This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Considering the Church” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, June 27, 1993.
About this sermon
Luther and Calvin both defined the church simply as the people of God, a definition modern experience has quietly made expendable. Against that drift, Christ’s own word in Matthew 16 answers directly: he builds an ‘assembly,’ a dwelling place for God, something no merely personal faith can substitute for. The series opens by putting that assembly back at the center.
Sermon transcript
This morning we are reading from Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 16, beginning with verse 13. Let us give attention to the word of God. When Jesus came into the co-successory of Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?
They said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist, some Elijah. and others, Jeremiah, are one of the prophets. He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter, And upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Then charged be his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. From that time forth began Jesus to show unto his disciples how that he must go unto Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord, this shall not be unto thee. But he turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan, thou art an absent son to me, for thou savest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. But what is a man profiting? He gain the whole world, and lose his own soul. What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? The Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then He shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”
O God, give us a zeal for your word and for your gospel, even as we ourselves express that May we think long about the need of your people in the world, and also the matter of that calling of your elect from various nations and tribes of the earth. O Father, in this our zeal for your word and your gospel, may we be concerned to pray always that word and its success, knowing, Lord, that you are faithful in calling your own. And as we have evidence of your call at work, may we rejoice, rejoicing as much in these that you have called as we do rejoice in our own calling. We ask this for the sake of Christ, who is at work by his Spirit presently. to draw all your elect unto you. Amen.
Once he marched, even a child of seven knows what the Church is. Now, his comment had nothing to do with the precociousness or the intelligence of children in the early part of the sixteenth century. But rather, that comment had to do with how much everyone in German society, from the youngest to the oldest, was vitally interested in the Church. A child of seven, no less than a middle-aged former Augustinian monk. in that early part of the 16th century was absorbed with the subject of the Church and the Church’s true identity.
Now in the high times, we who are the descendants of the Reformation, Get this matter straight. It is high time that we get it straight once and for all. Reformation, which had at its center the work of a monumental figure like Martin Luther, had nothing to do, in Luther’s mind, with what we call modern individualism. Consider Luther’s doctrine of personal justification by faith. Luther pressed that doctrine in the interest of identifying the true evangelical Church, into which a justified person is incorporated. That justified person does not stand alone by himself, autonomous. separated from the assembly of God’s people, rather that justified person is identified specifically as he is incorporated into the Church that preaches truly the doctrine of justification.
If that is not enough for you and you are not particularly impressed by Luther, let me cite Calvin. Calvin, in writing the preface to his now-famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, said that he had no other goal in writing those volumes and in his ministry as a whole other than his service to the Church. But I didn’t know that you had to require it.
Now we might judge that these attitudes by Luther and Calvin are a bit too conservative given the mood of our day. We might even judge that the attitudes expressed by Luther and Calvin are too churchy and much too close to Rome to suit us. to have control over the candle blocking on table 15. Indeed, there is a conservative element to the doctrine proclaimed and declared by both of these individuals. But a conservatism that we would do well to hold close.
Luther and Calvin thought a reformation of the church, not a revolution, nor were they interested in anarchy. Those claimed Luther and Calvin would get it straight. Now given their conservative bent and their interest in the church, We do well to press further and deeper so as to not miss their contribution to the discussion about what the Church is.
For them, conservative as they were, the Church would not be defined in terms of its hierarchy. This is where they differed from Rome. They had as much zeal for the Church as they had as the church, as those in Rome did. Where they differed was that they refused to define the church in terms of its hierarchy, as if the church existed only where the Roman poppet, the Pope, was represented.
No. The reformers saw and claimed to see clearly in their Bibles that the church is foremostly defined as the people of God. Rome’s view does not necessitate of itself the people, but only the Roman Pontius and his representative. And this is why, to this day, a priest in the Roman Church can celebrate the Mass regardless of whether there is a congregation present or not. You don’t need the people.
