The Messenger 5
Introduction
In our reflections on Ephesians we have begun looking at chapter 3:10 – God’s intent for His Church. We are taking it phrase by phrase because it is easier to digest it that way. In our previous reflection we focused on the phrase “His intent was that now…” In this reflection we will look at the words “through the Church…”
When we have looked at each phrase in turn I will attempt to put it all together into some kind of comprehensive whole that will help us better understand the message of that verse and its significance for the Church today.
1. Through the Church….
In recent years I seem to have come across a number of Christians who are struggling. They are struggling not so much in the area of their faith in God as in their relationship to the Church. They seem to have reached a point in their spiritual life, and I was there for a while myself, of disenchantment and disillusionment with the Church. It is not difficult to understand why some have reacted this way. After all her flaws are plain for anyone to see, many of her inherited practices often bear little resemblance to the early Church and many have been left with the mental scars of the hurts they received while serving in the Church. But for all its limitations, the Scriptures make it clear that the Church remains “central to history, central to the Gospel and central to Christian living.”
John Stott has a comment to make that touches directly on this very point: “It is understandable, even inevitable, that we are critical of many of the Church’s inherited structures and traditions. Every Church in every place at every time is in need of reform and renewal. But we need to beware lest we despise the Church of God and are blind to its work in history. We may safely say that God has not abandoned His Church however displeased with it he may be. And if God has not abandoned it, how can we? It has a central place in His plan.”
It may carry the marks of human fallibility and frailty, for it is made up fallible, frail human beings, but the Church is not the creation of Man. God is its creator. When we appreciate that then experiencing disillusionment with the Church may not be such a bad thing after all. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, reminds us: “God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community.”
The point that Bonhoeffer is making is that it is only when our dreams of a perfect Church are shattered that we are open for God to teach us what He had in mind in creating this community. We no longer project onto the Church our own illusions of what she should be and learn to trust God for a deeper understanding of Christian Community.
None of us is perfect, yet with all our imperfections God still uses us through which to exercise His will on earth. We marvel not at our own abilities to serve God but at the grace of God that is able to use us despite everything. So it is with the Church. God uses it despite everything. And just as we hold fast to the Biblical truth that God is ultimately taking us into perfection in Christ, so we hold fast to that belief about the Church. It is uniquely God’s creation and God’s possession. It is He who is preparing the Church for its ultimate destiny. It is He who will ultimately perfect it.
“Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any blemish, but holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:25-27).
Over the years I have visited many churches. I can look back now and appreciate just how different each church was in its traditions, its worship styles, in the way in which it presented the Gospel and in its ethos. If I ever thought that I would find the perfect church I was pursuing a lost cause. Trying to find the perfect church was as frustrating as a bachelor or a spinster looking for the perfect partner for marriage. Such a person just doesn’t exist.
However, while no church that I visited had it all right, I began to appreciate that no church I had visited had it all wrong. And while they may have differed widely from each other they had enough in common for me to recognise them as the Church that God had created. They believed in the fundamentals of the faith – the triune nature of God, the Lordship of Jesus, salvation by faith, the importance of the Scriptures. However, their outward, visible expressions as a community of faith was a constant reminder of the natural human limitations that we all have in trying to understand, interpret and express the will of God in this world. It was a clear reminder to me that just as I have not arrived at my ultimate destination in Christ so no church has arrived at the point of perfection. Despite that, however, God has, as Paul reminds us in Ephesians 3, a present and clear intention for His Church: “But it is God’s intent that now through the Church…..”
I don’t know how God is able to use such a divided community as the Church through which to fulfil His intent for her anymore that I am able to understand how God is able to use me in my imperfection. I have no clue how the Church will one day emerge from her imperfections and be presented before God as pure and spotless and without wrinkle. What I do know, and what I urge you to know if you don’t know it already, is that God has never abandoned her and nor should we.
Though with a scornful wonder
we see her sore oppressed,
by schisms rent asunder,
by heresies distressed,
yet saints their watch are keeping;
their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.
If you have a question or a comment about this series please feel free to write to me, Brian, at
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