"Christ and the House of God" (Hebrews 3:1-6)
This morning we’re continuing in our study in the book of Hebrews. We’re going to be reading from studying Hebrews 3:1-6, so if you have Bibles with you, I’d invite you to open up with me to that text. Hear now the word of the Lord.
1Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, 2 who was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house. 3 For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. 4 (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) 5 Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, 6 but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
Hebrews 3:1-6, ESV
This is the word of the Lord. With the New Testament there are a few places where we encounter a surprising problem of sorts. It’s a problem where godly people, some of whom are godly people, in a moment of awe-struck wonder radically mistake God’s messengers and God’s servants with the one they serve, with God.
Now let me give you a few examples of this. First in Acts chapter 10, we read in account how one day the apostle Peter is sent out by God to a gentile he’s never met before named Cornelius. The Lord spoke to Cornelius, a God-fearing man, in a vision and told him to send for Peter and so he does that. When Peter enters the household of Cornelius, a couple days later Cornelius starts to worship Peter. He falls down at his feet and he worships him, which leads to Peter’s response, don’t do that stand up, I too am a man.
Then later in the New Testament in the book of Revelation the apostle John, of all people, makes a similar mistake. He spontaneously falls down and worships an angel, only for the angel to respond similarly, you must not do that I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus, worship God.
Now if you’re anything like me, when we come across accounts like that in the scriptures, we’re probably taken aback by how confused you’d have to be to confuse a servant like Peter or an angel with the one that they serve, namely with the Lord. Now maybe we’re somewhat sympathetic because after all Peter was an important guy, he was an apostle and angels look strikingly otherworldly, at least that’s how Revelation invites us to imagine angels. To confuse a messenger of God with God himself would seem, at least in my mind, to be a pretty big error to make.
Yet I would submit that as foreign as those errors may appear to us, that a related kind of problem often persists in the church today. Now of course when I say that I don’t mean to suggest that the church is often prone to worshiping their pastors and their leaders. Fortunately, that’s never been my experience and I commend you for that. It is true, I think, that very often we forget or confuse who’s really in control of the church and who’s really calling the shots. We forget, as our confession puts it, that there is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ. We forget and confuse that it’s ultimately Jesus who empowers everything that we do. We forget that Jesus is the one who changes hearts and minds, it’s not us. We forget that ultimately the marching orders of Jesus are what we’re called to heed in our worship and work, not our personal preferences or our strategies that we make up of our own design. We sometimes forget that in the church all of us are ultimately held accountable to the head of the church, Jesus Christ.
Now by God’s grace, he raises up leaders and servants to shepherd his church and he uses such leaders and shepherds as instruments for his ministry. But above every leader, above every servant, and above every shepherd stands one head, Jesus Christ.
So, our big idea this morning is this, Stay fixed on the Son instead of on servants.
As we work through this passage and see this big idea developed, we’re going to unpack it in three parts. So, I have three points for us to think through or to work through.
1. The Faithfulness of God’s Appointed
2. The Greater Glory of God’s Anointed One
3. The Perseverance of God’s Adopted Ones
As we work through this text, I’ll transition us accordingly just so we get our bearings straight as we go along.
The Faithfulness of God’s
First let’s look at the faithfulness of God’s appointed ones. Now you may notice if you’re looking at your Bibles, and I’m using an ESV translation, but I think the NIV has something like this too, that there’s an editorial heading that introduces our passage that says Jesus is greater than Moses.
Now understand that these headings, they’re not part of scripture, they’re things that the editors of the various translations put into the scriptures to sort of help us keep our bearings and understand main highlights of this text or that text. In this case I think this is a very good summary that captures the main thrust of our passage.
Just like in Hebrews chapters one and two, where our author labored at length to tell us how Jesus was superior to the angels, well now in chapter three he shifts and tells us how Jesus is superior to another servant, in this case how he’s superior to Moses.
Before we dive into all the specifics and the specific comparisons our author draws between these two servants, these two figures, I think it’s worth stepping back a moment and asking ourselves the question why our author does that? After all there’d be a number of servants or shepherds that our author could have selected from the Old Testament against whom to compare and contrast Jesus, so why does he land, above all figures, on Moses?
