Transcript

I'd like to start this morning, if I may, by reading to you a passage from the Gospel according to St. John, from chapter 17, from a portion of our Lord's High Priestly Prayer, beginning in verse 6 of chapter 17. And this is St. Andrew's, though it is not a St. Andrew's worship service, but we have people here from St. Andrews, and they'll think that I have become apostate if I don't ask you to stand for the reading of the Word of God.

I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world.

They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.

Now they have known that all things which You have given Me are from You.

For I have given to them the words which You have given Me, and they have received them and have known surely that I came forth from You, and they have believed that You sent Me. I pray for them.

I do not pray for the world, but for those whom You have given Me; for they are Yours.

And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them.

Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You.

Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.

While I was with them, I kept them in Your name.

Those whom You gave Me, I have kept, and not one of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.

But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves.

I have given them Your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one.

They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

Sanctify them by Your truth; Your word is truth.

As You sent Me into the world, I have also sent them into the world.

And for their sake, I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth.

This is just a small portion of this High Priestly Prayer that, through the generous superintendence of the Holy Spirit, we are given the opportunity to eavesdrop, as it were, on this prayer.

And I have not been assigned to give an exposition of this text, but rather an exposition of a portion of the Nicene Creed, in which we find the four famous adjectival qualifiers that describe the Church as one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic body.

But I've read this text because in it...

We find the biblical foundation for those attributes of the Church.

Hear this word that comes to us from the Book of John and receive it as the Word of God, for which it is.

Please be seated.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, as we consider the nature, the function, the destiny of Your Church together in these days, we ask that You would condescend to our weakness and send us help.

Send us Your Spirit to rekindle the gifts that have been given to us through the laying on of hands, to awaken and quicken within our hearts a fresh joy in the vocation that You have given to us.

Instruct and encourage us in these hours, for we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

If someone were to look at the contemporary Church and heard it being described as one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic body, they may be inclined to cynicism.

Because when we look at the fragmentation and dissension that exists in the contemporary Church, we see anything but unity, anything but sanctity, anything but catholicity, and anything but that which is apostolic.

And so we could say that the Church, in our purview, is fragmented, corrupt, parochial, and modernistic.

But that would be the purview of the cynic, because in a very real sense, the Church that was established by our Lord Jesus Christ and is sustained by Him through the ages remains, by His power and by His intercession, one Church, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

And even in the Nicene Creed, as these attributes are mentioned, they are mentioned within the context of a creed itself, and so implicitly we could add a fifth, namely, that the Church is confessional.

But I'm going to spend the time this morning, God willing, looking at the significance of these four qualifiers that we find at Nicaea, beginning with the affirmation that the Church is one.

Of course, when the Nicene Creed was written in the early portion of the fourth century, there's a hole in this thing, and I almost just dropped my libation into it, but God answered my prayer to visit us in His grace and kept that from happening.

But at the time of the Nicene Creed, for the most part, except for some small isolated heretical groups, the Church was unified, visibly and organically, and the rest with the Roman Catholic communion.

But though that is in ages past, now we see in the history that has ensued that the Church has been fragmented into a vast number of denominations, sects, and groups.

I don't know how many denominations there are right now in America.

When I graduated from seminary a hundred years ago, there were 2,000 listed distinct denominations in America, including the Church of the Ladder Up to Heaven number one and the Church of the Ladder Up to Heaven number two, which had split from the Church of the Ladder Up to Heaven number one.

In the last 40-some years since I graduated from seminary, I've lived through the pinnacle of the ecumenical movement that has witnessed an abundant number of mergers between denominations.

And so you would assume that the number of 2,000 separate denominations has been significantly reduced, but that would not be the case.

In fact, it has been significantly increased.

For every time there’s a merger between two bodies, instead of producing one out of two, it inevitably produces three.

You have the new group plus the continuity of the two groups' dissidents that didn’t want to become part of the merger.

And so these manifest plurality of churches continue.

