Psalm 48, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all of the earth. Mount Zion in the far north, the city of the great King. Within your midst of the heavens, God has made Himself known as the Lord. For behold, the kings have assembled. They came on together, and soon as they saw it, they were astounded. They were in panic. They took to flight. Trembling took hold of them here. Anguish as of a woman in labor. By the east wind, you shattered the ships of Tarshish." As your name, O God, so your praises reaches to the ends of the earth. Your right hand is filled with righteousness. Let the crown of Zion be black. Let the waters of Judah rejoice because of Your love. Walk about Zion. Go around her. Number her towers. Consider well her ramparts. Go through her citadels, that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God, forever and ever. Amen. Now, on page 5, let's lift our voices to sing to this great God with the words of, oh, for a thousand tongues to sing. Amen. And as we give Him praise this morning, we give Him praise for the great redemption that is ours through Jesus Christ, the great forgiveness of sins that is ours because of the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and the fact that Jesus came and shed His blood because as the Son of God, He loved us. Because as God, He had mercy upon us. And so this morning we come, as we always do on the Lord's Day, mindful of our sin, thinking upon our failure, our fallenness, how far short of God's glory we have fallen, and upon the great mercy and upon the great grace of God by which we have been saved. And this morning we'll focus our attention in that manner on David's words in Psalm 32 as he talks about this great forgiveness of sins and the importance of confessing sin before the Lord, not hiding it in our hearts, not protecting it or sheltering or harboring our sin, but laying it all out before the Lord in acknowledgment to Him, not only of our sinfulness, but of His grace by which we would be healed. And so pay close attention to these words this morning as we understand the absolute essential nature of coming before the Lord in confession. David says, how blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me, and my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. But I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found. Surely in the rush of great waters, they, the waters, shall not reach Him. You are a hiding place for me. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance. I will instruct you, the Lord says these words, and teach you in the way that you should go. I will counsel you with My eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding which must be curbed with bit and bridle or it will not stay near you. Many are the sorrows of the wicked. but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart." And let us do that this morning. Take a moment to confess your sins before the Lord, to acknowledge to Him that you are fallen, to avoid doing what David did for so long after he sinned with Bathsheba and against her husband Uriah. He hid his sin. He didn't confess it. and it tore him apart spiritually. Don't do that this morning. Lay it out before the Lord and allow Him to heal you and to forgive you and to allow the grace of God to cleanse you and to set you free from the burden of your sin. And then give Him praise for that freedom. Let's pray this morning. Our great God and Father in Heaven, You are the Holy One. You are the Majestic One. You are the Almighty One. You are the Creator of heaven and of earth. You are the One who upholds all things by the Word of Your power. Father, You are the One who knows all things. You are the One who is sovereign over all things. You are the One that the angels worship. And so, Father, we acknowledge this morning that since our birth in Adam, we have spent our whole lives in idolatry, not worshiping You as You deserve to be worshiped. but worshiping the idols of this world and the idols of our hearts, surrendering, Father, and submitting to the lusts of our eyes and our flesh and being governed by the boastful pride of our lives. And so, Lord, with David in Psalm 51, we would say that You would be fully just to speak Your words of judgment against us and to consign us to an eternity of punishment for the sin of idolatry that we have committed since our earliest days. But Lord, You are not a vindictive God. You are a God who is full of mercy, full of patience, full of compassion, full of everlasting, steadfast love. And Father, You have poured that love out upon us by pouring out Your judgment upon Your own Son. And so we praise You, Lord, this morning for Jesus Christ We praise You for His incarnation and for His sinless life. We praise You for His substitutionary death by which He took the punishment that we deserve. We praise You, Lord, for the blood that He shed. And we praise You that we have been sprinkled clean by this blood and made acceptable to You. We praise You for the righteousness that has been imputed to us through faith and that by it we can be accepted by You and called Your children. no longer your enemies. And so, Father, this morning we ask that the truth of the Gospel would radiate in our hearts, not just in our minds rattling around in dusty, dry, academic ways. But Father, that this great love that You have shed abroad in our hearts would energize us today to sing Your praises and to be filled with Your Spirit and to cause our lives, Father, to become living sacrifices to You in our holy service of worship. Father, may our lives sing Your praises. And may You