Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships.
This week we're closing the series by looking at what I might be the most important earthly relationship of all. It’s our relationship with an institution. The institution Brad Edwards calls “the most counter-intuitive, universally cringe, and eagerly abandoned institution of the last 75 years: the local church.”
1 Peter is a letter written by Peter the disciple of Jesus, to early members of christians churches– local assemblies of Jesus-followers– from all different backgrounds scattered throughout modern day Turkey. Peter wants his readers to understand how to faithfully navigate all the challenges of life in this world. And the answer he gives is: we can only live wisely in this world, to the degree that we live together as God’s people.
(*Thank you to Brad Edwards for his excellent book The Reason for Church which informed much of the content in this sermon! )
“Why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death … Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world ...Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines” -- Eugene Peterson
“The church is not simply another voluntary society, like the Boy Scouts or the Sierra Club. It’s an embassy of Christ’s Kingdom….unlike the rulers of this age, Jesus doesn’t ask us to shed our blood for his empire; he instead gave his own life for his realm. Then he was raised in glory as the beginning of the new creation, and now he is gathering coheirs into his kingdom who belong to each other because, together, they belong to him. The visible church is where you will find Christ’s kingdom on earth, and to disregard the kingdom is to disregard the king.” --Michael Horton
“The church is the church as a creature of God’s Word—a creature that finds its life outside of itself, that does not have faith in faith so much as faith in the God of covenant promise made known in Christ." -- J.Todd billings