Tony Evans - Gods Glorious Church: The Mystery and Mission of the Body of Christ

Tony Evans

MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO

2003 by
ANTHONY T. EVANS

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New American Standard Bible , Copyright The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version . NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

ISBN: 0-8024-3951-9

ISBN: 978-0-8024-8030-9(electronic)

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Printed in the United States of America

This book is lovingly dedicated to
all the members of
Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship
for the strategic part they play
in helping us to be God's Glorious Church

I want to say a word of thanks to my friend and editor, Philip Rawley, for his excellent help in the preparation of this manuscript, and to Greg Thornton, Cheryl Dunlop, and the rest of the team at Moody Publishers for their encouragement and quality work on this project.

T his is a book about the local church, the most important spiritual institution in human history. It is the visible manifestation of the universal church (all Christians from Pentecost to the Rapture) in history. That means nothing is more important for us than understanding what God wants us to learn about the church, and participating in a local assembly of believers who are seeking to live out the principles and precepts of the kingdom of God.

Although we are saved individually, as Christians we are born into a community. Just as a baby must be born into the context of a family in order to experience the fullness of his new life, so each of us must become a functioning member of God's new house-hold, the church, in order to experience the fullness of the new life we possess.

This means that local churches must understand their identity and purpose for their existence, and provide a biblically healthy context for believers to grow and live out their lives by faith. It's unfortunate that so many churches see themselves primarily as weekly centers of spiritual inspiration for their parishioners, rather than the only ordained place where heaven visits earth. When we do church right, God's people will experience and reflect the answer to Jesus' prayer, Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

It is my hope that this book will enable you not only to understand what the church is, but also inspire you to help make your place of worship all that God intends it to be.

A ll of us are familiar with the story of Humpty Dumpty, the figure from the children's nursery rhyme whose world was shattered after he had a great fall. He called on the best his world had to offer to address his problemall the king's horses and all the king's men. We would say today that Humpty had the White House, the Congress, the military, and any other human power or authority you can think of coming to his aid in his brokenness.

But the tragedy of the story is that none of these human powers could put Humpty Dumpty's life and world back together again. Apparently Mr. Dumpty had no biblically functioning church available to help him, because if he had he would not have had to call on the king in the first place.

Now it's one thing when a nursery rhyme character cannot find the help he needs to repair his shattered world, even when his problem is being attended to by the highest authorities the culture has to offer. But it's another thing altogether when real people in the real world discover that all the king's horses and all the king's menhuman institutions of power and influencecan't fix society's deepest problems and address people's deepest needs.

This is where the church comes in, because the church is the most important institution on earth. The church, and only the church, has been commissioned by the sovereign Lord to be His representative agency in history. It has been given sole authority to unlock the treasures of the spiritual realm so that they can be brought to bear on the realities of earth.

Thus, as the church goes so goes everything else. God designed the church to be the epicenter of culture, and the church's strength or weakness is a major determining factor in the success or failure of human civilization. When the church is strong, the culture is impacted positivelyeven if the powers that be in a particular place don't realize that impact and seek to marginalize and persecute the church. But when the church is weak, its influence deteriorates and so does the culture.

One example of the church's impact, both positively and negatively, is the institution of slavery in America. Many segments of American culture condoned and sanctioned slavery, even though it served as the catalyst for a civil war that cost thousands of lives and helped produce ongoing cultural upheaval. And Christendom at large helped provide justification for slavery, even leading some to find a basis for slavery in Scripture. But, in the end, it was the strength of the true church bringing its influence to bear that helped lead to the collapse of slavery.

It is important to understand the church's importance for cultural reasons, since Jesus called His people to be salt and light, a city on a hill. But understanding the church's nature and mission is even more important for spiritual reasons. That's because the church has been given the assignment of growing all of its members into mature believers who can disciple others and maximize their spiritual potential.

When the church is strong, its members recognize their eternal purpose and the church moves forward. But when the church is weak, its members tend to wander around in confusion on their spiritual pilgrimage. My purpose and prayer for this book is that it will contribute to our understanding of the church, so that instead of being Humpty Dumptys lying in ruins with no one to help us, we will become dynamic followers of Jesus Christ and contributing members of His church.

A GOD-SIZED PROBLEM

Talking about the church may bring certain verses from the Bible to your mind. But I want to begin our discussion of the church in what seems like an unusual placenot in the words of Jesus or the writings of Paul, but in an obscure Old Testament passage in which we find a God-sized problem that will help us answer the question of why the church is so important in God's plan today.

Before we go to this passage, let me give you a foundational principle for this chapter and this book, which is simply this: Everything that is physical and visiblethe world and life around usis controlled by things that are invisible and spiritual. This has always been the case, in fact. We need to get this order straight because the only real way to fix what is wrong in the visible and physical realm is to make sure that the invisible and spiritual realm is working right. Until the invisible is operating properly, the visible cannot be addressed in any lasting and effective way. This is why society can go on for years and even centuries without seeing very basic and destructive problems being solved, no matter how much clout and money we throw at those issues.