fill us with the grace unto that life this morning. We depend on You for everything. And we praise You for everything that You give us and have given us and promise to give us. And ask, Lord, that we would never take it for granted. We thank You, Father, that You have told us by the words of Your own Son that as much as You care for the little birds that hop around on the ground and as much as You care for the flowers that grow in the fields, that You care even more for us who have been created in Your image and recreated, Father, and reborn by the Spirit of Your goodness and Your love and Your grace. And so, Father, this morning as Your Holy Spirit is with us, ministering to us, speaking Your Word into our hearts, we would ask that we would be submissive to Him. And we would ask, Lord, that we would be grateful for all of the ways in which You care for us. And so we draw near this morning to Your throne of grace And we bow ourselves and lay ourselves at Your feet. We place ourselves at Your disposal. We confess our dependence and our reliance upon You. And we receive from You the strength that You so freely give. And Lord, again, as we are in Your presence this morning, may we consider ourselves to be Your children because we are because of Your love. And may we give You praise. And may everything that we do and say this morning be an expression of the great gratitude that we have because of all that you have done for us in Jesus Christ. We pray unto your glory and in his great name. Amen. Please rise for the reading of God's Word. This morning's text is Mark chapter 3. I'll be reading verses 13 through the end of the chapter. Please give your careful attention to the reading of God's Word. And he went up on the mountain, and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, so that they might be with him, and might send them out to preach, and have authority to cast out demons. He appointed the twelve, Simon, to whom he gave the name Peter, James, the son of Zebedee, and John, the brother of James, to whom he gave the name Sons of Thunder, Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, and Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, He is out of his mind. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, He is possessed by Beelzebub, and by the prince of demons, to cast out demons. And he called them to him and said to them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, the kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, the house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strongman's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strongman. Then indeed he may plunder his house. Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. for they had said, He has an unclean spirit. And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him, and called him. And a crowd was standing round him, and they said to him, Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you. And he answered them, Who are my mother and my brothers? and looking about at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother." And God's people said, Amen. Last week in our service, we took a bit of a detour from our regular study in the book of Ezekiel. I was telling a friend of mine who is also a preacher about that. And he laughed. I said, why are you laughing? He said, well, I preached through the book of Ezekiel six or seven years ago. And he said, what chapter are you in? And I told him, we're coming to chapter 40. And he laughed. I said, why are you laughing? He said, that's where I was when I took a break from the book of Ezekiel. I said, well, how long of a break did you take? And he said, well, it's been so far six or seven years. He never looked back. Hopefully we'll look back. Hopefully in November we'll get back to the book of Ezekiel and we'll finish it out because I think that the closing chapters of that book are the best chapters. I think that the message of grace and hope and love and peace and unity that God gives in those chapters is some of the most important stuff that He speaks to us in His Word. So I look forward to getting to it. But we did take a little bit of a detour last week in order to spend some time thinking on those Tremendously important words of Paul in Philippians 2 about the meaning of the Christian life. Paul's words, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, he humbled himself. by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. And those, I think, are some of the most deeply humbling and convicting words in all of Scripture. That call to have that same mind, that same self-abasing, God-exalting, humble, sacrificially loving attitude that Christ had, that's a high call, isn't it? Too high of a call for any of us by our own means to reach. But it is the call, is it not? It is the standard by which we are held, and nothing short of that standard. And the only way to reach that standard is Christ in us. That's our only hope of glory. Christ in us, crucifying our flesh, crushing our pride, destroying all of our self-loving, self-worshipping desires and creating clean hearts in us. New hearts. Hearts that are formed by His desires now, and His humility, and His love as He is formed in us. That's the Christian life. Christ in us. Christ through us. In Galatians 4, Paul prays for the Christians in the churches around the province of Galatia, and he pours out his heart to them like a loving parent. He says to them, my little children, for whom I am in the anguish of childbirth." The anguish of childbirth. He says that He's laboring for them. He's praying for them. He's