Shepherds of God's Flock (Part 3)

-------------------------------------------

Last Sunday we looked at the picture that we see in Scripture of

Church being the Body of Christ

Church being the Family of Believers

Church is the Bride of Christ

Again, another familiar picture of The Church

And all of these pictures of church that we are talking about, I believe are so powerful

at least, for me, they are powerful because they are pictures that we are familiar with

Church as a body—each of us has a body

We understand the importance of our body working in unity and all our parts with different functions working for one common goal

And when it comes to church being a body, we can say, “Oh yeah. Same thing there! It’s important that each of our gifts work toward a common goal!”

Or church as a family—each of us has a family, or grew up in a family.

Maybe some of our families weren’t what we wished they would have been, but we understand the way families work or should work

And when it comes to church, we can say, “Oh yeah. I can see how important it is to live as a family with my brothers and sisters!”

Maybe it’s more of a challenge for us to realize what an amazing thing it is that we have been adopted by God Himself to a new family!

But with His help, I pray that we can grasp this in a deeper way

And the neat thing with all of these pictures is that God chooses to use these pictures with us.

Because what it says to me is that all that God has created in this physical world should point us to deeper spiritual truths about God

They should help us understand in a deeper way who God is. What He is like. His priorities. His character

And they should move us into a deeper sense of love for Him and move us toward more and deeper worship of Him

And this is true of this picture of church that we are looking at today: The church is the bride of Christ

It is a very tender and intimate picture of the relationship between Christ and His Church

I love to use that familiar passage from Ephesians 5 at weddings.

Paul gives us instructions for husbands and wives, how we are to live with each other and what it means to have relationships that honor God

But then at the end, he says in regard to marriage: “This is a profound mystery. (not just your run-of-the-mill mystery, but a profound mystery. The Greek word means intense or severe.)

This is a great, intense mystery, but I’m saying that it (that is, the mystery of marriage), actually refers to Christ and the Church

And we are very familiar with this passage. At least the instructions for how we as husbands and wives are to live together

But I wonder, if in our modern day understanding and practice of courtship and dating and marriage, if we miss some of the deeper significance of what Paul is saying about how the Church is the Bride of Christ

The way that courtship and dating and marriage work here in the States:

a man and a woman notice each other

could be physical attraction

Could be an emotional attraction

Or they connect over a shared interest

However it happens, they single each other out somehow

And a relationship starts to form. Maybe you don’t call it love, yet. But they start to spend more time with each other

And as time goes, that relationship starts to turn into what we know as love

They start to think, I really don’t want to spend much time apart from this person

I think maybe I’d like to spend my life with this person

Again, this is true (as I understand it) for both the man and the woman

And so, they get engaged and they promise that they are going to marry each other. And they set a day when before God and other witnesses, they will pledge to be true to each other

And during the engagement time they work even harder on their relationship

They get premarital counseling

And if they are serious about what they are learning there, they make serious effort to change their lives accordingly

In other words, they work on themselves. They work on their relationship because they want to be found acceptable to each other when they are married

And as that time gets closer, they begin to make preparations

The man makes sure that they have a place to live and that he can take care of his wife

The woman…does everything else

She plans the wedding, gets the invitations ready

Get’s the wedding cake ordered, or whatever you do there

And when the day has almost arrived, she gets herself ready

Because on the day of, everything must be perfect.

she wants to be beautiful for her husband

She makes sure her flowers are just right

She makes sure that the dress is going to fit just right

She makes sure that the bridesmaids look just the way she wants them to look

she gets her hair done, just the way that she always imagined that it would be

The point is that in the way we think about relationships and marriage,

both the man AND the woman make decisions about whether or not they want to spend their lives with the other person

And BOTH of them take steps to make sure that they are presentable to the other person

But I wonder, does it work the same way when it come to this picture of Church being the bride of Christ that we are given in Ephesians 5?

Because when Paul talks about the church being the bride of Christ, of course he would have in mind what courtship and marriage looked like in his culture—that is, 1st century Palestine

In fact, there are cultures around the world today taht still practice marriage much like they would have in 1st century Palestine

And in that culture, a young man would see a woman that he desired

And he would go to that woman’s father and offer him a gift, called mohar. (land, livestock, other material goods)

And if that gift was acceptable to the father, this young woman would be betrothed to this young man,

We might think of it as engagement, although I believe that it was a stronger bond than we think of as engagement

We can break engagements, but the breaking of a bethrothal was almost like a divorce

But the young lady would be betrothed to the man. Sometimes she would get to voice her opinion about it, but many times that was just a formality. She often did not have much choice in the matter

And after a time of betrothal, when the young lady would come of age, they would have a marriage. And that is when they would become husband and wife and the marriage would be consummated.

And, of course, she was expected to enter the marriage pure.

Because if the man found out that she wasn’t pure, he had the power of life and death over her. He most certainly would divorce her,, and most likely would have her stoned

And certainly, that man would never marry a woman whom he knew wasn’t pure or had been unfaithful to him

This is why the pictures that we have in Scripture of God being a husband to His people are so striking!

Because what the Bible shows us is a picture of God as a husband pursuing marriage with a bride who has been terribly unfaithful. And not just one time, but over and over again.

We see God pursuing a bride who, while betrothed (promised) to him, doesn’t seem to have the least bit of ability to stay faithful to Him and instead is chasing after other suitors.

This picture of the people of God being a bride to Him is not new in the New Testament. We see it first in the OT

Remember the story of Hosea the prophet

In the opening verses of the book of Hosea, God tells him to go take a wife of whoredom.

