prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of Jesus -1 + 1

plus Paul, right? This is it says that this is the

foundation of the, the cornerstone is Jesus Christ.

That's his finished work. And then came the apostles and

the prophets. What the commentators are saying

is that it's the 1st century apostles of Jesus and the 1st

century prophets, meaning the work of the early church, these

church members who are taking the gospel to the far corners of

the world. That's what it's talking about.

These were the first to preach Christ after his resurrection.

So again, this is saying it's not just the work of God, it's

the work of us, his church. And so we see evidence of this,

You know, how do we know that it's the 1st century apostles

and prophets? This is how Scripture speaks of

it. In Acts 21, for instance, 9 to

10, the Philip the Evangelist daughters, remember Philip the

Deacon turned evangelist, He has four daughters and it says that

they were prophetesses. And then in the very next verse,

it introduces you to one of the weirdest prophecies.

It's memorable of Agabus who hog ties himself and then tells

Paul, right, if you go to Jerusalem, so too will you be

tied up. Very typical prophetic picture.

But there there's prophets in the early church.

The same thing is going to come in Ephesians 410 to 11 and verse

10. It's going to say, there's this

historical progression where Jesus descended and then he

ascended into glory. And then it says, and then he

gave verse 11, the apostles and the prophets and the evangelists

and the shepherds and the teachers for building up the

body of Christ. So these were the offices of the

earliest church that God used to expand his Kingdom, to build

that first layer of the church. And so God gave gifted men to

inspire scripture and to form the church.

And now God gives gifted men and women to build his church.

The building of the church has not changed in 2000 years.

God does it the same way. The legacy of the expansion of

the church is still a story of adventure.

If you don't believe me, ask Josh Stokes as he goes to spend

an indefinite amount of time among people he's never met in

Liberia. It's still as a story of heroism

and bravery and loss and martyrdom, life and victory.

So you go back to the early church.

What did they need? They needed farmers and

merchants and builders and bakers to take on a spirit of of

long-suffering and service and work ethic.

And they needed men and women who lived quietly and worked

with their hands. And they also needed heroes and

statesman and evangelists and church planners to take on a

spirit of boldness and risk. And our church, our local

church, needs those same things 2000 years later.

We need those same kinds of people.

And that we have to have a vision at this church that's as

deep and long and wide as the vision for the church that God

had for Ephesus and those local churches there.

We need bold businessmen who stay and bold entrepreneurial

women who engage in work. We need faithful Proverbs 31

women in all of our church. And we need faithful Psalm 112

men in all of our church, and we need families who are raising up

kids and teaching them with excellence in theological

education. And we need church members who

don't just come to church, but who give themselves forth a

church. Where are those men and women?

That's what we need to build this building.

And when you're faithful and the smallest role that God has given

you in this divine plan, you can be confident and have faith that

you are participating in building His church.

And there's a confidence that comes with the passage.

It says that Jesus is building his church and the gates of hell

will not prevail against it. You have confidence through

these verses. It's the kind of confidence that

gave Brian Salvey. He wrote the song Men of God

take up the sword, commenting on the verse that Jesus Christ

through his church is binding the strong man who is Satan and

plundering his goods. If you're a man in the room, you

love that metaphor. That's what we do, men and

women. We have to take up the sword and

take that which belongs right now to Satan and claim it for

God and his church. And we do that through taking

the children that he separated in this world.

He takes broken families and we we put them back together and he

takes children away from their parents in a way that they can

never return. And we bring them into our own

household. We remember that on Orphan

Sunday and we go out and we preach the gospel faithfully.

We win people to Christ and we bring them into the church.

That's what we're participating in.

We're saving people from eternal fire.

We're taking people who are citizens of the Kingdom of this

world, and we're giving them a new identity and a new metaphor

to live by. You are now citizens of the

Kingdom of God, and Christ is your king.

We're bringing them into the household of God that God might

be their Father. And we're making them part of

the beauty and the glory of the church so that we can say

together corporately we are His masterpiece.

He has created us new in Christ so that we can do the good deeds

he planned for us long ago. We will be a beautiful new

creation that will endure forever.