striving in the Spirit for them. He's desperate for their growth and their sanctification. And He says that He's laboring and striving that He feels like a mother in labor, in anguish. until that incredible moment of birth when all of the pain and the striving and the laboring is forgotten because of the sheer, overwhelming joy of the life that has come into the world. That's how Paul feels. He's striving, he's laboring, he's enduring all kinds of hardship and tribulation for their sake, waiting like an expectant mother. And what's he waiting for? What's the goal? that he's laboring for. The thing that makes it all worthwhile, he says, my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. That's the goal. That's the Christian life that Paul wants more than anything to see manifested in Christians. In my life, in your life, He doesn't want to just see us learning some new strategies and turning over new leaves and coming a long way and making great strides in our personal maturity. He wants to see people who have been crucified with Christ and raised to newness of life, people who forsake self and submit themselves so completely to Jesus that it is Jesus who is being formed in them. So that again, It's not just them trying to be like Jesus. It's Jesus living in them. It's Jesus living through them. It's His heart. It's His attitude. It's His desires, His love, His humility, His grace that is transforming Christians as He is forming Himself in them. That's what the Christian life is. That's what the Christian life looks like. It looks like Christ. Not because the Christian is trying to look like Christ. to mimic Christ, but because the life of Christ Himself, the resurrected, omnipotent life of Jesus Christ is overwhelming and transforming and recreating our lives. Now, that's what the individual Christian life is and what it looks like. This morning, I want to expand that out and ask ourselves the question, what is Christ's body? What is Christ's church? And what does it look like? And I think that that is such an absolutely and extremely important question that we have to understand the biblical answer to in part because there are a lot of unbiblical answers to that out there, aren't there? All kinds of people who think that the church is a corporation. Jesus is the owner but the pastor is the CEO and the elders are the board of directors and the deacons are the trustees. And the congregation, that's the workforce. And we structure the church just like we structure corporate America, or after the democratic pattern of America, or after some other man-made model. The question is though, what does God say about His church? What is it? What does it look like? And the New Testament isn't short on answers to those questions, is it? And what God's Word has to say is very, very different from the models that we've often imposed upon the church, isn't it? Just think of some of the metaphors that Scripture uses to describe and define the church of Jesus Christ. It's His body. Paul says in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians and Colossians, He's the Head, and there are many different parts, many different members of the body, each with a different gift and a different calling and ministry, but all collectively and interdependently united together in Him by faith and by the Spirit of the living God. He's the Vine, Jesus says. In John chapter 15, and we are all the branches organically rooted to Him. growing from Him and growing in Him by faith. He's the Bridegroom. Ephesians 5. And we are the Bride that He is sanctifying and cleansing by the washing of water with the Word, nourishing us and cherishing us, so that He might present us to Himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish. The church is the living temple of the Holy Spirit's presence, the dwelling place of the Spirit of God. Ephesians 2, 1 Peter 2, 1 Corinthians 6. Do you see the picture that all of that paints? Christ's church isn't an institution or a corporation or some kind of a social club. It isn't just a group of people with common beliefs and interests and desires who work together towards common goals. The church isn't just an organization. First and foremost, it's a spiritual organism. It's a living organic body that is given life spiritually and nourished and fed and strengthened by the grace and the presence of God and bound together by the redeeming work of Jesus Christ. We're one in Him. And that's what I want us to focus on today. That divinely created spiritual bond that exists between every single member of Jesus Christ's body. And that bond is a bond that is stronger than any other bond. It's a union between the members of Christ's body that is more lasting and enduring than any other union. Even though to look at the church these days, you might not know it, what with all of the division and all of the infighting and all of the quarreling and all of the bickering. As we saw last week for the individual Christian, the question to live by, Philippians 1.27 is, is my way of life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Is my love worthy of His love? Is my humility worthy of His humility? Is my commitment to others' needs worthy? Are my relationships worthy of the reconciliation that He shed His blood to accomplish? And that same question, see, that we have to ask of our individual lives, we also have to ask of the church. Are we, as a body, worthy? Are we, as a local manifestation of Christ's body, are we worthy? Is the unity and the love of this body, this church, is it worthy of the great bond of peace that the blood of Jesus