EL CUERPO GLORIOSO DE CRISTO.

3:14-15
Paul has told us in the first 13 verses in this chapter of the most visible figures in leadership
in the assembly, and they are simply outstanding men and women through what God in his
mercy has done to them.
What Paul has been writing is not simply high theology but also practical requirements for
daily living. People ought to conduct themselves in a certain way in the church (v.15). In
the world there is pluralism in behaviour, and no one knows what is right or wrong. That is
not how it is for those who profess themselves to belong to the living God. We live by the
touchstone of these New Testament words.
I. LOS CRISTIANOS SOMOS EL HOGAR DE DIOS
In Old Testament times God was seen to be living in a home which was a tent or a
tabernacle in the middle of the people of God. Their whole encampment was set out to
emphasise this. There were three tribes with their tents to the north of the Tabernacle,
three to the south, three to the east, and three to the west. At the heart of them all God
lived. All the time they moved across the desert and during the early years they were
settling into Canaan the presence of this house and the Person living in it had a fluctuating
influence over the people. Think of it like an important person coming to stay for a few days
in your home: initially everyone is in awe of him, and very careful about what you do and
say, and then familiarity makes us take him for granted. That was the history of the Old
Testament people of God. Gods home was in the midst of his people and they had to walk
there to meet with the Lord. God himself said, There I will meet with the children of Israel,
and the tabernacle shall be sanctified to my glory (Ex.29:43). So the Tabernacle was called
a Tent of Meeting. Later the house of God became a more permanent structure, the
Jerusalem temple.
But the striking new covenant promise of God in the prophecy of Ezekiel was, My dwelling
place will be with them (Eze.37:27). God says that he planned to come very close and his
home would be in their actual neighbourhood. Not one of them could have imagined how
close the Lord would come. But John, speaking of the coming of the Son of God into the
world, tells us, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). God
the Son pitched his tent in our world, sharing a home with a family, attending weddings,
sleeping on a boat, eating and drinking with friends in an upper room. So you did not have
to go to the Temple any longer in order to meet with God, you went to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father I am in the Father and the Father is in me,
(John 14:9-10). Stephen preaches to the Sanhedrin and he tells them, the Most High does
not live in houses made by men (Acts 7:48). Where does he live? Where Jesus Christ is,
there is God. What a privilege they enjoy My Father will love him and we will come to him
and make our home with him (John 14:23). Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who
is in you, whom you have received from God (I Cor.6:19). Paul could say, Christ lives in
me (Gals.2:20). So when Christian people come to that empty building we call a church
they bring the indwelling God with them.
The New Testaments focus is never on a building. The church is a body of people who have
received the Lord into their lives. The church is the divine family of God. What privileges
then the household of God will know:i] Acceptance in the family of God. Our Father has made a beggar like Lazarus his own son
and heir. God even says of Lazarus, This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased, So
in Gods beloved Christ we too are accepted, however inconsistent and fitful our lives.
ii] Provision in that household. As David, because of his love for Jonathan, welcomed his son
Mephibosheth to his household and told him that he could sit at his table for the rest of his
life, so our Father for the great love he has for his Son Jesus Christ welcomes all those who
believe in the Lord to become his beneficiaries. He prepares a table for us in the presence
of our enemies, and our cup runs over from the lavishness of his provision.

iii] Discipline. All Gods household are under the discipline of their Father because he loves
them. He will not allow them to destroy their own lives. The household has rules which the
Head imposes. So they cant bring their girlfriends home for the night. They cant bring
drugs home. They are not allowed to bring their friends home with bottles of whiskey to
watch unspeakable videos together. It is not their household, and the Father will not allow
them to turn it into a drinking den or a house of ill repute.