At this point bear in mind something about Hebrews itself, and I’ve made this point before, bear in mind that Hebrews as a whole is written to people in their historical context who are faced with a very potent persuasion. They were faced with a persuasion to return to the old covenant administration of the temple and bloody sacrifices, all of which Christ had rendered obsolete through his life, death, and resurrection.
Nevertheless, they were faced with this theological fork in the road, as it were, either to persevere in Christ, even in the face of some intense persecution they were undergoing or alleviate that persecution and by doing so return to the old covenant way of doing things. Our author makes the point throughout Hebrews, including in this text, that to fail to persevere in Christ and to return instead to the old covenant would be a mistake. It would be to return to things which themselves pointed to Christ. To do so would be tantamount to even rejecting Christ. It would ultimately result, should they do that, in their spiritual death.
So given that primary emphasis and background that we encounter throughout the book of Hebrews, including in this passage, our author at this point draws Moses into the conversation. Moses in the Old Testament functioned as the mediator of the old covenant. He, as it were, stood in the gap in the old covenant between the Lord and his people.
We see Moses functioning in this way in a variety of texts in the Old Testament. On the one hand, we see that Moses served as a faithful representative of the Lord when he was, for example in the book of Exodus, summoned to climb Mount Sinai and receive the law of God. Then he descends from Mount Sinai with the law of God in his hands and proclaim the law to the people of God.
In that way Moses stood in the gap between God and his people, serving as God’s ambassador sent out to declare the will of God and ensure that God’s word and God’s law were adhered to by his people. Then on the other hand Moses was also a faithful representative of God’s people to God, by interceding on their behalf when, as a priest of sorts, he pleaded with God to show mercy after God’s people sinned in some terrible ways. They grumbled against God, and they deserve the judgment of God.
When we read through much of the Old Testament, it’s clear that Moses played a big role in all of these ways as the mediator of the old covenant. He represented, on the one hand, God before God’s people and, on the other hand, God’s people before God. The author of Hebrews, in remarking upon the one God appointed over his people in the old covenant, doesn’t intend to slight Moses or downplay play the role that he played in the slightest.
In fact, we notice in our text that the first thing he does in mentioning Moses is he commends him in verse 2. We read Moses was faithful in all God’s house. Now of course, to call Moses faithful doesn’t mean that Moses never sinned. We know that like every other human being, every other man and woman born in Adam, that Moses sinned. We learn from the first five books of the Bible, that Moses’ sin was the reason Moses was eventually prohibited from leading God’s people across the Jordan into the land of promise.
Nevertheless, as a sinner Moses, the author of Hebrews judges, was faithful in God’s house. He was faithful in serving among the people of God, which is what God’s house in this text refers to, it’s a reference to the church, the people that Moses was appointed to serve among. Theologically speaking the church is God’s great building project that’s born in the wilderness, we’ll come back to that point in our next point, and Moses was appointed in the church to shepherd the church in the old covenant. So, Moses was faithful in all of God’s house in the church of the Old Testament.
That’s very good news, but of course Moses, important as he is, isn’t the primary focus of our passage. From start to finish we see that the author of Hebrews points us to the one Moses himself pointed to. This is explicit in what our author tells us in verse one, where he urges his church, he urges you and me, to consider not Moses but instead to consider Jesus. Whereas the NIV translation puts it, “Fix your thoughts on Jesus”, who is then described for us as the apostle and high priest of our confession.
Now these two titles that are used to describe Jesus here in verse 1, apostle and high priest, also kind of fit Moses to some degree too. Moses was an apostle of sorts; an apostle simply means one who is sent out by God. Moses, as we just talked about was sent by God to represent God before God’s people. Although Aaron was the high priest not Moses, Moses also kind of served as a priest of sorts when he interceded on behalf of God’s people before God, we talked a little bit about that too.
Even though these two titles apostle and high priest can kind of describe Moses to some degree, our author doesn’t explicitly attribute them to Moses because only Jesus fills them perfectly. Jesus, we learn from the scriptures, is the faithful apostle, the one sent not from Egypt but from heaven as God’s perfect ideal and sinless representative and ambassador among us.