I'm sure those of you who are in ministry all know the story of the man who found himself shipwrecked on an island and was living there alone for 20 years, dreaming of the day where he might be rescued.

And one day he saw this ship on the horizon drawing near, and somebody from the ship spotted him and came over and sent their lifeboats in to rescue him from the island.

When they came for him, they noticed that over the period of 20 years, he had built three buildings on the island.

They asked him what the buildings were, and he said, Well, that building over there on the left was my house, the building in the middle is my church.

So they said, Well, what’s the other building on the right?

And he said, Well, that’s the first church, but I left that one ten years ago.

So in light of all the splinter groups that mark the terrain of ecclesiology today, how can we, in any real sense, still speak of the oneness of the Church?

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people express frustration that the prayer of our Lord in the High Priestly intercession in John, that they may be one, has been frustrated for lo these many centuries and seems not at all likely to come to pass in our lifetimes.

I disagree with that sentiment.

I’m convinced that in the real and substantial sense, the prayer of our Lord that His Church may be one has been fulfilled and continues to be fulfilled in the essential elements of it.

An earlier creed before Nicaea declared the Church's faith in what was called the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints.

And the idea of the communion of saints is one of the most important concepts that we have in the understanding of the Church.

That idea of the communion of saints is based upon the New Testament principle of the mystical union of the believer with Christ.

Those of you who have been to seminary and have been subjected to the rigorous task of learning the fundamental elements of the Greek language know that at the very outset of your study, you learned the difference between two simple prepositions: the preposition en that we would transliterate for the English e-n and the preposition eis (e-i-s). Right now, we are all together in this room.

We are inside of here.

But in order to be in this room, we had to first come from the outside and move from that spot into this room.

That’s the simple difference between those two words, but they are important in light of how they are used in the New Testament.

We are called to believe into Christ Jesus, and once we believe into Christ, then by the power of the Holy Ghost, we are now in Christ.

We are in Christ, and Christ is in us.

So herein we find this essential unity.

If I am in Christ and you are in Christ, and Christ is in you and Christ is in me, then obviously we have a profoundly important unity among ourselves—a unity that cannot be destroyed because it is a unity that has its strength and its initiation in Christ Himself.

This was the type of thing that Augustine was getting at when he made his famous distinction between the visible Church and the invisible Church.

He was not talking about two separate and distinct bodies— a visible Church here, an invisible Church over there— but rather Augustine insisted that the invisible Church existed substantially within the visible Church, including within it those who were numbered among the elect, those who were truly elected in Christ Jesus.

Augustine also pointed out that the Church in every generation, the visible Church, is a corpus permixum; it’s a mixed body that includes within it wheat and tares that are growing together, which is to say there are believers and unbelievers—people who profess to have faith in Jesus Christ but don’t possess the faith that they profess.

Those people may be members in good standing in a visible Church but have no membership in the invisible Church.

Well, who are these people who are to be found in the invisible Church?

And why do we say that they’re invisible?

It’s simple: I can’t see your soul.

The state of your heart, the state of your soul, remains beyond the pale of my visual perception.

But of course, God sees your soul.

God knows your heart.

All I can do is hear your words, your profession of faith, and watch to see if you manifest fruit, which will also be mixed throughout this lifetime.

And so, within any visible Church, there are true believers and those who are false, and God knows who each of those groups includes.

And so those who are in the invisible Church have an unbreakable unity with Christ and with each other.

The invisible Church cannot be found in any one particular visible Church sect or denomination.

We’re talking in this conference about concerns for the peace, the purity, and the unity of the Church.

Be careful of churches that only talk about peace and unity because there is a plague that has afflicted the Church throughout the ages—what Luther called a carnal peace and unity.

It was the complaint of Jeremiah when he said, These people cry, 'Peace, peace!'

when there is no peace.

They heal the wound of the daughter of Zion but slightly.

And remember also Jeremiah's famous temple speech when he challenged the he's in Zion that was present in his day.

He said, You people come and you say, 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!'

These are lying words, words that cannot profit.

He said, Go to Shiloh and see.

Why did he say that?