Christ has been shed to create between His people? How do you view yourself in the body of Jesus Christ? How do you view the bond between you and other members of that body? How do you understand your relationship to other Christians? Even the ones that are difficult for you. Even the ones that bug you and irritate you and you have nothing in common with. Even the ones that you've conveniently given yourself permission to say, I don't need to love them. because they haven't met all of the criteria on my list for loving them, and then written out of your life. This morning I want us to reevaluate exactly what the church of Jesus Christ is, and to learn to think of it and our place in it in biblical terms. Church is not an organization, or an institution, or a corporation. It's not just a place that exists for you to come and have your social needs met. It's not just a place where you can come and make friendships and social connections and find people that you have things in common with and build meaningful relationships with. I hope we can all do that, but that's not all that the church is or first and foremost what the church is. In fact, if we're going to rightly understand the church and our place in it, we've got to go beyond all that, deeper than all of that. And we've got to apply what we learned last week from Philippians 2 and stop thinking of ourselves first. I'm here for what the church does for me. We've got to start considering others as more important than ourselves and their needs as more important than our own. And because it is Christ who is being formed in us and who is the head of the church, we have to see our place in the church as being primarily about ministering to others. blessing others, building others up at whatever cost to ourselves, or else again, our place in the church and our church is not worthy of the great love and grace of Jesus Christ. So what is the church of Jesus Christ? What is this community of New Covenant believers that we're a part of? It is a divinely created community of the closest and the most intimate and the most enduring relationships that exist in your life bar none. Maybe you don't feel that way, but that's what it is. Is that how you think of the church? Is that how you think of your fellow Christians as the most significant and important relationships in your life? Or are there other relationships that are more significant and more important? Maybe your biological family. I suspect that a lot of Christians have that inclination to think that in order of importance and significance, the relationship priorities start at the top with the biological family and then go down from there. And sometimes even our unbelieving friends are closer relationships to us than our brothers and our sisters in Christ. Is that your sort of default mode? to assign family the highest order of importance in the hierarchy of relationships in your life. And then comes the people that you have the most in common with and the ones that are the most fun and the most fulfilling for you, the people that you have everything to do with. And I'm not discounting all of that. It's very normal and it's very natural for people with common interests and goals sharing common circumstances and experience to gravitate towards each other. There's nothing wrong with all of that. But what I want to remind us of today is that the most utterly important thing that we as Christians have in common beyond our tastes and beyond our preferences and our likes and dislikes and our political opinions our favorite movies and our hobbies. The thing that transcends all of those other reasons for joining together and fellowshipping together is, of course, the great redemption that we have in Jesus Christ. The great faith and the promises of God through which we have been given everlasting life. The great love of Christ that each and every Christian has been lavished with. By which we have all been given the right to be called what? John 3, verse 1, see what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God. And so we are. Children of God. See, what I'm saying here is that the church, the body of Christ, is the community of your most significant and important and intimate relationships for two reasons. First of all, because of that great faith and salvation that we have in common by the grace of Christ. That's what binds us together, what fuses us together. Back in Philippians 1, in the verse that we looked at last week, verse 27, where Paul says, let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel, he goes on in the same verse to say, Let your manner of life be worthy of the Gospel of Christ so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind, striving side by side for the faith of the one Gospel. That's what Paul wants. That's what he labors for. That's what he is desperate to see in the church. In our church, he wants unity and community, fellowship between people who may not have anything else in common, but are bound together by the one Spirit who has given us one mind and one faith in the one God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Doesn't that transcend everything else? Isn't that more important than anything else? That's reason number one why the body of Christ is the community of your most significant relationships. And reason number two is that this body that we have all been made a part of by God's grace and love is nothing less than the community of His children. His children. See what great love the Father has given to us that we should be called the children of God. He's our Heavenly Father and we're