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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Mark Howard

Rediscovering Church

Gracious Father in heaven, we are so thankful for the Sabbath day, we're thankful for your love, for your blessings, for your guidance, for the privilege we have of knowing you, Father, and your Son Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

And Father, as we meditate this morning on the importance of that knowledge and your intention for us having it, I pray the Spirit of God would move upon our hearts and would activate each 1 of us here today for your cause.

We ask these things in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.

This morning our topic is rediscovering church.

Now I'm going to share with you when I was growing up we're almost to Easter Sunday and when I grew up for Easter we would always go to my grandma's house.

And my grandma would fill these baskets full of candy.

And she would hide them and we would hunt for the baskets.

I know this is not biblical, so don't take me to task on this.

But in those Easter baskets, we would find chocolate Easter bunnies.

Now listen, there are 2 kinds of chocolate Easter bunnies.

1 is the premier kind and 1 is the a little bit of a discouragement.

Because with the chocolate Easter bunny, now when you start with the ears it's all okay, you don't know anything different.

But you get beyond that and in some cases the solid chocolate becomes a hollowed-out shell.

You had the solid chocolate Easter Bunny and you had the hollowed-out Easter bunnies.

The outer shell was there, but the inner substance was missing.

And there's an application that we're gonna draw from that this morning as we turn in our Bibles to Matthew 24.

I'm gonna ask if you would turn with me to Matthew 24.

We're gonna start right there in the first verse.

You're familiar with Matthew 24, I would imagine, where Jesus gives all the signs of his coming.

The Bible says, Then Jesus went out and departed from the temple, and his disciples came up to show him the buildings of the temple.

Do you think Jesus had never seen the buildings of the temple before?

And Jesus said to them, do you not see all these things?

Assuredly I say to you, not 1 stone shall be left here upon another that shall not be thrown down." Now, I don't know if anybody here has asked the question, what are they doing showing him the buildings of the temple?

They come out and they say, Jesus just look at this beautiful temple that we have.

We get a little more understanding if we go back just a few verses.

I'm not going to go through all of Matthew 23, but in Matthew 23, Matthew 23 is where sometimes it's called the woes to the scribes and the Pharisees.

These are the religious leaders of Christ's day.

And for you and me today, we know that the scribes and the Pharisees are the villains of the New Testament.

But if you had lived in Bible times, if you had lived in Christ's day, these would not have been the villains.

We see them through the lens of Scripture and Scripture reveals the heart.

To the disciples, to the people of Christ's day, these people were the epitome of religion.

And in Matthew 23, and keep in mind if you read through the Gospel of Matthew, 23 is toward the end, Jesus has had a whole ministry with encounters with these people, But not until Matthew 23 does he call them out.

And in Matthew 23, repeatedly Jesus uses this phrase, Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

It comes from the Greek word, hypokrites.

That's the word that's used there in the New Testament.

So if we were in Greece, Brad Pitt would be called a hupokrites.

What Jesus was saying is, you guys are a bunch of pretenders.

You make like you're 1 thing, but you're something else.

Now imagine that this is the church you grew up in.

These are the people you looked up to as your religious leaders and Jesus just got done calling them out and the system they stood for.

The verse is just preceding what we're looking at here.

In Matthew 23 verse 37, Jesus says, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the 1 who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her, how often I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings but you were not willing see your house is left to you how desolate for I say to you you shall see me no more till you say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Keep reading.

Then Jesus went out and departed from the temple and his disciples came up to show him the buildings of the temple.

Why are they showing him the buildings of the temple?

Basically telling them their whole religious experience had been a farce.

That the system they trusted in was not God's system anymore.

And so They came out and they said, but Lord, look, how could we have such a beautiful temple if we weren't doing God's will?

How could we have these wonderful institutions, these schools, these hospitals, et cetera, et cetera.

They were looking at those institutions and Jesus said to them, I'm telling you the truth, not 1 stone will be left upon another of this building that won't be cast down.

Now we know that was literally fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem because they had gold on the walls of the temple.

When the Romans set fire to the temple, the gold melted and got in between the stones.

And in order to get all the stones out, every stone was dismantled in a literal fulfillment.

But I believe Jesus was also speaking metaphorically here.

Not 1 stone of the faulty foundation of their religious experience was going to be left standing.

Jesus said you're about to be re-educated on what church really is.

And brothers and sisters I think today we might also need a re-education.

Have you ever heard the term institutionalization?

Institutionalization refers to the process by which an organization becomes more established and entrenched in its way in its ways of doing things.

Now it could be doing things well and so it can involve the creation of formal structures, processes, and procedures that help the organization to function more efficiently and effectively.

But it can also lead to bureaucracy, inflexibility, and resistance to change.

And it's that last part that leads to something that has been termed institutional drift.

According to the dictionary, institutional drift is the gradual, unintended transformation of an institution's practices, norms, or functions over time, often deviating from its original purpose.

The Church of Christ's day had drifted so far that it needed a complete overhaul.

Unfortunately, it's been far too easy for the church and its members to experience institutionalization and institutional drift.

Consequently, we forget why we really even joined the church, why we're really here.

It's not just about showing up and ticking off a service, you know that.

As a result, for many of us, our Christian experience, publicly and personally, has become hollowed out.

It lacks the very substance of Christianity so today we're going to rediscover church and we're going to start back in the book of Matthew I want you to turn with me to chapter 16 in the book of Matthew in the gospel of Matthew.

I want to share a verse with you that for years I read wrong.

I don't know how you read it And maybe you've processed through this before, but it's in Matthew 16 and we're going to start in verse 13.

In Matthew 16 verse 13, the Bible says, "...when Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?

So they said, some say John the Baptist some Elijah and others Jeremiah or 1 of the prophets he said to them but who do you say that I am Simon Peter answered and said you are the Christ the Son of the Living God Jesus answered and said to him blessed are you Simon bar Jonah that means the son of Jonah for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

And then verse 18, and I also say to you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my what church and the gates of Hades or the gates of hell shall not prevail against it Now I don't know how you read that verse, but for me, for the longest time when I read that verse, this is the picture that came in my mind.

The devil and his forces are trying to destroy the church, but there are these gates, you see, and the church is safe inside the gates, and the gates are there, and here we are, and now the devil can't get in to get us, because we're protected by the gates.

Oh, for the longest time that's how I read that verse.

Maybe that's how you're reading the verse this morning.

Until somebody brought out this point, or asked this question, and I'm gonna ask you, whose gates does it say they are?

Now do any of you have gates around your house?

They're a border to keep certain things out.

Could be critters, could be people, whatever.

These are not the church's gates, they're hell's gates, or the graves gates, or however you want to put that.

And they're not there to keep the evil people out from the church, they're there to keep the church out from hell to rescuing the souls that are enslaved and heading for an eternal death, rescuing them for freedom.

In other words, let me put it this way, Jesus is picturing his church here on the offensive rather than the defensive.

It's not the church huddled behind the gates.

The church as Jesus envisioned it is a church that's active in its mission, so much so that it's hell and the forces of hell that need to be afraid.

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Rediscovering Church

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