I'm going to go back. If you look at verse 17 last

week when Raleigh was preaching, it says that Christ preached to

those who were near and to those who are far away.

And if you think back to Jesus earthly ministry, he didn't

really get very far. And so how can we rightly say

that Jesus preached those to those who are far away, to

Gentiles who are far away. And we remember this, that where

we go, the Spirit of Jesus Christ goes before us and Christ

goes with us. If there's anything I know as I

read through Scripture, I go all the way back to Genesis.

It says that to Jacob, He says, I'm with you and I will keep you

wherever you go. You go to Joshua as they're

terrified going into the promised land.

He says, behold, I'm with you and I will keep you wherever you

go. Every epoch you come to the

Great Commission where he says, go and make disciples of all the

nations. He ends the the Gospel of

Matthew with what words I'm with you even to the end of the age.

I'm with you always Amen and Amen.

And so this household is built on the foundation of the 1st

century apostles and prophets. The cornerstone of the church.

What holds it all in place is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord

of glory, our Savior. Talk about the household of God.

It's built on that cornerstone. And if you live post 1990,

there's archaeologists that found the, the stones that were

the, the foundation of the temple.

There's 5 stones that kind of made-up that foundation and

they're massive. The largest of these was 55 feet

long, 11 feet high and 14 feet wide and weighed 570 tons.

And so this is what Scripture wants you to think of when when

you look at that stone once set in place, it's not moving.

It is immovable, it is unshakable.

Scripture says when you think of that, I want you to think of

Jesus Christ because that is the foundation from the church.

Once it was laid, it will never be moved.

It cannot be shaken. It is a worthy foundation for

all of this enterprise of the church that he's building.

And so this is the image of Christ.

It began with his death. It was built on as the Holy

Spirit came at Pentecost. This is where the building

began. And the work continues through

you and through us. So the first metaphor was that

we are citizens and His Kingdom. The second we are children in

His household. And finally, the third metaphor

he gives us is that we are living stones in God's temple.

You can see this in verses 21 to 22 read with me, says in whom

the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy

temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together

into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

So you see that this building is now a temple.

When you look at the metaphor of a temple, this is provocative,

intentionally provocative. Again, what is he doing with

what he's saying? He's attacking the temple of

Artemis that was in Ephesus. It was a a beautiful temple that

people would come all over the world to see this temple and

they still do. People still go from all over

the world to come to the ruins of this place.

It was the Temple of Diana or the temple of Artemis.

One of the seven wonders of the ancient world was in Ephesus.

Massive building, 377 feet long, 180 feet wide, entirely built of

marble, hosting A cult statue of Diana made of precious stones

and gold. The ancient writers said of

this, of this temple that it's splendor was quote beyond

compare. End Quote.

And Paul saying that's that's not true.

No, the most beautiful temple in the world is Christ Church.

Saying the temple of Artemis may be beautiful, but the most

beautiful structure in the world is his church.

And he's building a temple that alone is beyond compare.

It's adorned with choice stones from all over the world.

It's meant to bring up the the imagery that Paul already read

this morning of Second Chronicles 3, that all these

choice stones that are are being brought together, eclectic yet

unified. Paul says you are that building.

It's builder and architect is God.

Temple is the word heros, which is not here.

Actually the word heros. Heros is the word that meant the

temple and the grounds and the whole complex.

That's not the word he uses here.

He uses the word naos, which means just God's sanctuary.

This is talking about the holy place and the holy of holies,

and something is being communicated with each of these

metaphors. Remember back, His Kingdom is

communicating a shared place, shared values, and the shared

King, Jesus Christ, the households communicating shared

life and the shared Father, God the Father.

The temple is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

It's communicating a shared foundation, shared goals, and

the shared presence of the Holy Spirit.

Temple is connoting access. So take a thought experiment

with me. Think back to the Old Testament

and consider the temple through the lens of access.

And as you think about access, think even about the lighting

that is provided in this Old Testament temple.

Think with me for just a moment. Consider the Tabernacle in the

temple. If you were in the camp that

surrounded this temple, you had to be clean.

Access is provided to the clean. If you are because of your sin

or your sickness, you had to leave the camp.

There's not access provided even to the camp around the temple.

