Being the Church: Called to be Different

The Nicene Creed states, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”

“The glory of the gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.” (Dr Lloyd-Jones).

“You are 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. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. “ (1 Peter 2:9-12).

Question 1 - Looking at 1 Peter 2:9-12, what jumps out to you? What encourages you? What challenges you?

1 Peter 2:9-12 challenges us to live distinctly different lives as we are being the Church in the world.

The call to be different is necessary if we are to as Paul says, “shine as stars in the universe”(Phil 2:14) and although people may not like us for what we stand for Peter says they will at least “see” our “good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us.”

What then does it mean for the Church to be different?

1. We are Different because we are Called to be Holy:

According to the Old Testament, God is “holy, holy, holy” (Isa 6:3). This means that He is utterly set apart from all other beings, “dwelling in unapproachable light”(1 Tim 6:16) so that even the Cherubim and the Seraphim have to “cover their faces” and filter the light of His glory through their wings! This places God above and beyond all that is evil so that the Prophet Habakkuk can say: “Your eyes are too pure to look upon evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.”(Hab 1:13).

In order then for Israel to live comfortably with God they had to fulfil their call to be holy! The language of Peter, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God” echoes Exodus 19:5-6 in which Israel is called upon by God to “obey my voice and keep my covenant” and if they do He promises that “you will be my treasured possession out of tall the nations - for the whole earth is mine. And unto me you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

This call to holiness was often repeated in the Old Testament command to “be holy, for I am holy”(Lev 19:2;11:44;20:26) and it is echoed in the New Testament and applied to the church. - 1 Pet 1:13-16.

When Peter calls us to be holy, he says: “Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

Implied here is the need to be different from the world, to not being conformed to evil desires which are so manifest in an indulgent society. This shows that the idea captured by holiness, indeed the very word holy means to be different or to be set apart.

When we remember that the word for Church (Grk: Ekklesia) means to be called out, we can see at once the connection with holiness. We are called out by God and set apart to be his own special, holy people! The church then is a set-apart people, called to reflect, in its corporate life together and before the watching world, the truth that God is set apart from all evil, falsehood, and injustice.

The church is set apart when it loves and serves others rather than self-gratification, and when it seeks to stand out not because of its own ostentation or self-congratulatory good works, but by looking to the finished work of Jesus and letting His light shine through us to the watching world. - Eph 5:1-27.

Our vocation and our mandate is to “be holy for the Lord our God is holy” and in doing so we will be different and stand out in the darkness of this world!

Question 2 - What challenges you about the concept of God’s holiness? What scares you?

2. We are Different because we are being Made Holy:

The ultimate foundation of holiness in the church is not its own righteousness or power, but the atoning work of Jesus and the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit. - Eph 5:25-27

The writer to the Hebrews tells us in 2:10-11 that “In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.” Notice the language there - “the one who makes men holy”. Jesus is our “righteousness”(Rom 3:22). He imputes righteousness to us in the sense that , it is because of His perfect righteousness that God accepts us as His own special people. Not on account of what we have achieved but because of the merits of what He achieved in his perfect life; sacrificial and substitutionary death and glorious resurrection.

This is confirmed in Hebrews 10:8-14 where the writer says: “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them” (although the law required them to be made). Then he said, “Here I am, I have come to do your will.” He sets aside the first to establish the second. And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool, because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.”

And notice the language of “being made holy”, a reminder that we are looking at two aspects of holiness here - firstly the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, placed against our account if you like, that makes us acceptable before God and then secondly, the Holy Spirit imparts righteousness , which is worked in us as we seek to obey Him and live according to His will and word. This we often refer to as sanctification, which does not occur as a separate step after salvation; rather, it is the working out of one’s salvation into the whole of life and practice.

In justification, Christ’s righteousness is imputed to believers: it is reckoned to their account, judicially speaking. In sanctification, Christ’s righteousness is imparted by the power of the Spirit, the converted sinner becomes more like Christ.

The sinner is transformed in every area of his or her life: inward and outward, heart and action, relationships and purpose. Sanctification is the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (John 17:17, 19; 1 Cor 1:2, 30; Eph 5:25–27; Col 1:22; 1 Thess 5:23; Heb 10:10–13; 13:12, 20–21).

“To be in Christ -- that is redemption; but for Christ to be in you -- that is sanctification!”― Major W. Ian Thomas

Question 3 - How does the distinction between imputed and imparted righteousness help you understand the work of Jesus for you and your work for Him?

Sanctification then is the application of justification: those who have been declared holy are now made holy. It is the development of regeneration: those who have received new life now live out this life as they grow in Christ. It is also the implication of adoption: God’s beloved children imitate him in holiness and purity.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 35 asks, “What is sanctification? and it answers, “Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”

Christians are enabled to do good works that please and honor God, love and serve others, and represent God’s character and ways before the world (John 15:5, 8; Rom 7:4; 1 Cor 10:31; Gal 6:2; Jas 2:14–22).

Our triune God not only declares his children righteous but also progressively makes them righteous, setting them apart for himself and freeing them from the entanglements of sin. It does not happen in a moment but is the ongoing work of God throughout the life of a believer, freeing and empowering believers to become like Christ (Rom 8:12–14; 15:16; 2 Thess 2:13; Titus 3:5; 1 Pet 1:2).

3. We are Different because we are Striving to be Holy:

We are CALLED to be DIFFERENT. We are MADE to be DIFFERENT and finally we are STRIVING TO BE DIFFERENT! We must hold these things together in tension and not rest on laurels or think of holiness as something that is done to us rather than with us!

