Well, we had a slight typo on the bulletin, but I promise we do have a scripture and a sermon this morning. So please, if you would, turn with me to Romans chapter nine. And that's gonna be our passage this morning, our main passage. We'll consider some other passages of scripture as well. But you can turn with me to Romans chapter nine. And we're going to continue our series in the church this morning. Romans 9, the first eight verses will be our guiding passage as we consider the church again this morning. There are many helpful texts that we'll consider, but this will be a very helpful starting point. So please, if you would, turn your attention there with me and let me read for us from God's holy word. I'm speaking the truth in Christ. I am not lying. My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever, amen. But it is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we have read your word, now make us attentive to the preaching of your word. May my words conform to your word. May you edify and equip us through your words to fulfill our calling as your people. that we are children of Abraham by faith and recipients of the great promise fulfilled in the coming of your Son, our Lord. And it is in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, that we pray, amen. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. That's the beginning of the third part of the Apostles' Creed that we confess and that we believe. But what do we mean by a holy and Catholic church? Why do we add the communion of the saints? This is an important question for us to ask at this point in our series, in this series that we're considering about the church, what the church is. There are many ways that we use the word church in our everyday vocabulary. And what we want to do in this series is consider what the church is, who the church is, what the mission and ministry of the church is, why we should love the church. But sometimes we use the word church in ways that scripture doesn't. So sometimes we use the word church, but we're only talking about the church building. So we'll say, I'll meet you at the church. which means I'll meet you at the building that's located at 1930 Virginia Avenue. Other times we use the word church when we're talking about participating in corporate worship. So I'm going to church this morning, which means I'm going to participate. I'm going to participate in the corporate worship service at Christ the King. And now the point of the sermon is not to police our language. And we use those terms in that way. I prayed talking about that. The church that meets at 1930 Virginia Avenue, we use the language in that way. But what we wanna do this morning is talk about how scripture talks about the church. Because this will help us understand what the church is and what the church is not. And this distinction, it impacts everything. It impacts how we understand church membership, to what we do on Sunday mornings, to who we are as a church family. All of those things are affected by our understanding of how the Bible uses the word church. There are so many different directions we could go this morning, and we are not going to be able to cover every single aspect of the church. But if there's only one thing that you take away from this morning, I want it to be this. This is the foundational understanding of everything else that we could discuss. And that is that there's only one people of God, and that is the church. And we understand the church in two different ways. So that's the foundational principle that we're considering this morning. First, that there is only, there ever was, ever will be one people of God. So that is in the Old Testament and in the New, Israel and the church, it's the same people, it's one people of God. That's the first thing. And the second, when we talk about this one people of God, we must distinguish between two characters or two aspects of this one people, the visible and the invisible. So one people of God with a distinction between visible and invisible. That's what we're going to talk about this morning. It'll make more sense as we go along. So let's consider these two things together. The first is that there's one people of God, the redemptive history of Israel and the church. There's one people. And so the question is, one question we could ask in thinking about this is when did the church begin? When did the church begin? If you were a part of the new members class that we held back in May, you know the answer to this question. We talked about this. The church did not begin as such in the New Testament. The church did not begin at the book of Acts. The church, which is understood as God's people, has existed from the very beginning. This is the first foundational truth what we need to understand. And Paul builds his case in Romans 9 through 11 on this foundational principle that there is only and ever was one people of God. So let's remind ourselves of the context of Romans 9. Often we talk about this chapter as the definitive proof of Reformed theology, of Reformed doctrine of predestination and God's sovereignty over salvation. And yes, that is absolutely true. But notice the context of how this chapter starts. It starts with Paul very humbly and pleading and in anguish in his heart because his fellow Israelites have not believed in the Messiah. He says, I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen, according to the flesh. You see, these are the Israelites. These are his kinsmen according to the flesh. According to their physical descent, they are all children of Abraham. They were God's people that were brought up out of Egypt, God's people whom he chose, whom he gave the law, he gave the sacrificial system to. He made them his very own people, his very own possession. And Paul summarizes the blessing of being an Israelite. He summarizes the blessing in verses four and five. He says they are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs. And