Because in Shiloh were the ruins of the earlier central sanctuary, and he said, This is what Jerusalem will look like in future times unless this people repents.

So this prophet, among others, was sent not only to be concerned for the peace of the Church and for the unity of the Church but for the purity of the Church.

And any time that a Church, individually or denominationally, begins to lose its moorings and departs from its confession and departs from Christian orthodoxy, if anybody dares to speak a word of correction to it, they will immediately be rebuked for destroying the peace and unity of the Church.

On the other hand, we can be so zealous for purity that we have no charity, and we unjustly disturb the peace and the unity of the Church.

But the unity of which we’ve looked already is a unity that is certainly without destruction and cannot be destroyed, and it is affected through Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

Let’s look then at the second, which is the one that seems to be most problematic: that the Church is one, holy, as well as catholic and apostolic.

You know, I think from one perspective it would not be too much of a stretch or even hyperbole to say that the visible Church is the most corrupt organization on the face of the earth.

You say, How in the world can you say that when we have organizations like Murder Incorporated, like Al-Qaeda, and a host of others that major in corruption?

Well, I said from a certain perspective, if we look at things as the Lord does, that to whom much is given, much is required.

No organization has a more sacred task or mission than that which has been given to the visible Church.

And if we were to be measured by our conformity to our purpose and to our mission, then we can see the depth to which we have fallen.

From the sanctity of that task, and in light of that, it is difficult to think of ourselves as being holy.

Yet in the New Testament, the believers of the various churches who are addressed, particularly in the apostolic epistles, are called the hagioi, the holy ones.

Look at Paul writing to the Corinthians as he calls them the saints, the holy ones.

He has to spend most of the time of the epistle rebuking them, admonishing them, and correcting them for their sins.

So we wonder how in the world somebody who is as sinful as the folks were in Corinth could ever be called holy.

This was one of the issues of the 16th century—one of the reasons for Luther's adage simul justus et peccator, that the believer is at the same time just and sinner.

He is just not inherently; he is holy not in and of himself.

He is just only by the imputation of the righteousness of the Holy One of Israel.

This was the heart of the issue in the 16th century: is the righteousness by which we are declared just by God something that inheres within us?

Or is it, as Luther called it, an alien righteousness—a righteousness that is extraneous outside of us, that doesn’t belong properly to us, but belongs properly to somebody else who gives it to us?

That righteousness of God, which is by faith, and so in that sense, the believer is in Christ Jesus and wears the cloak of Christ's righteousness; he can be said to be truly holy.

Not only that, the primary meaning of holiness in the Bible is not purity—that comes secondarily with the term—but rather it has to do with being different from, being set apart, from being consecrated.

And insofar as the Church is that community created by God, sanctified by God, consecrated by God, set apart by God, it has been given a holy vocation.

We look at the very word for church in the New Testament; it is the word ekklesia, made up of a prefix and a root.

The prefix means from or out of.

The root comes from the Greek word kaleo, which means to call, and so the Church is that group of people who are called out of the world.

That prayer of Jesus drips with that concept, doesn’t it?

I don’t pray for the world; I pray for the ones that You gave Me. They were Yours; You’ve given them to Me. Keep them.

I don’t ask them to be taken out of the world but to be kept by You in the world.

This is My Church—the ones who You have called out of darkness, called out of the world, and given them to Me. They were Yours; now they’re Mine.

And so Jesus there in the prayer speaks of the Church as His possession.

Hence the etymological derivation of the English word church.

It’s a translation of the Greek ekklesia, but the word church comes from a different source, a different root.

In English, it’s church; in Scotland, it’s kirk; in Holland, it’s kerk; in Germany, it’s kirche.

Notice all of those words start with a hard c sound and have a different vowel in the middle, but they end with that same sound.

And it’s all German, Dutch, Scottish, English—all of that word for church derives from the Greek word kurike, which means those who belong to the kurios, those who are His possession, those whom He has purchased, those whom He owns.

That is what makes us the Church, and that’s what makes us holy because we have been called out by the Holy One.

