The Church’s One Foundation 3/6/49
Scripture: John 14: 5-12
Text: John 14: 5; “Jesus saith --- I am the way, the truth, and the life.....”
A building of permanence needs sure and solid foundation. The house of worship wherein we now meet rests upon rock. I am informed that its foundations were even, so to speak, blasted into the bed rock of this river shore. It is not likely that any storm or flood will ever move it. Even a major earth quake, if this were a quake area, might not seriously disturb so solidly based an edifice.
Jesus, in his teachings, referred to the necessity of sure foundations when he referred to a house built upon the rock as secure, while a house resting on shifting sand is never secure. Of course he referred to human character. That was the point of the parable.
The hymn which we last sang this morning, “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!” makes use of the same illustration for the sake of spiritual precept. And the hymn with which we shall bring our worship to a close today sings of Jesus Christ as the one foundation of the Church.
The church needs to be well founded today. For it is under critical fire. Here is one encouraging fact concerning the church in our country: more people are members of the churches of this land today than ever before in American history. Something like 53% of the population of our country now claim membership in some church. Never before has that proportion been so high. This seems to indicate that people have a real interest in what the church stands for.
The things that the church stands for are under serious fire. They are seriously challenged by materialistic and anti-religious philosophies in the world. They are always endangered; by the neglect and indifference of many who are, in name, members of the church.
Evidently our Lord believed in the church. A man remarked to me not long ago that Jesus worshipped in the fields, in a garden, by a lake, on a hillside, as if to suggest that the Master did not usually go to church as we are accustomed to doing. True, he could, and did, worship almost anywhere away from the walls of the houses of worship of his time. But he also sought those walls and the fellowship of those within. Luke tells us that “As his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.” [Luke 4: 16]. And of course the synagogue was the Hebrew equivalent of our church.
The synagogue was far from perfect. Jesus was critical of weaknesses, broke with some of its teachings, denounced the hollowness and the harshness of some of its leaders. He was thrown out of the synagogue of his home town by an angry mob which threatened to lynch him. But he believed in it, sought its purification, participated habitually in its worship and teaching. The church today would be in a vastly stronger spiritual position if every one of its members were going regularly, “as their custom is,” to its services. For we need it certainly no less than he did.
1) We need comradeship in the service of the best. It is not sufficient that a man live his own life in such a manner that his conscience approves his own individual actions. Choices in a way of life involve relations with others. Real life is meeting others in various situations. To private integrity must be added social righteousness. Only the most stupid of individualists would deceive himself with the general assertion: “I can do without you.” We were made for fellowship. We are inescapably interdependent. The necessary issue of our personal commitment to righteousness is its practice with our fellows. And so the fellowship of the members of the church is elemental to the successful practice of Christian conduct in general society.
2) We need the faith of the church. The church has no monopoly on faith. On all sides, rival institutions offer a faith. Marxian communism offers a fanatical faith. So-called materialism is a faith. Various cults have their faith to offer and propagate. But the church has no rival in the field of faith in a Christ-like God, and in the supremacy of the Christ-like life.
Not long ago a Scottish journalist made public profession of his faith and was received into communicant membership in the church he attended. Some of his colleagues were startled and asked why he did so. His answer would be a good starting point for careful meditation. Said he: “It is perhaps sufficient to say that I did not consider this to be a particularly appropriate time to stand on the touch-line and shout advice, far less a time to ignore the entire game. On the whole, I have never much admired people who could not apply headlines in their daily newspapers to their daily lives, and these appear to me to utter every morning a personal challenge to anyone who believes in what we are pleased to call our way of life.”
Our “way of life” is our faith issuing in action. We believe that God lives; that he had visited and redeemed his people in Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ is God’s will or way for the soul of man in the flesh; that we encounter a revelation of God in the birth, life teaching, death and victory over death, of Jesus. As Jesus Christ was, so God is eternally. God takes the initiative in answering our need even before we call about our need. This is our faith, reiterated and continually revived in our church. We need it.