Now, that word for us is a strong word and we don’t like to say it.

When I was growing up, it was stressed that this mean that Gomer, his wife, was a prostitute. That Hosea was ordered to marry a prostitute

She might have been, but that’s not nessarily the case.

This Hebrew word that we have translated here is also used for the nation of Israel when they were unfaithful to God and when they would start worshiping other gods

So, it can be used for sexual unfaithfulness specifically, but it can also be used for unfaithfulness in general

So, whatever the case, Gomer has a problem with staying faithful to those to whom she has made promises

But Hosea obeys God and marries Gomer and they have 3 children together. And things are OK for a while, but then Gomer starts to get restless

And she takes off and leaves Hosea and their children

Do you identify with her a little bit? Prone to wander, Lord I feel it

But Hosea loves her and God tells him to go and search for her

And Hosea eventually finds her her, ragged, torn, sick, dirty, disheveled, destitute, chained to an auction block in a filthy slave market, a repulsive shadow of the woman she once was

And Hosea, without hesitation, so great is his love for her, that he buys her back for 15 shekels of silver and 13 bushels of barley

A total of about 30 pieces of silver

And he brings her back home and cleans her up, and restores her to being his wife

Such a clear and amazing picture of the love of God for a people who time and time again wandered away from Him and were unfaithful to him

And we bring this picture forward to Ephesians 5 where Paul desribes how husbands should love their wives

and he says, actually, I’m talking about Jesus. I’m talking about how He loved His church

He loves her as a husband who will, without hesitation, go out in search of wayward people whom He loves

Re. The story of the Good Shepherd, going out in search of one that is lost

And He will bring them back

And He will clean up their wounds and wash the filth of the streets off of them

This is what Jesus did by coming to this world to be born, to live and minister among us, to die and rise again, and ascend into Heaven

He sacrificed incredibly, immensely, in order to go out to the slave market and buy back His bride who had wandered away and found themselves sold into sin

slaves of sin

He bought us, he brought us back, He washed us. He purified us

And I think this marriage picture can be so hard for us to grasp

Because we think of marriage kind of like a contract. An agreement between two people

For us, a good and solid marriage is built on two people agreeing equally to be a part of this marriage

I was dating Heidi and I came to the point when I was tired of being single and I wanted to start being married to her

And that’s how we think about our relationship with God

I’m tired of living for myself. Now I want to live for Jesus

I have decided to follow Jesus

I am going to make Him my Lord and Master

and so on

And yes, some of that is true. We do have to submit our will to Him

But that’s just scratching the surface of what really happened

but let me ask you. Can a slave just decide to stop being a slave?

Could Gomer have changed her situation? Do you think that she enjoyed being put on display in a slave market and sold like a piece of property?

No! She had to be purchased. It was Hosea that had to come and pull her out of her desperate situation

And that is what Jesus did for us while we were hopeless and helpless

Read Ephesians 5:25-30 “25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body.”

Do you see this? It was Christ who loved the Church

The reason that we love Him is because He first loved us

Christ gave Himself for the Church

Christ made the Church holy.

Christ cleansed the Church

Christ made the Church look beautiful.

It wasn’t the church that went out and got her hair done and did all the things that brides do to make themselves beautiful

No! It was Christ that did ALL of that “…so that he might present the church to himself in splendor.”

This doesn’t sound like a 50/50 contract like we think of marriage today

but it’s a picture of Hosea going out to the slave market and buying his wife back when she was out of options

Scripture makes it clear that it is Jesus who reached out to us

Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him!” (that is, no one can come to Jesus unless they are sought out and gathered in by the Father)

1 John 4:19 “19 We love because he first loved us.”

If we grasp what Jesus did for us, how can we not help but love Him

This is not a thing of we grit our teeth and think “The Bible says I have to love Jesus, so let me try to love Him more today”

No, instead, we start to grasp the immensity of what Jesus did, and out of that flows our love for Him

Ephesians 2:8 “8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,”

This is what it means to be the Bride of Christ

Yet how often do we find ourselves trying desperately to rid ourselves of our shackles of sin and find our own way out of the slave market called “bondage to sin”.

How often do we find ourselves trying to clean ourselves up and make ourselves beautiful for Christ, so that we can somehow be pleasing to Him?

How often do we find ourselves withholding parts of our lives, from Him?

And why do we do that?

Control: We want to be in control of our own lives.

Have a feather to stick in our own caps

Keep the

Fear—closely tied to control.

It’s an amazing, yet fearful thing to be loved like Jesus loves His bride

Did Gomer wander away from Hosea? We don’t know.

But we sure do don’t we. And some of that is fear

What if I release everything to Him and allow Him to clean me up and make me beautiful?

What if I do that and He messes up somehow?

the clock is saying that I need to move along, but I just want to remind us of what we already know (in our heads, at least)

Being the Bride of Christ is an amazing and sacred privilege.

A Bride in our society today has a good deal of “say so” in a relationship. And if things don’t work out between her and her fiance, she most likely has other options

But this is not true wit the Church, the Bride of Christ. Jesus is our only hope and we don’t get to bargain with Him

Neither do we get to try to clean ourselves up to make ourselves presentable. This is His work and His alone!

So my question for us, Church, is

Has Jesus met you in the slave market and brought you back home to restore you into right relationship with Him?

Are you living daily in the love that He has for you, or do you constantly wander and take back control

Church, Jesus loves you. you are His bride. He gave everything for you and He will love you to the end

Church as a flock