The Glory That Makes The Church as GLORIOUS As GOD Himself

Now we’ve got our work cut out for us. Yeah, listen, I want to say something to you about whispering. I really do. Never whisper. Say it out loud. Okay. Go ahead and finish. It’s fine. I really mean that. I really mean that. I can tell when a church is becoming a church: it stops whispering and stops tiptoeing into the meeting. They come in, and they talk, and they don’t tiptoe, and then I know that religion is abating. So, I don’t mind one bit. See, see, see? He’s just whispering, right? Okay, good. I like that. I really do.

We’ve got our work cut out for us. Tonight, and for the rest of the week. We talked about what this morning? We talked about what this morning? I’m going to leave the ministry if I don’t hear something here, just right now. What did we talk about? The second state. The second state that we’re in, and the former state, the state we’re not in today. And tonight, we’re covering what? The first state. The first state we’re in. The first state you are ever, ever, ever in.

Now, saints, holy ones, I want to drive this home again and again. We’re not looking at you, the individual. Now, the reason I’m asking you to be here is that I’m going to leave Switzerland. I want you, when I walk out of this place, I want you to have a sense of being that one person.

We are about to take a trip, the longest trip that can be taken, and we’re going to go together. This is one person. This is your state, your first state. Not one person. Try not to think of yourself as a person, but as the brothers and sisters in Constance. This letter is written to you as a people. It is an explanation to you. You were in big trouble in your second state, but Jesus Christ came to the pawn shop and, with his own blood, redeemed you. You were not part of the Commonwealth of Israel. You were without God in this world. You were aliens. What else were you? We were without hope. And I’ve left out one. Okay, we were also corrupted, and we were following the prince of the power of the air and the lust of our flesh, and we walked. This was our way of living. We walked in these things.

Now, what did you do to earn your salvation? Nothing. Okay, now if that’s true of you, it’s true of all these brothers and sisters here. Did you do anything during your salvation? Did you do something to make God like you?  No. That’s the best way I know to explain everything we Christians do in our religious state. Trying to do something that will make God like us better or to like us at all. Alright, sister, did you do anything particular to come to your salvation? Only that you believed. Now, that took you out of this second state, but it was not your first state. It was not the first status quo of your life.

I wrote a little book for my wife’s mother. Right before she died, she asked me to write something to her grandchildren so they would know what happened to her when she died. I started off by saying that if we start from the point of what happens to you after you die, we’re in the middle of the story. If we start at the time when you were saved, we’re in the middle of the story. Your story is very ancient. Now, I’m telling you that in God’s great wisdom, and in a lot of the things, He saw you. Sisters and brothers from Chicago, He saw you. This is hard for me to grasp. It’s hard for you to grasp. You’re not a group of Christians who meet on Clybourne Street in Chicago, Illinois. That’s not who you are. You are a person who has been with us for a long, long time. You’ve been around a long time, and you’ve been there not as individuals, but as a people. I want to go back and say this to you again. This was addressed to the believers… all the believers… in a city. Put it this way: all the believers who gathered.

Now, I know there are Christians in this town and every other place who are getting together on Sunday morning, and I don’t want to get into any of that at all, and I never have and I never will, but you are a people who get together in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. You are a body of believers; you’re not just churchgoers. He has dealt with His church. For instance, if I were to say to you, and I of course would, I would of course conditionalize this, but right now I’m not going to, if I said to you that Jesus Christ did not die for you as an individual, what would your reaction be to that?  Does anybody… You should react negatively to that. Jesus Christ did not die for you. He didn’t die for you. Christ did not die for you…. individually. Well, you know, I’m not going to make a condition out of this now. We can go look up all the verses, but I would like you to remember the other side. Christ died for whom? Christ died for the church. Christ died for the church. It’s a statement by Paul. He died for the church. You were chosen as part of his body. You were chosen before the foundation of this world, as part of his body.

We will be far better off if we can see that we are part of a whole, because, up until now, we have only seen ourselves as individuals, and I said last night, I’ll say again, and we’re on thin ice as believers trying to struggle to get to know the Lord. Every one of us was designed to fit into the body of Christ and to be part of her. Have you ever taken a sheet of paper, a big sheet of paper, newspaper, and let’s say you’ve got a bonfire in a barrel, and you don’t wad it up real tight? You wad it up loosely and throw it in the fire. It’ll almost explode. It’ll go, and it’ll burn very, very quickly, and you can make a scientific conclusion. Paper was not made for fire. It cannot survive. I would like to make a scientific conclusion. You were not made to be an individual Christian. I’m not trying to take your individuality away from you; I am saying to you that you cannot effectively live the Christian life on your own.

Now, the question that is begging to be answered, and the thing that is so much on my heart, is where in God’s name can we go to be with brothers and sisters where all these marvelous, wonderful things can happen? The answer is that we face the same problem we have faced for the last 1,700 years. There are few, and they are far between, and some of those few are just downright dangerous. They are not good for your health… they are, this church is not good for your health. Okay, you got it? It’s kind of like cigarettes. The Attorney General in the United States…we have this on our cigarette packages, has determined that cigarettes are not good for your health, and there are churches that are not good for your health. But being alone is also a prescription for disaster. Now we’re going to look at some passages of Scripture that explain to you your first state. Would you write these down, please? We have a few more of these than we did the other. We only had four, five, six verses about your second estate. Here’s your first state.

Chapter 1, verses 4, 5, and 6. Chapter 1, verse 11. Chapter 1, verse 12. A lot of these verses blend two or three states sometimes. Chapter 2, verse 10. I think that I would like to say beyond this point that I’m going to deal with two things at once here. So, I’m going to go ahead and give you some other verses that do not particularly reflect that statement that I just made, that this has to do with your first state. I want you to look up chapter 2, verses 9 and 11, chapter 3, verses 8, 10, 11, and 16 sometime. Now these have to do with the state of God in eternity past.

Now then, I’m going to give you one other group of verses, and these verses have in them a phrase: either his intention, or in accordance with; His intention, or in accordance with. This is important because it aligns with the second one we’re discussing here, the status of God at the time you received your first status with him. This will get clear in a minute. Chapter 1, verses 5, 9, 11, 18, and 19. That should do it. Alright, I’m going to start off with the state of God and eternity past. So, let’s just read some of these passages. Verse 1.11, would you look at that with me? “We have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to his purpose who works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Hold that one on “the counsel of his will.” Hold that just for a moment, and let’s go to these other passages. Let’s go to 1.5. Do you see down here “according to” …chapter 1.5, “according to His kind intention” and “according to his will”? And in 1.9, “He purposed in Himself,” “according to His kind intention which He purposed in Himself,” according to—I’ll explain this in a minute.  1.12, “to the end.” This is not “in accordance with” but “to the end,” toward the end. He has decided on something that will produce an ultimate and end result. That was 1.12.