Over the past five weeks I have been sharing a series of messages with you that are intended to form a broad vision for how I see God using Gilead Baptist Church in the future. I have called this series “God’s Home Here At Gilead”. Our Church has long been known as “a place to call home” and to many this has evoked warm associations of belonging and fellowship. I am thankful for the fact that Gilead has a warm and welcoming reputation, and I am committed to ensuring that we continue to be recognized in this way. There is, however, another aspect of our motto that I have labored to lay before you over the last month, namely that people are not the only ones for whom we should be building a home. Gilead needs to be a place that God can call home. God has never intended that our faith should be a purely intellectual or academic pursuit in which we interact primarily with ideas and facts. This is because the very heart of God’s work in our lives was not primarily intellectual, but relational. We are not merely people who had problems understanding things about God, the world, and ourselves. We are people who had a profound and irreparable problem relating to God properly. To put it another way, by ourselves, we were not a place that God could call home. We often talk about Jesus coming to live in our hearts as though He is moving into a spacious, well-maintained, ocean front condominium, but the reality of what God has had to in order to come into our hearts is far more startling. He has had to do a miraculous work in our hearts by piercing our darkness, removing our blindness, and washing our sinfulness.* Our salvation was a transformation of the same magnitude as “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” in which God had to remove a heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh (ref. Ezekiel 36:26). Since that time He has had a remodeling agenda in the individual lives of every believer, but He also has a remodeling agenda in the collective lives of every Church.
God’s transformation of our lives is a personal relationship with public consequences. When we are born again, we are born into a new family that is God’s family. Salvation does not happen any other way. We are not saved for isolation but for integration into the family of God and into the “home” of God. This integration of our lives into the Church can be understood in two different pictures that the Bible gives us of the “household” of God. They are both expressed and linked as follows: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” (Ephesians 2:19-22 [ESV]) Please observe that these two pictures describe the relationship between three entities: the individual Christian, the believing community, and God. In the first picture we see a “foreigner” or “orphan” who has been adopted into God’s new home and given the rights of a “saint” and a “member”. This is the family aspect of our new birth, because we are pictured as being joined with other children in belonging to God’s “home”. In the second picture, we see a house that is being built with a solid foundation, a structure that is joined together, and a holy temple or dwelling place that is growing for God to live in. This is the construction aspect of our new birth, because we are pictured as being joined with other stones in building up God’s “home”. This is an ingenious way in which God has communicated to us that our belonging is linked to our building of God’s home.
God is simply too big to live in only one person’s heart and that was never His intention. He wants to build us all together into His dwelling place by the Spirit and only together can we accomplish this. The beauty of this truth is that the same discipline and commitment that make us better brotherly material also make us better building material. This is how our individual efforts at living a more godly life connect with God’s larger “Extreme Makeover” agenda for the Church as well. As we pray, serve, give, and counsel, my hope is that we will see both the size of our individual hearts and the size of Gilead’s heart grow to become a more spacious home for God. I think that God really does deserve for Gilead to be a place that He can call home.
* Shaun Groves’ song “Welcome Home” describes the cleansing work of God on a human heart well. You can hear it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkU9LAWdVPY&feature=related .
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