If you had, if you wanted to go into the temple compound the

temple grounds into the courtyard.

It was reserved for men alone, Israelite men and for the

purpose of sacrifice only. So access, the closer you get to

God, access is taken away. It's it's less than it's more

and more exclusive. And thinking of even the

lighting, the lighting of the courtyard is provided by the

sun. It's in broad daylight.

It's the sun. You can see what you're doing.

But then as you go closer to the presence of God, you enter into

the the holy place. Access is restricted.

Now it's just one of the 12 tribes and the the priests that

are able to go in have to be chosen by lot.

So it's God is now choosing who's coming in and access is

restricted. You look at the lighting, it's

now lit only by the menorah, very dull, dimly lit.

And finally, when you come to the Holy of Holies, who gets

access there? The high priest, and only once

per year as you come into the very presence of God, it's

darkness. He's not meant to be beheld.

He's not meant to be seen. And then you have the high

priest going in and throwing blood on everything, hoping he

hits the mercy seat so we can make atonement for the people.

He's dwelling in darkness. And so the message is God's

presence isn't meant to be beheld.

It's behind a veil. We read about it, a beautiful

veil, but it's he's back there, accessed only by the high priest

and only once a year until the veil is torn at his crucifixion.

That beautiful veil of purple and fine linen with the cherubim

inscribed on it got ripped it with schizo.

He tore it in half from top to bottom because through Christ we

all have access and he becomes a lamp to our feet and a light to

our path and through him we have access through the light of

Jesus Christ. And this is in this eternal

temple, we don't get access to God once a year.

For just a few seconds, you become God's dwelling place.

This is the complete reversal of the fall.

That is the beauty of this metaphor.

God's building a building. He's bringing men and women from

every tribe and tongue and nation.

He doesn't just use the generic word for build.

He's building, but it's a more specific word that means he's,

he's fitting it together, communicating an intentionality

that's happening as he's building this a deliberate

choice as he's putting us all together and where we go and how

we minister. And Paul mixes metaphors here,

which is a sin in our culture, but I guess not for him.

He, he says we're not just a building.

We're we're a living, growing building.

And it's going to grow until it's complete and then the end

will come. And so we pray God that you

would grow our vision. We pray that God would grow our

vision, that it would be as deep and wide and long as this vision

for the church in Ephesians, a church that's trans historical

and transgenerational and transdenominational and trans

political and transnational. And my prayers that you would

have a vision of the church that's large enough to include

the farmer who's working quietly with his hands out there in

obscurity. And it'd be large enough to

extend to the stay at home mother who's raising up

worshippers to fill the earth and extend to the statesman in

Washington, DC, and to the church planners bold enough to

go to the far corners of the world.

And so because of these verses, I, I ask you, whatever lot God

has given you, whatever part you have to play in this divine

plan, go with confidence knowing that you are building his

church. You're standing on the

foundation of the church from every generation, all the ages.

You've been given the baton from the church that's come before

you, from the Ephesian church, and through the centuries it's

come to you. And now it's for you to take the

bar and to move the bar further for the good of the Saints and

for the glory of God. God says he's building a

building as an inheritance for Jesus Christ.

This is the church. And he says the gates of hell

will not prevail against it. Please pray with me, Lord,

expand your church. Help us not to to eat the fruit

of idleness, but to see exactly what's happening.

You have called us as you bind the strong man that we plunder

his goods, Lord and and we want to do that.

We want to be active. May it be that we are a church

where every member is vibrant and alive and they have given

themselves to you and to your mission and to your Kingdom is

pictured in this building. Lord, we want to be your

masterpiece. You didn't call us your

masterpiece so that we can play video games 10 hours a day and

fall into all kinds of sin and temptation and to be idle and to

be cowards. But you've given us the Spirit,

not a fear, but of power and of love and of self-control.

And so we pray, Lord, help us to walk in that with confidence.

Whatever lot you have given to us, whatever lot you have called

us to, by the power of your Holy Spirit, because of Jesus Christ

from the Father, we pray that we would walk in that to the glory

of God. Amen.

Thanks for listening. To learn more about Heritage

Church or if you'd like to respond to this sermon, visit

our website at www.heritage Shawnee dot.

Org.