Think of it like this. The Church is spoken of as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16; comp. 2 Cor. 6:16,). It is constructed by Almighty God in accordance with His will for us. However, each local church has a part to play in this, indeed each individual believer is compared to “living stones” being “joined together” rising to “become a holy temple to the Lord.” (Eph. 2:21)

We are a temple and we are becoming a temple! We are when we gather together the “the household of God”(1 Tim. 3:15) and we are to behave and act in ways appropriate to holiness - hence there is a scriptural mandate to exercise church discipline against unrepentant sins among church members, including sexual immorality, greed, swindling, and idolatry (1 Cor 5:1-13).

Question 4 - Thinking of your life as a temple of the Holy Spirit, how should that challenge how we act before God and others? How should it challenge how we view ourselves and others? Take care of ourselves and others?

This is important because the Scriptures often connect the ongoing visible holiness of the church with the church’s witness to the world (Matt 5:14–16). This holiness includes being set apart as a community from the ways in which the world operates and if we do not, but rather if we scandalize our witness by worldly living then we bring discredit on the Gospel and the Lord.

Take Corinth! - “What might an advertisement for the position of senior pastor at Corinth Evangelical Church have said? “Wanted: Pastor to lead a divided, undisciplined, worldly, weak, chaotic, ignorant, disorderly, unloving church”? Perhaps, I doubt that it would have attracted a stream of seminary graduates, although, from rock bottom, the only way is up...Yet the remarkable thing is how Paul opens the letter we know as 1 Corinthians (1 Cor. 5:9 makes it clear that this was not the first letter Paul had written to them). He addresses his intended recipients and readers as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1:2). Both the participle used to describe them as “sanctified” and the noun used to describe them as “saints” have at their root the idea of holiness. For Paul, “the church of God that is in Corinth” may be described as divided, immoral, and decaying, but she is defined in terms of holiness. The people of God in Corinth have been set apart to be holy, and they are called holy.In other words, Paul does not look at the behavior of the wayward disciples of Corinth and conclude that there is no church there. Quite the opposite—he sees a church there, a holy people whose calling and identity are being belied and compromised by their behavior. His burden is that they will repent and live up to their name. First Corinthians is the letter that says to the church: “Be what you are!”… The work of sanctification is God’s work—He makes His people holy. But He does not do it apart from a call to them to take up arms against every sin and to “cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump” (5:7). The great commands and imperatives of this letter—“Flee from sexual immorality!” (6:18), “Run that you may obtain [the prize]!” (9:24), “Do all to the glory of God!” (10:31)—belong to God’s sanctifying work in us. He calls us to be what we are—holy—and He is working in us both the desire to be holy to Him and the ability to live for Him. (Iain D Campbell).

So although sanctification is first and foremost a supernatural work of God in a person’s life, it also requires the active cooperation of the person through faith, obedience, and submission to the divine work (Rom 6:19; 12:1; Phil 2:12–13; 2 Tim 2:21; Heb 12:14).

In Scripture, good works are consistently expected of the people of God as an indicator of the reign of God in their midst. In the Old Testament, the holiness of God’s people, especially their conformity to the Law of Moses, was held up as their distinguishing feature among the nations (Deut 4:5–8).

In the New Testament, a holy lifestyle was likewise expected of the nascent church, as seen perhaps most forcefully in the letter of James (“faith without works is dead”; Jam 2:26), as well as in the Apostle Paul’s numerous entreaties for Christians to submit to the leading of the Spirit into a lifestyle “against which there is no law” (Gal 5:23; cf. 1 Thess 4:7–8).

The Reformers, Calvin and Luther each attempted to guide the Church after the Reformation to live good lvies in the world and avoid the scandalous abuses to which Rome has trqagically ebcome so scandalous - John Calvin referred Christians to the law as a moral code to enable us to attain Spirit-empowered godliness. Luther, portrayed good works as acts which Christians should be expected to undertake, albeit only “out of spontaneous love in obedience to God” rather than by the compulsion of having one’s salvation depend upon such acts.

God has provided various means by which Christians can participate in their growth toward holiness and union with God. These include prayer, the reading and meditation of Scripture, fellowship with other believers in the church, the use of spiritual weapons (Eph 6:10–20), the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23), and the gifts of the Spirit for God’s mission in the world (Rom 12:3–8).

“[Sanctification] is a process that includes on the one hand medication and diet (in the form of biblical instruction and admonition coming in various ways to the heart), and on the other hand tests and exercises (in the form of internal and external pressures, providentially ordered, to which we have to make active response). The process goes on as long as we are in the world, which is something that God decides in each case.”― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

In terms of what degree of sanctification is possible in one’s earthly life? Although some Christians hold to the doctrine of “entire sanctification,” also called “perfectionism” believing that by a second act of grace God can instantaneously and fully sanctify a believer during this life, it appears that the Bible teaches that whilst we can progress in holiness and blamelessness, complete sanctification awaits Christians only after death.

“God’s will for you is to make you more like Jesus. Christlikeness is your target, your goal, your vision, and the reason you were created. You are set apart to be like Jesus. That goal will take the rest of your life to accomplish." (Life Hacks, p.61)”― Jon Morrison, Life Hacks: Nine Ideas That Will Change How You Do Everything

What the New Testament is absolutely clear about is that holiness matters!

As individuals we will be held accountable for our actions as is clear from Jesus’ teaching in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt 25:31–46), and Paul’s teaching of the testing of works at the Day of the Lord and our appearance before “the Judgment seat of Christ.” (1 Cor 3:5–14; cf. 2 Cor 5:10).

We are called to be DIFFERENT! -

“The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness and sanctification centre, where flawed people place their faith in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he designed.” ― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you.”― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Question 5 - What particular steps are you going to take, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to become more holy, more like Jesus?