II. LA IGLESIA ES LA IGLESIA DEL DIOS VIVIENTE
The word church is the translation of a Greek word from which we get our word
ecclesiastical. It means basically a group of people assembled together. God has an
assembly, or a company who have been called out and called together. Paul refers to in
our text as the church of the living God (v.15). What can we say about it? I believe in the
Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church says the Apostles Creed. The church is there defined
as catholic and it is holy. Two useful definitions that will let us into this phrase:
i] This assembly of the living God is a catholic church. it is world-wide. It is not
merely our assembly the group we belong to and worship with on Sundays. It also
includes the church that met at Ephesus under the ministry of Timothy over 1900 years
ago.
The church of the living God is immensely vast and colourful. It includes a group of people I
know who assemble under a tree in Yala in western Kenya. Then there is a congregation in
Seattle most of whose men work for Boeing and build jumbo jets. There is a church in Israel
which has to meet on a Saturday morning when no one works, and there the Hebrew
worship is translated into Russian and English. There are high-tech Japanese Christians in
Tokyo and fishermen in the Scottish Hebrides and computer designers in Silicon Valley
near Los Angeles, and there is even a church which meets in a Bolivian prison. The church
contains women who have believed the gospel for eighty years, and infants who have just
learned that the Son of Gods name is Jesus, and that he loves them because the Bible
tells me so.
The church is catholic not only in that it stretches all over the world but that it goes right
back across the centuries. John Bunyan belongs to the same community as you and I do. So
do Ann Boleyn, Felix Mendelsohn, Robert E.Lee, Cliff Richard, Lord Mackay, Eric Liddell. Even
Daniel, Moses, Abraham and Sarah are in the same church because they belonged to the
same Lord. Abraham was called out of Ur of the Chaldees, and Zacchaeus called down out
of a sycamore-fig tree, and Chuck Colson called out of the White Houses corruption in
Washington D.C.. So too have you and I been summoned out of our unbelief into the
assembly of Christian believers. As already has been said, the word church means those
who are called out from all of human history and from all over the world.
ii] This assembly is a holy catholic church. The word world in the New Testament
often has moral associations. When Christians are told not to love the world then that is
defined for us as the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. It is out
from that world that all the members of the church are called to live very different lives
holy lives. We witness holy living in many Christians. I think of a mother accepting with
exemplary peace the death of her son; a young couple longing to have children but refusing
to have in vitro fertilisation because of the destruction of unused fertilised eggs; a woman
who regularly goes to visit a retiring girl who doesnt enjoy being with crowds of people; a
man who lives on the edge of a vast African slum, who has been held up at gun point, but
who stays there teaching the Bible with his wife and little boy. We look at all that sanctified
living and know that there is much more. Then we say that we believe in a holy catholic
church.
Do you see that we are not defining holiness in terms of a decision followed by baptism that
a person went through many years ago? That is only the first rung of the ladder, and the

mere beginning of being identified with the church. From that moment onwards there is the
whole of the new life to be lived and the Christian is to go on growing in holiness, changing
from glory to glory. Advancing in the knowledge of God, love of God, joy in God and sorrow
for sin at every level of his spiritual life.
Of course, every step we advance is by the grace of God. John Newton was once speaking
with a friend about Pauls phrase, by the grace of God I am what I am and Newton said, I
am not what I ought to be. I am not what I wish to be. I am not what I hope to be. Yet I am
not what I once was, a slave to sin and Satan. And by the grace of God I am what I am.
John Newton did not think of grace as a pleasant quality but the very power of God.
So when we ask to explain what is the church we are not simply an assembly of bourgeois
men and women, kind and charming folk (though I hope we are that), and that is all. We are
a people set aside by the living God, and radically transformed by him in the depths of our
beings, and finally and irreversibly renewed. In other words a true church can only be
explained in terms of the continuous workings of the life-giving Lord who supernaturally and
sovereignly has been operating in the lives of the congregation.
