The Great Commission, Core of Our Ecclesiology (Part 3)

The Great Commission, Core of our Ecclesiology (Part 3) Addendum on Brotherhood

By Jay Wegter

The church is indebted to Dietrich Bonhoeffer for writing the book, Life Together. In that magisterial work the author opens the topic of shared life in Christ. Bonhoeffer also makes a lucid contrast between natural love and agape love. The latter is only possible for those joined to Christ and thus made alive in Him and indwelled by His Spirit. In addition to Bonhoeffer’s work on Body life, Charles Jefferson, who wrote The Building of the Church, does a marvelous job of explaining what is involved in building a true brotherhood, essential to Body life.

The work of these two authors has pointed us back to the N.T. that we might revisit what Christ intended for the communal life of His Body. This revisitation of biblical ecclesiology is strategic, if not crucial if we are to co-labor with the Lord in building a church that pleases Him. Again, the revisitation of N.T. ecclesiology gives us a much-needed metric. For in this age of information-assault and phrenetical pace, Westerners tend to normalize shallow relationships, stultifying church structure, and external expressions of religion—all of which hinder, if not cancel the spiritual fellowship Christ intends. The above considerations have prompted the following probing questions and comments.

1. What does it mean to love my brother for Christ’s sake?
2. How would you describe shared life in Christ?
3. How are the guarded enclaves of the self, breached by Christ?
4. Is it possible to define ‘fellowship’ as devotion to a common institution rather than by devotion to a common Savior?
5. Why does the regenerated soul settle for nothing less than the personal communication of supernatural love to the brethren?
6. The self, locked shut against incursion by the Lord is content with an insular, detached posture toward the brethren. Explain from 1 John 4 how this preference for distance gives shrewd evidence of an unregenerate condition.

7. Explain how the power of the gospel awakens our created disposition to a) live in relationship; b) know and be known by others in close relationships; and c) pursue true community to the glory of God.
8. As with the church of Laodicea in Revelation chapter three, we are not ready to enter intimate fellowship with the Great Physician until we are deeply humbled by His diagnosis of our spiritual condition.
9. Christ, the Great Physician diagnoses countless members of His ‘lampstands’ as relatively loveless, and as abandoning their first love, and as lukewarm. What would promote repentance for these failures?

10. Having inherited Adam’s broken scepter, and his falling short of God’s Glory, like our first father, we possess the propensity to clothe ourselves with fig leaves. If we are determined to manage our own depravity and dereliction, the odor of graveclothes will cling to us; for we will be guarded, self-protective, self-occupied, and thus unable and unwilling to go out of ourselves in love to our brother.
11. As long as self insists on being the sole manager of personal brokenness and dereliction, the experience of Christ’s love will be rebuffed. For consenting to be served by Christ’s cross work of suffering is incredibly humbling. Ongoing gospel faith involves daily recognition and consent—namely that the Son of God became the Great Physician by suffering and rising as our Substitute. And we are entirely clothed before God by Him. As the Puritans often said, all what Christ suffered in His agony, humiliation, forsakenness, and passion were formed into the perfect medicine for your sin.

12. The point made in number eleven above is that our ability and desire to love our brethren supernaturally is stipulated on the real, felt experience of consenting to receive Christ’s love. Why is this the case? The answer is revolutionary. Our actions of defending against judgment, producing our own covering, carrying our own value, and overseeing our own lovability has the net effect of sowing to our pride. Unfortunately, if a person is engaged in the above, the tendency will be to inwardly despise those who are unable to manage their dereliction as well as you think you do. Again, the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ is the solution.

13. Cultural Christianity normalizes the abnormal. For by institutionalizing and warehousing the brethren, by condoning social formality, and by treating cold detachment as tolerable anonymity in the Body is treated as standard fare. Thus, by normalizing the above, a church is guaranteed to be an audience rather than a brotherhood.
14. A self-managed soul of unquestioned loyalty to self sits as stoic and static as Egypt’s Sphinx. What must take place before a man’s uncompromising religion of the sovereignty of self is evicted? What must happen for the gospel to break the heart, to make a man disgusted with his carnal defenses and self-worship? How does the gospel do its work of taking me out of myself and moving me toward my brother?

15. Christ’s blood applied slays the revolt in the human heart. Christ taking my place conquers my heart. For the propitiation He wrought is the height of love (1 Jn 4:10). To receive this other worldly love is to drop one’s weapons. Regeneration by the Spirit installs an entirely new Lord of the soul. Self is willingly evicted. The Spirit shedding this love abroad in the heart plants in a man the irresistible desire to pass this love on to others. Thus, the power of the gospel in creating a ‘new man’ has formed a new creature, a person perfectly suited for Body life. This begs the question, if a true believer is a new creature formed for life in the Body, how in the world on this green earth could he possibly settle for an institutional expression of Christianity?

16. Consider that Christ’s work as our Substitute was a glorious guilt exchange (2 Cor 5:21). And by gospel faith we receive the Savior, and with Him and all the benefits of this amazing exchange which He accomplished. But what goes missed in hyper-grace forms of Evangelicalism is that the exchange at Calvary, although finished, is the precursor to the believer’s exchanged life. Thus, as Paul summarizes the exchanged life in Galatians 2:20, life in the Spirit is the marvel of Christ expressing His personality and virtues through me—a new man. The ramifications of this for Body life, and ecclesiology are immense.

17. The exchanged life means the old Adamic me has been exchanged for a Christ-like version of me. Will that not show up immediately in spiritual fellowship? It will! For the multitude of the one-another commands in the N.T. are obeyed as a function of the exchanged life being lived out. But in the institutional audience-based church more attention is paid to religious forms than to the biblical obligations we owe to our brothers. This arrangement produces a deadening status quo, for attention to the religious ‘moving parts’ become the metric for an ‘orthodox ecclesiology’ rather than attention to the N.T. conditions of brotherhood.

18. What passes for worship in institutional churches may not be regarded by the Lord as we think He regards it. I hear pastoral prayers, “Lord let this worship be an acceptable sacrifice to Thee.” It sounds sacred enough, but it begs the question, is it really possible to give ourselves and our worship to the Lord while refusing to give ourselves to our brethren? That is a dangerous deception in consumer Christianity—for laymen are considered as having done their part if they support the ministry done by the professionals. Little else is required! By contrast, 1 Corinthians chapters 12 through 14 describe a fully ministering Body of members who care deeply for one another.