Monday: The Relationship of the Kingdom and the Church
WEEK 19
MONDAY
THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH
Ephesians 2:17-22
The fellowship of which we have been thinking was antecedent to the church. C. A. Anderson Scott puts it this way: “And this Koinonia, called into being by the Holy Spirit, was prior to the organised Ecclesia: it was related to it as the life to the organization.”* Out of this koinonia, the fellowship, came the ecclesia, the church.
But there was something beyond and above both the fellowship and the church, and that was the kingdom. The kingdom was best seen in the church as it, in turn, embodied the fellowship, but it was not to be identified with the kingdom. The kingdom is the absolute; the fellowship and the church are relatives. They are related to something higher than themselves—the kingdom. The kingdom is not related to something higher; it is the absolute order confronting all relatives with an offer of grace and demanding complete surrender and obedience. “Seek [first God’s] kingdom, and these things shall be yours as well” (Luke 12:31 RSV). The kingdom is first; all else, including the fellowship and the church, is to be related to it. If they become first, they become idolatry; for where a relative order becomes an absolute order, there is idolatry. The fellowship and the church are not ends but means to the ends of the kingdom.
You cannot go out and say, “Repent, for the church is at hand.” It would sound absurd. But it doesn’t sound absurd when you say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For we feel that here we are confronted with the Absolute to which all life must be related or perish. The church contains the best life of the kingdom but cannot be identified with the kingdom. “Christ is head of the church, that is, the savior of the body” (Eph 5:23). Christ saves the church but not the kingdom. The kingdom is salvation; it offers salvation to all, including the church. The church must lose its life in the kingdom, and then it finds itself again. But if it saves its life—makes itself the end—then it loses itself. The fellowship within it dies; and when that dies, the church is dead. The kingdom is universal, for all worlds; the church is particular, for this world.
O blessed Spirit, you have brought into being the way to live corporately. Then help us to yield to you so that in us that fellowship may be realized again. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The kingdom is my absolute; I hold all things in relationship to it.
*C. A. Anderson Scott, The Spirit, ed. B. H. Streeter (Macmillan Co., 1919), 138.