The Church

Ephesians · 2024-06-09 · Jason Wolin · Theology Matters

Ephesians · Church. The Church — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

The Church Slideshow for this message PDF Message Download Introduction I hear a lot of people criticize the church. I’ve heard criticism about people getting way too amped up over things that don’t really matter. criticism about the hypocrisy in people. Sometimes it comes in the form of a story. I used to be way committed but then I got burned. I watched a really ugly church split. I watched an embarrassing moral failure of one of the main leaders in the church I saw the unfair backbiting or underhanded greed or power or pride or jealousy ruin a group of relationships. And so there’s all this talk and for the most part I can’t argue with them. These are valid concerns. There are lots of pretty good reasons to be frustrated with the church. And I have personally experienced some of those reasons. Maybe that is where you find yourself today. And it is easy to get disillusioned. How should we think about this? So today we introduce the doctrine of the church. The goal of today’s message is to tell you what God thinks about His church. And if you love God, seeing what he thinks about His church will really bless you in your own perspective. Let’s just all get on the same page. When we talk about the church; this is not a church. This is a church building. There are about 300,000 buildings in America which house local churches. The word church in the Greek is the word ekklesia. Now sometimes you will hear people parse this out. They will say the Greek word ekklesia is the combination of two Greek words ek meaning out and calleo which means called so the church is the “CALLED OUT ONES” and then there’s some point made about how the saints are “called out” from the world. That makes sense in our ears, but unfortunately you can’t do that. Sometimes it’s appropriate to make those kinds of word observations and sometimes it’s not. You have to really study the word to find out. For example, if I were say, the word butterfly comes from two English words butter and fly? A butterfly is not flying butter. We have to ask what did that word mean in that time. That’s what we mean by HISTORICAL, GRAMMATICAL interpretation. This word had ZERO theological meaning in society. It was used mostly to talk about a gathering of politicians who gathered to settle civil matters. It had no religious meaning. It just means assembly or gathering. Now the word church in the NT has two uses. Sometimes it refers to the universal church and sometimes it refers to the local church. Our doctrinal statement address both. Let’s begin with the universal. The universal church (the body and bride of Christ) is a spiritual organism comprised of all born-again persons. What do we mean by universal. When we speak of something being universal, we mean that is applies in all cases. So we might sp…

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