His children and together we are all brothers and sisters literally in Christ. And I hope that doesn't sound like some cheap platitude to you. I hope you realize that that's in fact what we are as Christians. We're brothers and sisters in a family that is more significant than any other family. even your biological family. You know in the book of Acts that the word brothers is used to describe the relationship between Christians more than 50 times, and Luke doesn't use that word lightly in some overly sentimental kind of a way. When Luke says that Christians are brothers in the Lord, Luke the academic? Luke the doctor? Luke the one who studied classical Greek literature all his life? Luke's not a poet. Luke doesn't say things for sympathetic reasons. Luke speaks very literally. When Luke says that we're brothers in the Lord, he means we're brothers in the Lord. He means we're family members. That's what Christians are. Not just friends. Not just acquaintances with common interests and beliefs. We've all been born together of water and of spirits into the family of our Heavenly Father, together adopted as His children, joint heirs of the heavenly inheritance. Now, turn with me this morning to John, if you will, in chapter 19. Because I want you to see that this is what Jesus did. That this is what He has made us to be. John 19, the scene is Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He's been betrayed by Jesus the night before. He spent the whole night praying and agonizing in the Garden of Gethsemane. And then Judas betrayed Him and He was dragged off and hauled before Annas and Caiaphas, the high priesthood of Israel. And then he was tried the next morning by the Sanhedrin, and then taken to Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, to be tried again. And Pilate couldn't find anything wrong with him, so he sent him to Herod Antipas. But Herod sent him back to Pilate, and Pilate caved in to the demands of this bloodthirsty Jewish mob, and Jesus was beaten, and He was scourged, and He was made to carry His own cross to the crucifixion. And I want you to picture that in your mind. And I want you to feel the weight of the sorrow of that, and the agony of that, and the horror of that as they beat Him, as they stripped Him of His clothes, and as they took and they assembled the two pieces of that cross together and then threw Him down on top of it, and then took and drove great iron spikes through His hands and His feet. and then took and picked that cross up and hauled it up and dropped it into a big hole in the ground with Him nailed to it so that it would stand upright. And there He hung. You mothers, picture it. Mary was watching as He hung there. beaten and bleeding and dying as the soldiers ignored Him and disregarded the horror of the suffering that's going on behind Him. They're busy casting lots for His clothes, trivializing utterly the death of the Son of God. But look at verse 25, John 19. John says, "...but standing by the cross of Jesus were His mother, and His mother's sister Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. And when Jesus saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved, that's John, standing nearby, He said to His mother, Woman, behold your son. And then He said to the disciple, Behold your mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home. Look at those words. What would you expect Jesus to say as He's hanging and dying on that cross, looking down at His mother? How would you expect Him to address her? What would you expect Him to call her? How about mother? Maybe even mom. I'm dying, mom. These are His dying words to her. She's carried Him in her womb for nine months. She birthed Him 33 years earlier in a stable in Bethlehem. She raised Him and nurtured Him and loved Him like any mother would love her own child. And now she's watched Him be beaten. She's watched Him be dragged to the cross and watched those spikes be driven into His hands. She's watching the life of her Son drain away before her very eyes. And as she stares up at Him, He doesn't look down and say, Mom, He says, Woman, to her. Woman. Why would He do that? Why would He call her by that impersonal title in that most desperate moment? Well, remember, this isn't the first time that Jesus has done this. It's not the first time He called her woman. He did that back also in John 2 at the wedding feast of Cana where He performed His first miracle of turning the water into the wine when the host of the wedding feast ran out of wine. And Mary came, remember, to ask Jesus to do something to help. But Jesus answered her and said to her, What has this to do with me?" What did he mean? He said, my hour has not yet come. What did he mean? He was talking about his mission. He was talking about the redemptive work that he'd come to earth to do, and he was saying, what I'm doing here has really nothing at all to do with your being my biological mother. It has to do with the will of my heavenly Father. He's saying, today I must obey My Father in Heaven, and you, My blood mother, have no claim on Me. See? In other words, when Jesus called her woman, He was saying, My redemptive calling from My Father takes precedence over My relationship of nature with you. And it's the same thing at the cross. There at the cross, In fact, Jesus said the most loving thing that He could to her because He transcended His natural, biological, earthly relationship with her. Let me read the words of one preacher who explains so well why Jesus called her woman there at the cross. He says, seeing her standing at the foot of the cross as a