Jesus isn’t just a high priest in the mold of every other high priest who came along in Israel’s history, who represented God’s people before God. Instead, he’s the faithful high priest who offers, and we will learn this later on in Hebrews, who offers a single and complete sacrifice for sins that abolishes every other bloody sacrifice. Jesus, who unlike Moses, always lives to make intercession for his people.
So, Moses was faithful, that’s great news and Jesus was faithful and that’s good news too. However, Jesus’s faithfulness, in view of everything that we’ve already heard in Hebrews about the one who is Son, and in view of everything else we know of Jesus from the scriptures, takes on a weightier significance. This weightier significance our author is going to unpack for us in the next few verses, in verses 3 through 6.
Yet at this point in our passage, at least in the first two verses, our author’s emphasis lies not so much in the distance between Moses and Jesus, although to be sure there’s significant difference that we can draw between them, as much as it lies in the faithfulness of God who’s seen fit throughout human history to appoint faithful shepherds in and over his church.
Now Moses and Jesus, again, were unique shepherds, they were mediators who were given unrepeatable tasks to do. Jesus was the mediator par excellence, the mediator above every other mediator, who’s categorically distinct from Moses and distinct from you and me in a number of important ways. What both Moses and Jesus demonstrate through their ministries in and over the church, is that we have a God who’s absolutely committed to his church. We see his commitment chiefly above everything else.
When we do what our author urges us to do and that is consider Jesus, but we also see his commitment when we consider all of the various ministries that maybe we’ve benefited from in our own lives. Or from all the other servants that we’ve benefited from who God has raised up in human history and in church history including even today. Friends the Lord is faithful to his people, he’s faithful in shepherding his church, and we see his faithfulness in raising up faithful shepherds in the days of Moses and even beyond including today.
Yet now that our author has established the faithfulness of those whom he has appointed in history to lead his church, Moses and preeminently Jesus Christ we hear now explicitly that this is where any similarities between Jesus and Moses end.
The Greater Glory of God’s Anointed One
So, second, looking at verses three through six, we’re going to look at the greater glory of God’s anointed one Jesus Christ. Let me read for us, just to orient us back to the text, verses three through six where we read this,
3 For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. 4 (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) 5 Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, 6 but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
Hebrews 3:3-6, ESV
So now in these verses, our author begins to put some pretty significant distance between Jesus and Moses. We hear specifically that while both were faithful, Moses’s person and ministry wasn’t accompanied by nearly the same degree of glory that accompanied Jesus. This is a point that’s drawn out for us explicitly elsewhere in the New Testament too, particularly in 2 Corinthians 3. Now in that text, and if you have Bibles, you’re invited to turn with me there, I’m not going to dwell on that text too long, but I think there’s an important connection here.
In 2 Corinthians 3, the apostle Paul reflects quite a bit on Moses and specifically on what happened in the book of Exodus when Moses was called up on Mount Sinai to speak with God. Paul reflects a little bit about this and tells us that what happened when Moses functioned as an apostle of sorts and reminds us of what the book of Exodus narrates. Namely that when Moses, after he had gone up on Mount Sinai, and then he descended from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the law in his hand. His face radiated glory and this was symbolic of the covenant Moses mediated, the Mosaic Covenant.
Moses radiated glory and the covenant he mediated was a glorious covenant, but even though glory accompanied Moses and glory accompanied the covenant that Moses mediated at the same time, Paul reminds us of these things reflecting a little bit upon those events from the book of Exodus. Well, he also reminds us that the glory that accompanied Moses and the Mosaic Covenant was ultimately a fading glory, it wasn’t a lasting glory, it wasn’t a permanent glory. It was like the covenant Moses mediated, it, like Moses himself, destined to come to an end.
This Paul tells us stands in sharp contrast to the glory that accompanies Jesus Christ and the new covenant that Jesus Christ mediates, because Jesus’s glory isn’t a fading glory, it’s a permanent glory. Jesus’s glory, unlike Moses’, isn’t a derivative glory, it’s an innate glory. What Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3 about this glory contrast between Moses on the one hand and the greater glory of Jesus Christ and the new covenant on the other, is reflected here in Hebrews chapter 3. There we hear again that Jesus has been counted of more glory than Moses. To underscore this important point in Hebrews chapter 3, our author uses then two illustrations to sort of emphasize this point that Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses.
