The Messenger 4
Introduction
When I was pastoring a church in my hometown of Port Elizabeth during the 80’s, a member of the congregation arranged for me to be taken over the city in a helicopter. It was for me a fascinating experience. One thing that particularly stood out for me was our flying over the house where my wife and I lived. I have to confess that I had great difficulty in recognizing it from the air. It was a reminder of just how different things can look, even something as familiar as one’s home, when viewed from an unfamiliar perspective.
Apply that illustration to the Church. We have our own perception of the Church – the one we grew up with. Whatever we may think about the Church we feel we know what it is, how it should look, how it should function and where we fit in. And then for the first time we are given a totally different perspective of the Church – we are given an opportunity to see it from God’s perspective. And because the view is so different from the one that we have grown up with we find ourselves struggling to identify it as the Church that we thought we knew so well.
God’s intent
It is in Ephesians chapter 3 that we find ourselves confronted with this new perspective of the Church. What we find there in that chapter is a clear link between this “mystery of Christ” that Paul speaks about and God’s intent for the Church. Take a few moments to think about these words in verse 10:
“His intent was that now through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.”
“We are given here” writes Dr DM Lloyd-Jones “a portrayal of the Church in her dignity and greatness and glory, which, in a sense, really seems to surpass anything the Apostle has ever said about her.”
1. His intent was that now…
The Church was never God’s Plan B that He had to put into operation when Israel did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. It had always existed in the mind of God (cf. verse11). From Genesis right through to the New Testament God was working out that plan. And then with the coming of Jesus and the Gospel God’s plan for the Church was finally put into operation.
The word “now” in that verse 10 means exactly what it says. There is a present reality that God intends expressing through the Church. We are not simply being pointed here to something that is still in the future. We are being told about something that is relevant right now.
If we only look at the Church from our own limited human perspective we will miss all this. We are very likely to become bogged down by all the human elements of Church life – the power struggles, the insensitivity of some people in the Church, the judgementalism and the administrative wrangling that so often takes place. Some people become so negatively affected by those human elements that they no longer want anything to do with the Church. How sad that in the end they miss something incredibly inspiring and beautiful that God wanted them to see.
When we lived in Cape Town in the 90’s we visited the IMAX cinema at the Waterfront. What I experienced as we watched The Blue Planet had a huge impact on my life. So realistic was the IMAX format that what I experienced that day must have come very close to matching the emotional intensity experienced by those intrepid astronauts floating around the earth in a tiny space-capsule. In the past I might have caught brief snatches of the earth’s beauty in a photograph, but they were only snatches. My perspective was always too limited to comprehend the full beauty of our planet and my mind too distracted by the senseless violence, human greed and racial conflicts in the world to have an uncluttered appreciation of what I saw. But that day it was different. I was viewing our world from a new perspective altogether. I felt I was literally sitting in that space-capsule viewing the earth with the same feeling of awe and wonder that those astronauts must have had as they looked out of the tiny window at that amazing blue planet below.
The emotional intensity I felt that day will live with me. How could the human race be so blind , so utterly devoid of concern, so totally immersed in their own selfishness that they would want to destroy something so incredibly beautiful and precious? What foolishness possessed the human race to think that they could use this earth to serve their own selfish ends without regard for the purpose for which it had been created?
It seems to me that this is what God wants us to see about His Church as he invites us to look at it from His perspective in this wonderful chapter in Ephesians. With all the present realities of her divisions, her conflicts, her failures, her present struggles, He wants us to see that the Church from His perspective reflects His infinite wisdom – a wisdom that was hidden through the ages but is now revealed.
If we fail to comprehend what God wants us to see here it seems to me that we will remain trapped in our own limited parochial mindset; we will see no further than our own fellowship or denomination. And without a greater vision to inspire us, how easy it is to end up majoring on minor issues and trivializing those things that are intended to reflect the holiness, love, grace, beauty and wisdom of God.
Let me close this reflection with the familiar words from a hymn by Samuel Stone:
The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord.
She is her new creation, by water and the word.
From heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride;
with his own blood he bought her and for her life he died.
Elect from every nation, yet one o’er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation One Lord, one faith, one birth,
One holy name she blesses, partakes one holy food,
And to one end she presses, with every grace endued.
If you have a question or a comment about this series please feel free to write to me, Brian, at
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