sinner, Jesus now severs His physical, earthly, biological relationship with Mary and creates in its place a new spiritual, redemptive relationship with her. The culmination of His Father's work. And so at the height of her grief, Mary lost Jesus as her Son, piercing her soul. But then in His great mercy and to her great joy, she gained Christ as her Savior. Woman, Jesus said. Look at verse 26. When Jesus saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, Woman, behold your son. Not Himself. He's not saying, Woman, behold your son, look at Me. Because He's made it very clear that Jesus didn't say that until both Mary and John were in His vision. It's as if He's looking into her eyes and saying, Woman, and then looking over to John and saying, Behold your son. And then He says to John, Behold your mother. And what I want you to understand this morning is that Jesus is doing something far, far more important than just getting His affairs in order before He breathes His last. He's not just telling John, now you take care of her. Because Jesus had brothers who could take care of her. Mary had other sons to take care of her earthly needs, didn't she? Other men who would be the natural choice And so why does Jesus say these words to John? Why not James, her next oldest son? Because Jesus isn't just interested in finding a new place for Mary to live, a nursing home for her to live out the rest of her earthly life, and someone who will be in charge of her care. He's doing something far more important than that. In verse 28 it says that after these things, after giving Mary to John and giving John to Mary and instigating this mother-son relationship between them, it says that He knew that all things were finished, all things were fulfilled, all things. All of His redemptive work, all of His Father's purposes, all of His mission in coming to earth was completed and fulfilled when He gave Mary to John and John to Mary. not just because he'd found a new place for her to live, but because there on the cross, Jesus had formed the New Covenant family and people of God. His broken body, His shed blood redeeming sinners from the kingdom of darkness and bringing them into relationship with Himself and with each other in the New Covenant as brothers and sisters. mothers and sons, and brothers and sisters, we are that people. We are that family. Paul says in Ephesians chapter 2, And verse 13, speaking of the fact that now in the New Covenant, both Jews and Gentiles have been brought together to form this New Covenant people of God. He says, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for He Himself is our peace. who has made us both one and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and that He might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, therefore killing the hostility. a new people, a new family. And he goes on in verse 18, for through Him, we both have access to one Spirit, to the Father. You are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the prophets and apostles, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, and in Him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. The blood of Jesus Christ has made a new family that's more important than your biological family. A new household of God that is filled with His Spirit and bound together by His redeeming grace and love that empowers us for service in His Kingdom. As brothers and as sisters, the church of Jesus Christ is nothing short of your truest family. Do you see it as such? Do you understand all these people not just to be your friends Christian comrades, but you are truest brothers, truest sisters, and mothers, and sons, and daughters, and fathers." There at the cross, Mary became to John in the truest sense of the word, a mother in the household of God. And John became to her a son, not biologically, but in an even greater and more significant way, bonded together not merely by genealogical blood, but by the redeeming blood of Jesus Christ, which is better blood. In Christ's Kingdom, relationships between His people are more important even than are relationships within our biological families, as important as those are. Doesn't Jesus say that very thing in Luke 14? If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and yes, even his own wife, he cannot be My disciple. He doesn't mean to scorn your family necessarily. He means that if it comes to choosing between loyalty to them and loyalty to his family, to the household of God that he has built with the price of his blood, then what's the choice? And for many, many people in Jesus' day, it did come to that choice, didn't it? Jesus says the household of God must never be forsaken for mere earthly bonds. You must be willing to lose everything in order to gain membership in His kingdom, His family. And those relationships are more significant between His people than any other relationships on earth. Didn't Jesus even model that in His own life? What about the passage that Joe just read from Mark chapter 3? Jesus has been traveling all over Israel, teaching and ministering and preaching, performing miracles and healing people. And now He's come to Nazareth, His hometown, the city that He grew up in, the place where His family still lives. And so there He is, teaching and preaching and healing and casting out demons. Mary and his brothers come to see him. Jesus is in town. They wanted to spend time with him. He's their brother. He's their son. They thought that they'd get to have unique time with him. Wouldn't you think that? If you were them, wouldn't you feel like, of all the people that Jesus is