from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. Christ is an Israelite. He is a descendant of Abraham, according to the flesh, who is God overall, blessed forever, amen. They are blessed in so many ways. even in the fact that Jesus Christ is one of them. There's only one problem though. That is that the Israelites have rejected God's Son. They rejected Jesus Christ. And they murdered the Messiah and they crucified the Christ. They rejected Him and God's own people whom He chose, they rejected the God of their salvation. And so how can this be? Paul's wrestling with this as he writes this letter. How can it be? Did God make a mistake? Did He mistake in choosing this people? Or did he fail in his mission to save and redeem this people? That's the question, that's the tension that we feel in this passage. And the answer must be no, God did not fail. And so Paul goes on to explain in verse six, but it is not as though the word of God has failed. How can that be? Here's the interpretive key. Here's how we understand it. He says, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel. That's the interpretive key. Not all who descend from Israel belong to Israel. And not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring." Notice then Paul's argument. God's word did not fail because he did save his people. Though his people are those who are descendants of Abraham by faith, not according to the flesh. It is the children of the promise, not the children of the flesh. And so what is the promise? Well, it was the promise given to Abraham that God would use him to bring blessing to all the nations of the world, and that he would do this through Abraham's offspring, who was the Christ. Now, if you understand, if you understand this part of biblical theology, you understand the totality of the story of God's redemption, of how he redeems his people. So let's consider this for a moment. God gave a promise to Abraham. He said, I will be a God to you and to your children after you. And I will give you an offspring through whom I will make you a mighty nation and through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed. And so we see that God has a large scope in mind. It was never one particular people or ethnic group, but it was the entire world. It was every nation he had in mind that would be blessed through the promise given to Abraham, this promise of an offspring. But even this promise points us back to the very first promise of the gospel that was given to Adam and Eve in the garden after the fall. Genesis 3.15, as God pronounces the curse upon the serpent, he says, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. This is the first proclamation of the gospel. We see how the promised offspring would crush the serpent's head, by which it means that he would undo the curse and the sting of death. yet it would come at a cost to this offspring. Christ would be crucified, but he would rise again. And it is in this context that God calls Abraham, promising to him an offspring, which was not a promise ultimately about his son Isaac, whom we read about earlier, but it was about the Son of God, who was and is the offspring of Abraham, descended from his very line, the one who is the Christ. And in Galatians chapter three, Paul makes this point very clear. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring, Paul says. And he says, it does not say, and to offsprings, plural, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is the Christ. And so Christ, he is the offspring of Abraham. And Christ is the one who crushes the serpent's head, who accomplishes the redemption of his people. And he fulfills the promise given to Abraham that through him, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. And now as we look and turn to the New Testament, we see this promise finally being fulfilled in Christ. All the nations are coming to faith in Christ and are being blessed in Him with every spiritual blessing. All the nations, every nation now has salvation through Jesus Christ. Jew and Gentile, it doesn't matter because they are all descendants of Abraham, not according to the flesh. They can't trace their genealogy or their lineage up to Abraham, but they are true descendants of him by faith. Those who have faith in his offspring, which is Christ. And so at the end of Galatians 3, Paul says that for in Christ Jesus, listen to this, you are all sons of God. You are all sons and daughters of God in Christ Jesus through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. And so Galatians 3.28, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you're Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring. airs according to the promise. You see how all of that is connected together. If we are in Christ, if we belong to Christ, and Christ is Abraham's offspring, then you can follow the logic, you can follow the syllogism. Then we are Abraham's offspring by faith. And there is no longer any covenantal distinction between Jew or Greek, between anyone. In faith, we are all descendants of Abraham. Which is why, and as slightly as an aside, this is what Paul means in that verse, Galatians 3.28. He is not destroying, he's not demolishing all distinctions. That's not what his intention is doing. There continues to be differences and distinctions between races and ethnicities, between men and women, between those in different social classes. Those things continue, those things exist. But what is different now is that everyone Everyone, regardless of race, regardless of sex, regardless of social class or status or any other distinction, any other difference, everyone has equal access to God the Father through Jesus Christ our Lord. We all have equal standing at the foot of the cross of Christ. That is what Paul is saying at the end of Galatians chapter three. And why is this the case? Why is that? because there was only ever one people of God, forever and always one people. There are not two peoples, there are not different classes or structures