It’s an astonishing transformation! God takes His enemies and adopts them as His heirs, and He does it at the incalculable cost of the sacrificial death of His only Son! The love for people like us that stands behind the Gospel of grace is breath-taking. Yet not only does He save those who repent and put their faith in Him as Saviour and Lord, He changes our status entirely:
Last Sunday morning we considered that new status we have as members of the church, the body of Christ. Thinking briefly about several different astonishing statements used to describe the church from the New Testament, from the Church as the glorious Bride of Christ in Ephesians ch 5 & Revelation ch 19, to the description of the church as:
“…God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” (1 Tim 3:15)
Or the humbling idea that through the church:
“the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Eph 3:10,11)
Those descriptions of church are all based on a gathering of people founded on the Lord Jesus whom He has redeemed through His blood and transformed to be…
“….a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”
(1 Peter 2:9)
So often to us, the Church, made up of a mish-mash of people from all kinds of different backgrounds and situations with all kinds of challenges, can feel rather mundane. We must remember that’s not how God sees us at all!
Spencer Shaw