Week 46—Sunday Ephesians 5:25-27
Ephesians 5:25-27
THE KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH
We must now pass on to the relationship of the kingdom of God and the church. Only one church makes the kingdom of God and the church identical, namely, the Roman Catholic Church. Nowhere are the Kingdom and the church identical in the New Testament. Suppose you would say, “Repent for the church is at hand.” People would laugh. But you don’t laugh, you feel like bending the knee if you hear, “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.” But the actual emphasis today is largely not on the Kingdom; it is on the church.
Now I believe in the church. The church is the fellowship of the being-redeemed. With all its faults, it is the greatest serving institution on earth. It has many critics but no rivals in the work of human redemption. There isn’t a spot on earth where they have allowed us to go, where we haven’t gone with schools, orphan asylums, leper asylums, hospitals, churches, everything to lift the body, the mind, the soul of the race. No other institution has done anything like it. The church has been the mother of my spirit. At her altars I found Jesus.
But you are not saved by the church. The church is the subject of redemption, how then can it dispense it? “Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior” (Eph. 5:23). If the church needs saving, how can it give salvation? If the church takes you by the hand and takes you beyond itself to the feet of the Savior, it is wonderful. But if it stops you at itself and makes itself the issue, it is not wonderful—it is idolatry. The Kingdom is the Absolute, the church is the relative. The Kingdom commands, the church obeys. The church loses its life in the life of the Kingdom and finds itself again.
O Lord God, save us from making ourselves, individual or collective, the end. You are the end and we bow the knee there, and there alone. Save us from giving ourselves to halfway houses, trying to make them our home. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I do not belong to the church, I belong to the Kingdom—the church belongs to me, my Kingdom heritage.