Luther and Calvin’s insight proves to be that. As conservative as it was, as insistent upon the institution of the church as it was, a recovery of the biblical truth, namely that the church is the people of God. Now while this insight was made an article of faith for the reformers, and became an article of faith among the spiritual descendants of the Reformers, it was retained in the conscience of evangelical Protestantism for a mere three centuries. And then it began to be challenged and even eroded. I mean, you should call more. You have a great voice.
It was eroded by the rising disgust amongst many Protestants over denominationalism, the fracturing of the Church, the endless division that we observe within the Churches. It was eroded by a flood of suspicion about Church structures per se. I just don’t trust them. And it was also eroded by an out-and-out sinful disregard for personal accountability to the Church and to the Church’s rightful authority. I grew up in the subsequent schizophrenia of modern Protestantism.
On the one hand, I had a lingering respect for the Church. Even from a very young age, I was concerned to be faithful to the Church. However, now, looking back upon those young days, I can only describe my attitude presently as a desire I had in myself honor and institution upon which I believed, however naively, God had placed his stand.
I was regular. I went to Sunday school. I went to church. I was dutiful, responsive. I even went to summer camp. I didn’t miss a retreat. I was even enthusiastic. But, I have to admit that I was enthusiastic about the regularity of the whole thing. I was enthusiastic about the form and structure of things. So that is one side of my schizophrenia.
The other side, as I recall, was this, I was possessed of a spirit, being the modern evangelical that I was, I was possessed of a spirit that saw the church as extendable. I was possessed of a spirit that saw my individual personal Christianity as all that mattered. I had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and that was all important. And therefore, as far as my religious identity was concerned, I had an existence That was, by and large, for all intents and purposes, cut off from, independent of, detached from the Church. I couldn’t stand without it. But I don’t want you to miss the precise nature of what was going on in my young mind. I might well pride myself in my personal relationship to Jesus Christ, and I might even take pride in my steadfastness, my faithfulness, my dutifulness with respect to the Church.
But even at these points, I was laboring under confusion. Even the notion of the Church that I held on to was itself corrupted. That view of the Church which I had embraced as the child of decadent Protestantism was a departure from the Reformation and from the Biblical view. I had no real spiritual or religious interest in the people at all.
There was a certain social interest. Do you get my drift? I was interested in young ladies, if I have to spell it out. There was a certain social interest. But I like being with a crowd. But I have no real spiritual, religious interest in these people. I have no true sense that these people worry that. The church is gone. I had no real appreciation of their identity or of my own identity with them as the people of God.
In relationship to whom I and my personal faith in Jesus Christ was intimately bound through whom then I was to be defined. I must say that my awakening to the truth about the Church as the people of God, my awakening to the corporate character of the Church of Jesus Christ, was as astounding to me as my grasping of the grace of the gospel. It was electric. If therefore you have noticed an emphasis in my ministering upon the church and corporate nature, you are indeed picking up on something that is deliberate. Together with my interest to set before you the excellence of Christ as he is presented to us from Genesis to Revelation, it is my concern that you would live fully in your identity as the Church, that is, as the people of God. The excellence of Christ and our identity as the Church are interconnected, intertwined, inseparably bound.
Jesus says, does he not, I will build my Church. He is his church. He, in that statement, speaking as he does, seeks to distinguish his church from a church not specifically identified as his. What church might there be that stands over against Jesus? which necessitates him now to identify what he is about as his church. Now, in order to understand our Savior’s meaning at this point, we must not allow ourselves to be distracted, at least at first, by the image he uses. I will build my church.”
It’s a building, Jesus, not its building language. It may be tempted to think his comment then to center on an architectural point of reference, as if Jesus had in mind a literal structure, a literal building. Or, even carrying things a little further, we might I think the image of a building suggests a structure and has in view the organizational structure and order of the Church. But Jesus here has neither a literal building nor the organizational superstructure in mind when he speaks about building his Church.