To be holy even as He is holy, this is not merely a vacant or simple command, but with it, our Lord has enabled the Church to be the Church by virtue of indwelling that Church with the Holy Spirit.

Isn’t it interesting that when we talk about the Trinity, we talk about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost?

Well, I wonder why we do that.

Because the Bible constantly refers to the holiness of God with reference to the Father, and the Son is called the Holy One as well.

So we could say that the Trinity really is made up of the Holy Father, the Holy Son, and the Holy Ghost.

But why do we specifically add that appellation to the Spirit, that He is holy?

I think the reason for that, historically, is an understanding of the principal function of the Holy Ghost, whose task from eternity is to apply the saving work of the Son to His people.

He is the one who brings us into the Body of Christ through His supernatural and immediate work of regeneration.

He is the one who indwells us; He is the one who is working with us to sanctify us.

Again, at the heart of that prayer that Jesus makes in the upper room, Sanctify them by Thy word; Thy word is truth.

We are sanctified by the truth through the work of the Spirit of truth indeed, the Holy Spirit.

Well, what about the catholicity of the Church?

This is the one perhaps most open to question, and the question that is raised constantly by the Roman Catholic Church to those who are outside of it insists that we are not true churches because our churches are bound by national or local borders.

The denomination in which I am ordained is called the Presbyterian Church in America.

That is distinguished from the Presbyterian Church in Scotland or in Canada or some other nations.

But the Roman Catholic Church is the Roman Catholic Church all over the world, and so they claim a unique conformity to the Nicene Creed at this point where we fall short.

But again, if we consider the Church in terms of which we have already examined, the invisible Church knows no boundaries.

The invisible Church is not a parochial Church; the invisible Church is not a local Church simply; it’s not a national Church.

But the invisible Church exists wherever the communion of saints extends throughout the world.

If you’ve ever been in other nations and if you’ve ever participated in the worship of the Church in other countries, then obviously you will know exactly what it is I’m talking about.

A few years ago, I had to do a teaching mission in Eastern Europe that took us to Czechoslovakia—what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic—and then to Hungary and finally to Romania.

This was right after the Iron Curtain dissolved, and the people were still trying to recover from the decades of enslavement under communism.

It was a difficult period for these people, but I preached in churches in all these countries, and of course, not because I could speak their language; I had to have the assistance of a translator in order to be able to preach to them.

But there were one or two portions of the services that I didn’t need a translator for.

One was when we sang the hymns, and the other was when we celebrated the Lord's Supper.

I didn’t know what the officiating minister was saying when he led us in the Lord's Supper, but I knew what he was saying and communicating and what it meant.

I knew the content of the Supper.

And we sang these hymns; I didn’t know a single word of them, but I recognized we sang Holy, Holy, Holy in Romanian, we sang A Mighty Fortress Is Our God in Hungarian, we sang all these other hymns that were amazing.

They were all part of the liturgy of the Church around the world.

And so I’ll never forget that existential experience of worshiping with people who spoke a different language and had a different culture but who had one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

So that was, for me, a taste of the catholicity of the Church of Christ.

Finally, the Council of Nicaea says that the Church is not only one, not only holy, not only catholic, but it is apostolic.

Now, the understanding of the Church's apostolicity has been challenged time and again throughout the ages.

Rome claims that the apostolic character of the Church is vested in the apostolic succession of the bishops of the Church, and most importantly, the Bishop of Rome, who is the successor of Peter and the vicar of Christ on earth.

Other communions, particularly those of the Episcopalian structure of government, also strive to be able to go back through history and see a continuity of ordination from the apostolic age down to the day and say that our bishops today come directly from the original apostles of the first century.

But whether we can trace our governments directly through the laying on of hands back to the apostles, there is a far, far more important manner in which the Church can rightfully be said to be apostolic.

And that is in its content and in its subjection to the authority of the apostles, which means being in subjection to the authority of the Bible, which gives us the content of the apostolic word.