Here are the two illustrations. First, we hear that Jesus is counted worthy of more glory than Moses because, notice, he’s the builder of the house whereas Moses was only part of the house. Now Moses may have played an important role in the church of the Old Testament, but even still Moses was only part of it. More than that Moses only lived for a relatively short period of time in the history of the church’s existence.
On the other hand, Jesus is the builder, he’s the one who built the church, who himself is the everlasting and eternal God over the house who was building the church even before Moses existed. He is who was ultimately responsible for building the church, even when Moses served as a servant and who then continued building the church long after Moses was gone.
I like what the Heidelberg Catechism, another reformed confession we sometimes come back to in our worship services says on some of this stuff. In Heidelberg Catechism question and answer 54 we read this,
Q. 54.
What believest thou concerning the “holy catholic church” of Christ?
A.
That the Son of God
from the beginning to the end of the world,
gathers, defends, and preserves
to himself by his Spirit and word,
out of the whole human race,
a church chosen to everlasting life,
agreeing in true faith.
and that I am and forever shall remain,
a living member thereof.
Heidelberg Catechism Question and Answer 54
Did you hear that, from the beginning of the world to its end? Even in the days of Moses the Lord Jesus Christ has been building the church. What are the implications of what we read here in Hebrews and what we just read and considered in in Heidelberg Catechism question and answer 54? The implication is that in the history of God’s redemptive work, there’s only ever been one church, one people of God, one house over which the builder Jesus Christ, the Son of God rules, and reigns.
Understand, and I think this is a common mistake we sometimes make in the church, that the church didn’t simply come into existence in the New Testament, not at all. Rather the church took shape under the patriarchs in Genesis. The church was born in the wilderness in Exodus. The church is perfected in the new covenant under the glorious reign of Jesus Christ the Son of God. All along the way there was only ever one church, one people of God, one house built and established by the one and only Son of God, Jesus Christ. We, brothers and sisters, are part of this house through faith in Jesus Christ.
That’s not the only illustration that our author uses to reinforce Christ’s greater glory. Yes, he’s the builder and that’s glorious, but as we continue, we also notice that Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses because he’s also the owner of the house, whereas Moses is only a servant in the house. As the Son, the church is Jesus’s inheritance. Jesus has rights over the house just as an owner has rights over his or her own house. He gets to call the shots over his house over his people. Moses on the other hand serves at the pleasure of the owner, he’s responsible to do only what the owner of the house instructs him to do, no more and no less.
I remember as a child that there were times in my own home when I would sometimes break the rules of the house. It didn’t happen very often, I know that my parents might disagree with that assessment, but when I did break the rules of the house, I was often reminded by my parents that they’re the ones who pay the mortgage. They’re the ones who own the house and therefore I have a responsibility to submit to their rules as the owners of the house.
So, as it went in my home, and I’m sure it goes in your home too, so it goes in the house of God. Understand that every servant Moses or anyone else, including me or you or the elders or the deacons, we do not have rights to dictate what happens or what doesn’t happen in the church. All we get to do as elders specifically, is minister and declare the word of God as God’s ambassadors. We’re not the owners of this house and therefore we don’t get to write the rules, all we do is follow as best as we can what God has already authoritatively declared to us in and through his word.
One of the implications of this is that we also ought not to look to God’s servants to be and do for us what only God’s Son can be and do. Instead in all that we do as individual Christians, and as a church we take our marching orders from Jesus Christ the head of the church. We fix our thoughts above every other servant or minister or shepherd in God’s house, upon the chief shepherd Jesus Christ.
The Perseverance of God’s Adopted Ones
As the author of Hebrews wraps up our passage, we also learn that this is how we persevere as Christians and as a church. So, the third point is the perseverance of God’s adopted ones.