The good news of the Redeemer “that taketh away the sins of the world” comes to you through the church. Remember it and seek the reminder often, and regularly. “Only the living flame of faith can scatter the night which has invaded the world without and the heart within.”
3) We need the worship of the church. Man worships something.
We worship because we seem not able to do otherwise. If a man does not worship God, he gives his life in idolatrous allegiance to some lesser deity, perhaps the state, or social power, or collectivism, or to man himself. How pitiful is the man who sings with Swinburne: “Glory to man in the highest, for man is the master of things.” For his deity has clay feet and has obviously failed to master such vital matters as war, famine, social relations and himself. We all need to worship in order to get the burden of ourselves off our hands! It is so easy to get lost in our world that we need to find the beam regularly, when we know that we can meet God, renewing our inner life at the source of life. We need stirred up within us, regularly, the will to fight the wrong that needs resistance and help the cause that needs assistance.
“I do not ask for peace From life’s eternal sorrow;
But give me courage, Lord, To fight tomorrow.”
We need comradeship in the service of the best; we need a holy faith to live by; we need worship to re-create and empower us. Jesus thought he needed these things from the church. Even so do we.
Here is a blessed difference between him and us, however. The church of his day was based on the law and the precepts of the prophets. Our church has been lifted, not away from, but above that level. For the Christian Church is founded upon Christ himself. Though he seemed to place it on the rock of human devotion and endeavor, he himself told his inquiring disciples: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” [John 14: 6]. He is, as Paul puts it, the “chief cornerstone.”
The earliest church was a fellowship of his friends, his disciples, his followers. They began soon to organize themselves for effective service and discipline. But these organizational efforts are chiefly man’s devices, often good, sometimes not good. By pre-reformation times the organized church had wandered so far from the spirit and truth that it was badly corrupted at some points. The effort of the Reformation evangelicals in their witness for Christ was to return the church to something like what Jesus must have had in mind.
A Protestant churchman was once taunted with the question: “Where was your church before the Reformation?” To which he somewhat inelegantly replied: “Where was your face before you washed it this morning?”
We evangelicals believe that Jesus Christ is the sole authoritative head of the church. Of shepherding we have need; of teaching; of fellowship in the effort to know God’s will; of forgiveness and redemption and salvation, we all have need. But each Christian is “his own priest” as it were, in approaching God. No intermediary is needed, or finally efficacious. Christ is the sole head of his church in authority and power, and he is accessible to all men in the gospel.
We believe in the Jesus of history, and in the Christ of eternity. They are indissolubly connected. The teachings and the character of Jesus are plowed into history and into our way of life far deeper than we realize. Some of his teachings seem outrageous: “Love your enemies.” “Pray for those who persecute you.” This in a country seething with revolt! “Whoever looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” [Matthew 5: 28]. “Do not trouble about what you are going to eat or drink in life, or what you are going to wear.” [Matthew 6: 25]. “You must be perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect.” [Matthew 5: 48]. Who else ever dared to suggest such demands on human life and what humans can possibly live up to them?
Perhaps we find the answer in the starting assurance of Jesus as to the intentions of God. Jesus is well aware that those things are impossible with men. But he assures us that all things are possible with God. Even the kingdom of heaven, which we are prone to believe we can somehow bring into being, is God’s creation alone. It does not come by man’s determination, but by God’s purpose, with which it is man’s hope and destiny to be in accord.
The absolute right of Jesus to reign was the first item of faith among all the apostles. It generally constituted the opening sentence in all Paul’s letters. Even in the early church, there was great difference of opinion as to how the authority of Christ was to be set up. But all agreed in the absolute right of his community over all earthly principalities and powers.
Jesus Christ was then, is now, and shall ever be the church’s one Foundation. Indeed, the church not only rests upon his sole authority, it is the body of Christ; serving, according to capacity and circumstance, as hands to do his bidding, feet to carry his message, eyes to see with his understanding, lips to speak his hope, strength to perform the will of God.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 6, 1949.