This again was the issue that was central to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, with the idea of sola scriptura, saying that though we may be instructed through the insights of the Church and the theologians over the ages, the only written work that can bind our consciences absolutely is the sacred Scripture given to us by and through apostolic authority.

When Jesus spoke of His Church, the apostles also described it with various metaphors in the New Testament.

One of the ones that we find is the building metaphor.

Peter speaks of each believer being a living stone that is added together to erect the Church.

If I asked my students in the seminary—I almost said cemetery; that may be the only students I have left soon—they would say, What’s the foundation of the Church?

And they would always say, Jesus.

The hymn says that the Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Bible does say that there’s no foundation which can be laid except that which is laid in Jesus Christ.

But the main metaphor for Jesus in the New Testament with respect to the building is that of the chief cornerstone.

But the foundation of the Church in the epistles and in the revelations are the prophets and the apostles.

The psalmist asks this question: If the foundations be shaken, can the building stand?

And in our day, we have seen a conscious rejection of that foundation.

People want to create the Church anew, correct the apostolic foundation, and repudiate the apostolic foundation and the authority of Scripture itself.

And when we do this, we take away the means of our sanctification: Sanctify them by Thy truth; Thy word is truth.

And so the Church is apostolic when the preaching of the Word of God is at the center of its concern, when we follow the Christians of the first century who gave themselves each week to the teaching of the apostles.

Yesterday we had a visitor...

We had many visitors in our worship service.

One man said that he has been in many Gothic churches in Europe, but he was puzzled by one element of our church architecture here.

He said, Why is it that your pulpit, which is behind me—that's a pulpit; it's not plexiglass; it's a real pulpit, okay?—is

in the chancel area?

In the Gothic churches that I’ve been in, he says, the pulpit's usually off at the side and down on the floor, and it’s not up in the chancel area like yours is.

Usually, it’s the altar that’s found in the apse of the church.

Why is your pulpit where it is?

This was one of the things of the Reformation: that we don't decry or dismiss the significance of the Lord's Supper.

We don't have an altar; we have the Lord's table, and above the Lord's table is the pulpit.

Because the sacrament is worthless apart from the proclamation of the word, and what happens when the sacrament usurps the word?

It results in sacerdotalism, and all of a sudden, salvation comes through the ministry of the Church rather than through the ministry of the word.

And so, this is a Reformed Church, and the pulpit receives a central place of focus, not to put the focus on the preacher but on the Word of God.

In our ministry and in our Church, we submit to the authority of the apostles because the authority of the apostles is the authority of Jesus.

Again, the question: who was the first apostle in the New Testament?

It should jump out at you by now.

It was Jesus.

It was Jesus who was the one who was sent, and even in this prayer that we read earlier, He said, You have made it clear; they know that You are the one who sent Me. And as Jesus is the one who is sent—that's what apostolos means, one who is commissioned and sent with the authority of the one who sends him—so the Son is sent into the world to speak the authority of the Father.

I say nothing on My own authority, Jesus said, but only that which the Father gives to Me. And then He takes from among His disciples and commissions some, transferring His authority to them, saying, Whoever receives you receives Me, and whoever rejects you rejects Me. You know, I hear this all the time from the feminists telling me, Oh, they love Jesus, but it’s Paul they can’t stand.

You can’t have it like that, folks.

As Irenaeus had to speak against the heretics in the early Church, if you reject the apostles, you reject the one who sent them.

And if you reject the one who sent them, you reject the Father Himself.

And so a Church, if it is to be true, receives, embraces, and submits to the teaching and to the authority of the apostles because that authority, again, was not inherent in them but was given to them by our Lord.

So as we measure our churches in these hours, we need to think about these characteristics: one, holy, catholic—not parochial—apostolic.

That’s the Church that Christ builds; it’s the Church that He owns.

And as John Calvin once said, It is the task of the visible Church to make the invisible Church visible.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank You for Your Church, for the consecration of it, for the endowment of it with the Spirit of truth and the Spirit of power, for Your ownership of it, and for Your intercession for it.

Amen.