In preparation to dive into the end of verse six, we will also look at verse one, which is where we’re going to focus in this final point. Let me give a quick structural note about Hebrews. Throughout the book of Hebrews our author, and you may have noticed this already reading through Hebrews as we’ve preached it or in your own personal Bible reading plan, our author often weaves together these direct appeals that he makes to his audience. He says do this or don’t do that, with a robust theological support for those appeals.
To put it very simply when our author says, as he often does, you know do this or don’t do that, well he also graciously tells us why. This is what we find in our passage. If you’re looking at the text our author, you may notice, begins with a direct appeal to the church and to us; consider Jesus. He grounds that appeal in why we should consider Jesus. Because Jesus is superior, he’s superior to Moses, he has he’s worthy of more glory than Moses.
Then he comes back at the very end of the passage with another appeal, in this case an appeal for us to persevere in Christ. So, for this final point, I want to focus specifically on the author’s final appeal in verse 6, when he tells us what perseverance as Christians and what perseverance as a church ultimately entails. Before we even do that and we consider some of what this passage calls us the church to do along those lines, well we need to back up for a moment and remind ourselves very briefly who we are.
Look with me in verse one and notice how our author addresses the church right as he opens our passage, and by extension how he addresses you and me. We read in verse one,
1Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession,
Hebrews 3:1, ESV
Now sometimes, maybe if you’re like me I sometimes do this sometimes, our eyes can tend to glaze over introductory words like this in order to get to what we might consider the meat and potatoes of the passage. Yet it’s really important, friends, that we pause on those words because they tell us something vitally important. They tell us that anything that we are called to do in the Christian life or in the church has as its starting point, has as its foundation, what God has already done for us.
These words remind us that we’ve been set apart. That’s what holy means, it means that we’ve been sanctified or set apart as a unique and peculiar people. That work of setting us apart came from heaven as individual Christians and together as the body of Christ. We have been born of God; we were formed from nothing of our own doing into living stones. Then we were placed together by the divine mason to be God’s house. Then we became a fitting building for God to make his dwelling among us. None of that was of our own doing from start to finish. Who we are is credited exclusively to the Lord.
This unique and special status that we enjoy, which is emphasized for us in verse 1, also carries with it a responsibility. That responsibility is emphasized for us in verse 6 where we are called to persevere. We read in the second half of verse 6,
And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
Hebrews 3:6b, ESV
Now understand, and this is actually a really important note because these exhortations to persevere occur all over the place in Hebrews including in this text, we need to know that when our author exhorts the church to persevere that he’s not telling us that our perseverance as Christians is somehow hanging in the balance. Not at all. In fact, the scriptures teach us repeatedly that no true believer can ever finally fall away from Jesus Christ. Moreover, that the certainty of our perseverance is grounded in the certainty of God’s unfailing work.
Yet as Christians, with that in mind, we do have a responsibility to keep pursuing Christ throughout the entirety of our lives, to continue fixing our every thought upon Jesus Christ. In the words of verse six, we do that by holding fast to Christ with confidence and a boastful kind of hope.
So first the perseverance of that God demands of us is fueled by a spirit-empowered confidence in the promises of God. A confident trust that as Jesus Christ rules and defends his church, which he does as our king and our lord, rests in the truth that he has better blueprints for his church and offers better security over the church than anything we could dream up or imagine. It’s a confident trust that Christ is absolutely committed to his church. Even if and when the church suffers for their profession, as the church so often does throughout our history, a confident trust that the Lord Jesus Christ knows what he’s doing from start to finish.
Then second, we learn that the perseverance God demands of his church also holds fast to Christ with a hope that boasts. A hope that in whatever the ebbs and flows we experience in the church or from outside the church, whether it seems to our subjective opinions that the church the worldwide church is growing or shrinking, that Jesus Christ is objectively, unquestionably building his church just as he promises. Also, that we are and will continue to be a spiritual house that will not crumble nor collapse with the passing of time or through the wear and tear of foreign elements beating at our walls and our doors.
We’re called to hold fast to Christ, then with a hope that whatever we face, our Lord Jesus Christ is preserving us and more than that that he is leading us into glory and perfection. I think this boastful kind of hope that we’re called to embrace as we fix our eyes and thoughts on Jesus Christ the head of the church is captured for us very well in the classic hymn that we sing pretty often in church, The Church’s One Foundation. So, we prepare to close out this part and then dive into a couple ways of to apply this passage I want to leave you very simply with what verse 4 of that hymn says. Let me read,
The church shall never perish, her dear Lord to defend;
to guide sustain and cherish, is with her to the end.
