13.Apr.2009 Priests made of Stone

Part Two of Series: If you build it…

Ephesians 2:20-21
Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We who believe are carefully fitted together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord.

1 Peter 2:5
Now God is building you as living stones into His spiritual temple. What’s more, you are God’s holy priests who offer spiritual sacrifices that please God.

Buildings are not the Church. People are the Church.

Last week we discussed how to go about building our lives—our individual lives, that is. Continuing on in our series, If You Build It, we focus this week on the New Testament’s instruction to build the church at large. Keep in mind that God wants to build the individual in order to help enlarge the body of Christ, the Church, but in turn the Church will assist the individual in his development. Proverbs 7:17 refers to this as “iron sharpening iron.”

It is important to note that in 1 Peter we are referred to as “living stones.” Not living bricks; living stones. Bricks, after all, are manufactured. They are symmetrical, balanced, and uniform in their dimensions and composition. Stones, by contrast, are organic, imperfect, and inconsistent. This is who we are. We are stones. We’ve got funky edges. We come from the ground in different sizes and colors and shapes. And isn’t it better that way? If the Church was a worldwide organization of bricks, we’d appear to be a band of zombies who all look and talk and behave the same. We would, quite naturally, appear to the world to be an army of machines; and machines cannot win souls. No, we are stones, you and me. God’s desire, then, is to take this pile of stones, to take us as we are and, again from Scripture, “fit us together” into the walls that are assembling. And it is this that becomes the body of Christ, the Temple of the living God. So we are, first, each temples unto ourselves—recall how Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:19 asks, “Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you?”—and then, collectively, are adjoined to construct one massive universal Temple. Like cells that make up an organism are we. And this organism is the Church.

So by fitting yourself into a church community—what we here at C3 frequently refer to as “doing life together”—you are placing yourself alongside other Christians who have undergone different hardships, who possess different talents and perspectives, and who ultimately have a unique revelation of God. The way this coexistence usually plays out is that the bits of God that are in others can, through increasing camaraderie, trust, and fellowship, commingle with the bits of God that you currently possess. It then becomes a two-way revelation, benefiting both, or again, iron sharpening iron. This is the Church, or at least what God intended for it to be.

So where is it that you fit? If you do not fit comfortably here at Christian City Church, then please, find yourself a place where you do. Do not spend your Christian walk bouncing from place to place. And do not spend it in solitude. You have been designed by God to exist in community. I will go one further and say that this is one of the most important elements of your spiritual development, because God will more often than not speak into your world through your Christian brothers and sisters than He will intervene directly. So let us be clear: Find yourself a church home and get yourself fitted.

Moving now briefly into the second part of the verse quoted above from 1 Peter; he specifies that we are to be God’s holy priests. Now, the word “priest” has become a bit of a loaded term in light of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, but let us forget that for the moment and focus upon the context of Peter’s usage here. Priests in the 1st century Israel were exalted men indeed. They were allowed special access to certain areas of the temple. And they were set apart from a cultural standpoint as, well, revered. Even their dress was intended to distinguish them as something different from the “common man.” The big idea was that they were believed to be holier than those who turned up to the temple, but nothing could be further from the Biblical truth. The position of the Bible is that we are all sinners, and that we have each fallen short of the perfection God requires for entry into His Heavenly Kingdom. This is why Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection are so essential to our understanding of God’s grace—that, in a sentence, our salvation is a gift from Heaven; it is not something that we have, or could ever earn ourselves. And it is the German monk Martin Luther who, 1500 years after Peter writes these letters, emphasizes this very thing in his now-famous 95 Theses, essentially impugning amongst other things the idea that certain members of God’s kingdom are capable of taking on a higher holy state. No no, we are each members of what Luther referred to as the “priesthood of all believers.” There is no higher or lower. There is Jesus and then there is everybody else. The Church, then, is not meant to look like a bunch of nobodies sitting round the feet of a handful of somebodies. We are instead meant to recognize our shortcomings, adopt an attitude of reverence and humility, ultimately give our lives to God, and subsequently become a kingdom of priests. Not one priest per congregation. A kingdom of priests.

That is the great thing about God’s way. We can turn up to His alter as raw, misshapen stones, but He will turn us into priests by placing people around our lives who will help to fit us into place, utilizing each of our gifts and experiences and idiosyncrasies, and chipping away at those hard, sharpened edges. Because once we are cemented into the walls of God’s temple, we find, finally, solidarity, purpose, and strength.