ministering to and spending time with, that if He comes to the hometown, you're at the top of the list? But what were they trying to do? They thought he was crazy. They thought he was casting out demons by the power of demons. They were listening to the Pharisees accuse him. I think they could see his end coming if he pursued this course of ministry much longer. They knew he'd be seized. They knew he'd be arrested. They knew they'd try to discredit and at least imprison, if not kill him. And so they go to seize him. They go to take him. They come to where He is and send somebody inside to let Him know that they're out there. And it says, a crowd was sitting around Him and they said to Him, Your mother and Your brothers are outside and they're seeking You. And what did Jesus say? He asked a question. Who are My mother and My brothers? And looking around at the ones who sat with Him, He said, Here. are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother. Not first of all those people outside that I am genealogically, biologically related to, but these people who will join me in the household of God are my first priority. Time and time again, this is what Jesus taught and stressed to His disciples, that His true family are not those that are related to Him simply by biological blood. His truest family are those who are committed to the will of the Father by faith, and that means that the body of Christ is our truest family. And we have to see it that way. And each other that way. A family of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, to minister to us all the grace and love of Jesus Christ. It's a family where the joy of intimate friendship exists and brotherly affection exists and where we have the privilege of being loved unconditionally and being needed and being included and being valued and being cherished because that's what family relationships are. And those relationships won't always be easy, will they? Are they in your biological families? No. Because we're all still sinners. We all still do things wrong. We all rub people the wrong way. And there's always somebody who rubs us the wrong way. And that's precisely why we need to allow the Spirit of Christ to minister His love. To form Himself in us and pour out His grace and His forgiveness, not only in our lives, but through our lives and into the lives of our family members. our brothers and our sisters, even in the midst of the most difficult family settings. Because those hard times in the household of God and the family of God's people, those trying times between God's children have to be seen as opportunities, see? Wonderful opportunities to do what? To breathe the grace of Jesus Christ on each other. Those difficult relationships in the body of Christ are opportunities for God's people to confirm to one another through commitment to each other, through a commitment to work through our conflicts and to love each other genuinely and unconditionally, through our commitment to to bear with each other and be patient with each other and be merciful and gracious to each other through all of that to confirm to one another that what happened on the cross is true because it's being done in us and through us. Do you see? You can't have a family without genuine and sometimes costly commitment, can you? Even in our physical, biological families. Even in those, there is no family without a commitment to love each other through the thick and through the thin. And so it is with the family of Christ. In His body, in the new covenant household of God, our commitment is what seals us together. His commitment to us is what seals us together. And our commitment to each other can't be based on what we profit from the other person. I'm only required to love them and be committed to them if they meet my list of demands. and needs and desires. You don't do that with your family, do you? Your biological family? Anybody who had kids would no longer have kids if that's what we did. Right? You don't say to your kids, unless you never, ever once make my life miserable, then I'm throwing you out in the street. No. You don't do that. Even in our physical families, family love is unconditional love. Not that we overlook sin or brush it under the rug or not deal with it, but that we endure through it. We bear up under it. We remain faithful and loyal to one another even when it's really, really hard because we're family. How much more must that be true in the household of God which is your truest family? How much more? What did Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount? If you only love those who love you, what good is that? Even the pagans do that. He says, so what? Big deal. If you love someone who's really nice to you, who does what you want them to and treats you well and really thinks you're a great person and treats you that way, what really good is it if you love just those kinds of people? Sinners do that. Unregenerate pagans do that. Atheists do that. It only qualifies you to be one of them. That's not the standard of the household of God. What is? John 6, same text. You bless those who curse you. You don't just put up with their cursing. You don't just refuse to curse them back. You bless those who curse you. You love your enemies. Not only do you refrain from returning evil for evil, you go beyond that and you do good to those who hate you. Luke 6.27 You pray for those who abuse you. If someone steals your coat, you don't go running after them and beat them up and say, well, he took my coat. You don't go over to their house and say, well, I'm going to steal something of