What Is
the Church?

Before we can talk about the church we have to talk about the cowboy, because the two have more in common than you think. A cowboy is two things at once. He is an ideology and he is a profession. The ideology is the set of standards he lives by: courage, honor, respect, hard work, toughness, taking care of what he has been handed, and giving himself to something bigger than he is. That ideology gives him purpose. It guides his thinking and his actions, even when it is dangerous. Especially when it is dangerous.

The profession is the work itself. Real cowboys are the Delta Force of agriculture. You do not see them from the road. They are back in the breaks where the trucks do not go, doing work nobody will ever clap for. You can wear the hat at the sale barn, but the hat is not what makes you one. The standards and the work do.

Now hold that thought and ask the other question. What is the church? It is not where you go on Sundays. It is not a building or an organization or a denomination. Those are the hat. This week we are going after the standards and the work. Peter says be ready to explain your hope. You cannot explain what the church is to a man who asks if you have never worked it out yourself.

Here is the first answer. The church is the adopted sons and daughters of God. He took us in when we had done nothing to deserve it. Not one thing. We did not clean up first. We did not earn a spot. He went and got us the way a man goes to the pound and picks the dog nobody else wanted.

Why would God do that? Because he loves us, and because he wants to be loved. That is it. Paul says God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family, that it is what he wanted to do, and that it gave him great pleasure. Great pleasure. He was not doing his duty. He was happy about it.

And understand what adoption meant in the world Paul wrote to. In Roman law a father could disown the son he fathered. But the son he adopted, he chose, and he could not un-choose. The adopted son had every right the natural son had and a security the natural son did not. That is you. You are not the hired man hoping to stay on through the winter. You are in the will.

The church is the bride of Christ, and this is the thing that separates us from the Old Testament saints. Abraham, David, Moses, those men belonged to God and they are with him. But the bride is something new. The bride is the people Jesus bought with his own life, from the cross forward. That is us.

Now, men, do not get squeamish. You can be a part of the bride. The bride is mankind, not womankind. It is a picture, and the picture is about how he treats us, not about what we are wearing. Paul says Christ loved the church and gave up his life for her, to make her holy and clean, and to present her to himself without a spot or a wrinkle. He is not marrying us because we cleaned up. He is cleaning us up because he is marrying us.

And here is the part a lot of men in this country need to hear. Jesus does not believe in divorce. He is not going to walk out on his bride. He does not trade her in when she gets old or when she lets him down. All of the end times hinge on this: there is a wedding coming, and the groom has never once considered calling it off.

The church is also the rulers and reigners. That one surprises people. They think of the church as the folks who sit quietly and sing. But John says the ones who share in the first resurrection will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him a thousand years. Reign. That is a word for kings.

During the Millennial Kingdom, the thousand years when Jesus rules this earth from Jerusalem, we will rule and reign with him. We will spend a thousand years getting a demolished earth ready for God. Think about that. The tribulation will have wrecked this place. Somebody has to rebuild it under the King’s orders, and that somebody is you. A cowboy who has spent his life fixing fence and doctoring calves and making a place better than he found it is not going to be bored in the Kingdom.

So when somebody asks what the church is, do not leave this out. We are not a social club waiting for the bus. We are the crew the King is training right now for the biggest job there has ever been. Everything you are learning about faithfulness in the small things is job training.

So that is what the church is. Now the second question: what is your part in it? Start with what the church does. Jesus wants us to influence the world around us. He said go and make disciples of all the nations, and be sure of this, I am with you always. But all the nations starts with you. Then your family. Then your friends. Then your coworkers, your community, and on out to the world. You do not skip the kitchen table to go save a country.

Now back to the cowboy. What holds the church together is the same thing that holds the cowboy together: a united faith and a set of moral obligations. Our faith is our shared ideology, the standards we live by. Our actions are our profession, the work you can only see when you ride out and look. James says it plain. Faith by itself is not enough. Show me your faith without good deeds and I will show you mine by what I do.

Your actions are your uniform. They are what identifies you as a cowboy who rides for the Man who died on a cross for your sins. Nobody can see your faith from the road. They can see how you treat your wife, how you handle a bad check, what you do when the neighbor’s cows get out. That is the uniform. Wear it. The church is not where you go. It is who you are, and whose you are.