He has first in mind an assembly. That is what the church translates to be. He has in mind an assembly, an assembly that is recognizably his, at the center of which is the confession by all who are a part of it that he, Jesus, is the Christ, the son of the living God. This assembly, which Jesus is specifically now identifying as his own and distinguishing from another assembly, is built by him as an answer to and over against the assembly of Israel, which, even though it has a fine pedigree and hails from the hallowed ground of Mount Sinai, both is resistant to and critically confused about Jesus’ identity. Although it is not explicitly stated, the clear implication of what Jesus is saying in Matthew 16, verse 18, is that his church is the new Israel of God. Jesus, then, is about the business of building his assembly. an assembly of people incorporated unto him and through him. This assembly then being the center of God’s activity, the true Israel of God.
But we must not lose touch with the building language that Jesus uses in the statement, I will build my church. Yes, to be sure, the people there are prominent, they are what has the preeminence, they are what is at issue, not brick or boards or nails or mortar. The building language is instructive. Not only is there the assembly of Israel in the background through Jesus’ statements, over against which now he sets his own assembly, but you will recall that there was a building enterprise associated with the primal assembling of the children of Israel after they had come out of Egypt.
After they were gathered to Sinai, they set about the task of constructing the tabernacle, a tabernacle that in time gave way to the temple. Jesus’ words, therefore, are not simply intended to set before us the Christian assembly as the replacement for the assembly of Israel. His words are meant to suggest that this Christian assembly, the true people of God, are in actual fact the temple of the Lord.
Not only the assembly of God, but as the assembly and in their corporate identity the very dwelling place of God. You begin to understand why I personally was electrified by these considerations. You understand why, when I began to see these things, I was so thoroughly excited about the Church. And though there were all of these pressures around me to minimize the Church and its importance, seeing the things that I was seeing in Scripture, I could not do that.
We are the people of God, the assembly of the Lord. We are the temple of the living God, and he dwells in our midst. None of this is lost on the Apostles, and is evident in their subsequent message. Should I remind you of the Apostle Paul, writing in Ephesians chapter 2, beginning at verse 19?
So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints in our of God’s household, of God’s building, having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.
It doesn’t become grander than that, and if that doesn’t thrill you, If that doesn’t cause your blood in the veins to course faster, if it doesn’t cause your heart to beat a little faster, then you’re dead. You’re a loser. And I worry about your spiritual destiny. And then there’s Peter. One of the central figures, if not central disciple. in the story that we read this morning from Matthew. You hear what he later says in his first letter, the second chapter of that first letter, beginning at verse four, and coming unto him, that is, coming unto Christ as to a living stone rejected by men, but choice and precious in the sight of God, you also as living stones are being built up a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable through Jesus Christ. And skipping down to verse 10, for you once were not a people of God, but now you are the people of God.
It takes my breath away. And that is what I wish for you. And I know that if it takes your breath away, I will never have to argue with you about how often you have to come here. Never. and that’s what makes me sad because presently I have to argue with some of you about how often you have to come here here is the common and powerful message that moves consistently through the New Testament from Jesus to Paul to Peter.
The Church. It is the assembly of the Lord. The people of God. The Church. It is the temple of God. The very dwelling place of God. You may well long for former days of Reformation zeal, but I can tell you that there is no way back to that Reformation zeal but through these truths. You may long personally for individual satisfaction in your Christian life, but I can assure you that there is absolutely no route that satisfies and pleases God. There is no route for you to individual satisfaction apart from your realization that your identity is wrapped up in the corporate assembly of the people of God. the veritable temple of the glorified Lord. Let us pray.
Our Father, You are here with us now. You bless us with Your Son in your Son’s presence by the Spirit that we might know that we are yours that we are your people that we are made to be a living temple made of living stones a dwelling place for our God Lord, strengthen us in our resolve to live like the people of God and to behave as those who are part of the temple of the living Lord. We ask it in Jesus’ name, that one who is the chief cornerstone and even the foundation for this structure which he himself is building.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.