theirs to make up for the loss. What does Jesus say to do? If they take your outer garment, you give them your shirt also, because obviously they're cold. Do you think that way? Do you treat your brothers and sisters that way? Oh, that's hard. You take the hardship as an opportunity to put the unconditional, unmerited, free, gracious love of Jesus Christ on display. That's what you do when you suffer. And why do we behave this way? Luke 6.36, we must behave this way. Jesus says we must be merciful in this particular way because our Heavenly Father is merciful to us in this way. Let your life be worthy. Is your life worthy? Is our church worthy? When they look in, when they come and visit, do they see the love of Jesus Christ on display? the mercy of the Heavenly Father so cherished and so loved that it's just flowing out of us to one another? That love that covers a multitude of sins that no matter what somebody does or says to you, you will not refuse to be their brother in Christ? Do they see a family that is bound together by the precious blood of Jesus and committed to one another as those brothers and sisters at all costs? Do they see bickering and selfishness and cliques forming and people giving each other the cold shoulder and divisions and strife? People only loving those who love them. Do they see Christians so obsessed with their own rights that they refuse to love other Christians or to be reconciled to other Christians if offense has been given? We come to the table Every Lord's Day. Why? We come to celebrate together as the family, as the people of God, that great redeeming love that has made us His children. We come remembering and proclaiming that He gave up everything and made Himself nothing and suffered and bled and died in order to reconcile us to Himself. Would any of us dare to come to the table and celebrate that costly reconciliation while at the same time refusing to be reconciled to one another as brothers and sisters? Would you do that? You see the hypocrisy in that? A Christian brother once told me that he hadn't taken communion in years because of that. Years, he didn't come to the table, not because he'd done everything possible, everything that he could do to try to, in humility and love, reconcile things with the other person, but the other person wouldn't reciprocate. That wasn't the reason. He didn't come to the table for years because he wouldn't humble himself. He was abstaining from the table for years because he was refusing to forgive and to go and to be reconciled. And so he thought that the right thing to do while harboring all of that bitterness and unloving, selfish pride was to be pious enough at least to not come to the table. Don't do that. I mean, if that's your heart, don't come, Paul says. But the point is that you want to be able to come and celebrate the reconciliation of Christ because it's in you and through you reconciling you to your brothers and sisters. Don't sit here week after week letting the bread and the cup pass knowing that you have business to take care of. Paul says in Romans 12 that we are to do everything possible, so far as it depends on us, to live at peace with all men. And sometimes we do everything possible and there still isn't peace because the other person won't budge. But don't let your own pride or bitterness or selfishness keep you from going and doing whatever you need to do to be at peace in the household of God. Because Jesus did. And if He's being formed in you, then you will. You will go. You will humble yourself. You will sacrifice your rights. You will lay it on the line in order to love the other person. And so as we come to the table this morning, let us remember what He did on that cross. Everything that He suffered. Everything that He endured in order to make us a new covenant family in His blood. And let us pray that as He is formed in us, that by His grace, He would cause His love and joy and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, and faithfulness, and gentleness, and self-control to flow into us and out of us into the lives of one another. That we would embrace each other as brothers and sisters in the truest possible family of God. Pray with me. Father, we pray that You would teach us to take every thought captive this morning. and that Your living and active Word today would, by the ministry and power of Your Holy Spirit, pierce our hearts and expose all of the ways in which we are not submissive to the humility and the great love of Jesus Christ in our lives. And Father, we pray today for a great outpouring of Your Spirit and Your grace and strength and truth into our minds and into our hearts that we might see and feel and experience ourselves to be brothers and sisters in the way that John and Mary were made to be at the foot of the cross. Father, bind us together. Sew us together by the great love of Jesus Christ. Father, that we might experience the blessings that come from that unity And more importantly, Lord, that we might give You glory by putting Your grace and love on display to the world around us. That as they look at us and see that love, that they would know that we are Your disciples, that we are Your children, because what they are seeing is the manifest presence of the love and the grace and the patience of God and Jesus Christ. And so, Lord, bring us to our knees at the table this morning. Humble us and break us of our pride. Fill us with Your grace and continue this work that You have begun of cleansing us, of softening us, and of forming Christ within us. We pray to Your glory and by Your grace and in His name, Amen.