III. LA IGLESIA ES LA COLUMNA Y FUNDAMENTO DE LA VERDAD.
The church has the truth. We have been greatly influenced by the leaders of the
Reformation like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli. God has given his truth to his church. It is
good news about his Son, Jesus Christ. The long-promised Messiah, the light of the world,
has come. As someone has said, He was born like no other man before or since. He died,
conquering his fear and going toward the darkness. They buried him; and when they went
for his body it wasnt there. Neither friend nor foe was ever able to produce it. He had risen.
Death was exposed in all its falsehood. It had masqueraded as the last word. It was only the
word before the last. This living Saviour offers himself to become the forgiveness of every
sinner who will come to him. Jesus will give them rest. That is the truth which we believe in
this church. It has two aspects:
i] We are the foundation of the truth. This word foundation supports and stabilizes
the truth. The church consists of those people who hold the truth steadily against the
storms of unbelief. That is what Timothy had to do in Ephesus. This is what Luther did in
Germany at the time of the Reformation, and Bunyan in England the next century, and
Jonathan Edwards in America the following century, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon did in
London the last century, and what thousands of churches like ours are doing today. The
truth rests on us, and we are upholding it. It is a burden, and we feel the incredible
embarrassment of our claim. The Lord Jesus Christ said it. Thy Word is truth (John 17:17).
And the One who lived the life he lived, and taught what he taught, and did what he did is
worthy of being heard. We are upholding the truth. There is nowhere to run, but how can
you run while carrying a foundation? You must stand and fight, and that will be blessed by
God. We become more than conquerors through him that loved us. Hold to the truth. Keep
upholding it.
Think of a cowardly regiment, running away in battle, and the victorious army is firing its
arrows after the men, picking them off one by one. The faint-hearted think there is a place
of safety for them not far away, but as the last surviving soldier glimpses the refuge he is
shot down too. Once we think of retreating, and conceding this area of truth and that
foundational teaching, then in the end there are no foundations left. And if the foundations
be destroyed, what will the righteous do? So we have to stand firm and cry to God for help.
No one ever cried in vain. Be steadfast and unmoveable! So we can say to the world,
Here is a foundation. You can build your life on this.
ii] We are the pillar of the truth. The purpose of pillars is not only to hold the roof firm,
but to thrust it high so that it can be clearly seen even from a distance. The inhabitants of
Ephesus had a vivid illustration of this in their temple of Diana or Artemis. Regarded as one

of the seven wonders of the world, it boasted 100 Ionic columns, each over 18 metres high,
which together lifted its massive, shining marble roof. Just so the church holds the truth
aloft, so that it is seen and admired by the worldthe churchs function is not to advertise
itself but to advertise and display the truth (John Stott, The Message of I Timothy & Titus,
IVP, 1996, p.105).
We have British Bible Schools currently training a thousand young people for Christian
service. There is a network of Christian Bookshops everywhere all complaining that they do
not have enough room to display all the books that are being published. We have pastors
and evangelists and student workers. There is wonderful Christian stewardship giving so
generously to spreading the truth week by week. We usually do not spend our money on
cigarettes and alcohol and designer clothes and make-up, and so we have money to give
for spreading the message of the Bible. There are not just our Sunday services, there are
Bible Study Groups, and Sunday Schools, and Young Peoples Fellowships, and University
and College Christian fellowships, and summer camps and outreach weeks, and many
similar enterprises.
Every month there is a different conference and a different magazine. There is a Christian
radio station that broadcasts from France to Great Britain. Every work-place has a Christian
presence, say, a scientist, a teacher, a doctor, a solicitor who have all excelled in the most
demanding walks of life. And every church has inherited a tradition of wise patterns of
worship and congregational structures which have stood the test of time.
We are saying that the church is lavishly resourced, and if we are failing to be a pillar for
the truth then it is not for lack of divine provision nor for want of means, but because we
have messed things up and grown lazy. We have been given the truth to tell to a nation in
darkness. Men need not stay one hour longer in the misery of life without God. The Light of
the world has dawned in the appearing of Jesus Christ. I am the truth, he has claimed.