within the one people of God, but there is one people altogether forever. That's Paul's point in Galatians 3. That's his point here in Romans 9 through 11, this larger section in those three chapters. As Paul continues and he builds his case, he gets to chapter 11, he employs this language and imagery of a tree and branches. And he describes how the unbelieving Israelites are like branches that were cut off. And the believing Gentiles are grafted into the tree and are nourished from the very same root. So notice the language. There is only one tree. There's only one root system that nourishes the tree. And as branches from Jew and Greek from every nation, every tribe, every tongue were grafted into that tree. In his book, Dr. Waters, his book on how Jesus runs the church, he talks about this and he makes the point that God did not chop down a tree and plants another. He did not reject Israel completely and plant the new tree called the church, but it is always ever one people. There's only one tree. There's only one household of God. Israel and the church, they're the same. They're the same household of God. Hebrews chapter three makes that point very clear. There are so many different passages that we could come to in our understanding of this, but God's purpose in salvation, His plan of redemption remains the same. It's this exact same announcement that was made, that the angel made to Joseph, when he said that Mary would bear a son, and the angel says that you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people. He will save all his people from every tribe, tongue, language, and nation. He will save his people, his singular people, from their sins. There's one people of God. Jew and Gentile from all times, there's one people. There's so much more that we could be said about this, but now let's consider this second thing that we mentioned. There is one people of God, but at the same time, we distinguish between two aspects of it, between visible and invisible. These two different senses, visible and invisible. Let's think about this. When we talk about the church, When we talk about God's people from all times, Old Testament, New Testament, past, future, when we talk about the church, we need to keep this distinction in mind between visible and invisible. So what do we mean by that? First of all, what we're not saying, we're not saying that there are two different churches. Remember, there's only ever one church, there's only ever one people of God, but we do distinguish between these two aspects. The invisible church, when we talk about that, what we mean is the whole number of God's elect, of God's people across all time in heaven and on earth, the membership in the visible church, which is known only to God by His eternal decree, unseen by us. That's the invisible church. And then we also talk about the visible church, which is made up of all those who profess Christ, who make a credible profession of faith together with their children. And so the visible and invisible church are distinguished from one another and are distinguished in a few different ways. In terms of membership, they're different. Membership in the visible church is made, like we said, from a credible profession of faith, but it is only God's eternal decree through his election and predestination and salvation that people are brought into the invisible church. Along with that, the number of members within the visible church will obviously fluctuate. As new people make professions of faith, as people move, as people unfortunately leave the church, the number changes, but the number of God's elect, that number within the visible church, whatever it is, unknown to us, but known perfectly to God, that number's fixed and never changes. And finally, what is perhaps most central to our topic at hand is because all this is true, what we must say is that not all members of the visible church necessarily belong to the invisible church. Not all who are members of the visible church belong to the invisible church. In other words, the visible church that we can see today, that's made up of all the churches around the world, that's a mixed community. It's made up of believers and unbelievers. Whereas the invisible church is made up of only those with true saving faith based upon God's decree. And so this is a lot of theology that I'm just throwing at you. And it can feel like we're splitting hairs. Why are we talking about this? Why are we trying to make this distinction? It's important because this distinction helps us to understand what scripture teaches. And I want us to stress that point, that this is a biblical distinction. This is a biblical category that we're trying to put words to, that we're trying to explain. And we see this come right out of that same passage in Romans nine that we just read. So Paul says in Romans nine, verse six, that not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel. Remember that was our interpretive key. Paul makes the same point even clearer earlier in the letter in chapter two, verse 28. He says, for no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. Well, hold on. Circumcision seems like a very outward and physical kind of thing. So what do you mean, Paul? What do you mean by this? He says, but a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart. by the Spirit, not by the letter. And so you see the distinction that he's making here, that there is a group of people who can be part of the visible community of God, but not part of the invisible spiritual community. Within Israel, there always existed those who had received the outward physical sign of circumcision, of physical initiation into the covenant community, were part of the visible community of faith, but yet inwardly did not have the spiritual circumcision of the heart, the saving faith that only God's Spirit can bring. We see this distinction very clearly in one of Jesus' parables in Matthew 13. Listen to this parable in Matthew 13, beginning in verse 24. He put another parable before them, saying, So when the plants came up and bore grain, Then the weeds also appeared. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds? He said to them, an enemy has done this. So the servant said to him, then do you want us to go out and gather them? But he said, no, lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. And at harvest time, I will tell the reapers, gather the wheat first and bind them in bundles to be burned. Gather the weeds first, bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn. And so you see within the kingdom of God as it exists on earth in the visible community, Jesus tells us that there is always wheat and weeds. And from these passages and others, we learn this important distinction that not all Israel is Israel. That not all who belong to the visible church belong to the invisible church. And so if we keep this distinction in mind, this biblical distinction, it will help us in a lot of ways. And it'll help us as we continue in this series, which is why we're talking about it this morning. It helps us to understand scripture, first of all. that in the same way we can use the word church to mean different things in different contexts, when the Bible uses the word church, we need to think about what is in view, the visible or the invisible. It also helps us to understand church membership. We consider it an unfortunate truth that not every person who is a member of the visible church is truly a member of the invisible. who is truly a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. But this distinction helps us to understand, helps us to realize that our job is not to determine who is a true believer. That's left to God alone. That's a knowledge that only he has. Only God can judge the heart. Rather, when your elders, when we admit somebody into membership to the Lord's table, what we're saying is that they have made a credible profession, as far as it goes for us to judge, a credible profession of faith. And we're gonna talk more about what membership looks like and about that next week. But it helps us understand the sacraments, which were given to the benefit of the visible church, to God's people, with a view of the true saving faith that belongs to the invisible church. And we baptize our infants, we baptize our covenant children, because they belong to the covenant. They are members of the visible church by birthright. And we pray that God who alone judges the heart will raise them up through the ordinary use of his means, raise them up to saving faith. This distinction helps us to understand also why unfortunately at times there are those who walk away from the faith. That's a sad thing. It's a difficult thing. but it helps us to understand apostasy and what that means, what that looks like. We understand because such a person who is renouncing their membership, renouncing their faith, is renouncing their membership within the visible church of God and demonstrating that they were not a member of the church invisible. So, There's so much for us to consider there. So much ground that was covered. And next week we're gonna pick up right here where we left off with a longer discussion about this visible church, the church that we see, the church within our generation. And even how our local particular churches is a visible church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we'll consider what that looks like and church membership and what all that's about. But as we wrap up, as we talked about these distinctions, and we talked about the people of God, This is what we need to focus on. And this is what I hope that you'll leave and walk away with. That there is one people of God forever. We make this distinction between visible and invisible because it is a biblical category. It helps us to understand what the church is. It helps us to read our Bibles. But we remember that the church is God's people. And if you have put your faith in Jesus Christ, have given yourself to be a member of some local visible church. If you receive the sacraments where the gospel is faithfully preached, the sacraments are administered, discipline is done in a loving way that always starts with the preaching of the word. If all that is true, if you've given yourself to Christ, if you profess your faith in him, then you can be sure, you can make your election and salvation sure, knowing that you belong to God. And that is where we're going to end. If you've put your faith in Christ and you are a beloved, a beloved son and daughter of God, you are his treasured possession, you are a people for himself. And not only are you united to Christ, but you enjoy the benefits of the holy and Catholic, which means universal, the universal church and are part of the communion and the fellowship of the saints from all time, from all ages. We're about to sing one of my favorite hymns. for all the saints. And in this hymn, we're going to proclaim to ourselves, we're going to proclaim to one another, to teach and instruct one another, and we're going to join with the church triumphant, who is always and forever singing and proclaiming God's praises. We're going to announce to the whole world that we belong to this one church, this one people of God. What a privilege it is to get to sing and to praise and to join in in the singing of His praises, our God in heaven. What a wonderful privilege that is. So please, would you pray with me and then let's sing. Lord Jesus, may your name be forever blessed. Thank you that you have saved us, that we are your people, that you've saved us from our sins. Thank you that we can have full assurance of our salvation as we look to you in faith. Thank you for your church. Thank you that you love her. And may we love her and value her as you do. Help us and continue to sanctify us unto the end that we will appear pure and blameless and glorious on the day in which you return. We long for that day. Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.