Though there be those that hate her and false sons in her pale;
against her foe and traitor, she ever shall prevail.
The Church’s One Foundation, verse 4
Brothers and sisters may that be our gospel hope as we seek to persevere by fixing our eyes on Jesus as a church and as individual Christians too.
Application
With that said let me give us two applications as we prepare to close.
1. The first application is this, it’s a great question for all of us to ask ourselves, are you invested in the house of God, the church? Are you invested in the house of God, the church? Unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon today to hear the belief expressed among even professing Christians that the church isn’t altogether important or necessary for Christians. Now perhaps you’ve heard the sentiment before that you can of course love Christ and you can belong to Jesus, but you don’t need to belong to the church nor love the church.
Yet the New Testament just doesn’t support that popular understanding of how things work. To belong to Christ, in other words, the scriptures teach us necessarily implies that we also belong to his body the church. The various metaphors that are used throughout the New Testament to describe the people of God makes this, I think, abundantly clear.
For example, the way the apostle Peter puts it in 1 Peter is that the church is a spiritual house made up of living stones, held together by the cornerstone Jesus Christ. Now as living stones it would be unnatural, no it would be unthinkable, for us to be separated from the house. In fact, our very purpose is realized only when we’re ordered among all the other living stones. Or consider the metaphor of a body, another metaphor for the house of God, the church, that we encounter so often in scripture. We are as one body made up of knees and arms and legs, and as such it would be unfitting, unthinkable, to be severed from the rest of the body. In fact, our very survival is in jeopardy if we try to exist as a body part apart from the body and apart from the head.
Belonging to the church then isn’t just an added benefit to the Christian life for us to take advantage when it suits us or when we need a little extra help. In the Christian life, brothers and sisters, it is a necessity when Christ saves us, he saves us into a people. More particularly he saves us into a local people, a local church where the ordinary means of grace where word and sacrament and prayer are regularly dispensed for our spiritual maturity and discipleship. A local church where we come under the instruction and discipline and discipleship of ordained leaders who are looking out for our spiritual good. A local church where we commit ourselves in the good times, and especially in the bad, to one another flesh and blood. Actual real-life people, who in turn commit themselves to you and me too.
Brothers and sisters, I recognize that perhaps some of you may not have had healthy experiences in the church or maybe you’re just not convinced that God actually calls us in the scriptures to be members of local churches. If that’s you I’d love to talk to you about what membership in the scriptures looks like, how the scriptures envision church membership, and even what church membership could look like for you here at Harvest Community Church. If not at Harvest, brothers and sisters, let me exhort you be members of a local church, belong to local churches.
Recognize that in Christ, if you come to believe in Christ, that you’re part of his body, his house. You can’t get away from that and so the exhortation in light of that is live out that distinctive by actually committing yourself to the local church. That’s the first application.
2. The second application is this, are you trusting in Jesus Christ to lead and guide his house, his church? So if you are a part of a local church, do you recognize that over everything we do Jesus Christ and Jesus alone gets to call the shots? In everything and in anything we do, Jesus Christ is ultimately the one who shapes hearts and minds for his glory.
Listen to what the 19th century Scottish theologian James Barreman says on this, I think what he says is very accurate, very salient, he writes this. “The church has no store of life apart from Christ being in it. The ordinances of the church have no deposit of grace apart from Christ present with them. The office bearers of the church have no gift, or power, or authority, or action apart from Christ ruling and acting by them. It is most important to remember that it is in this high and very peculiar sense that we are to understand the expression that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only head of the church.”
Friends, in the local church you should expect things from your leaders. There are qualifications set out for us in the New Testament for both elders and deacons and you should expect your ordained leaders to match up to those qualifications. Not perfectly, mind you, but you should expect a general adherence to them. You should also expect your leaders to care about what God has to say about things in his word and to minister, above everything else, according to the scriptures.
Yet I would also submit that many frustrations we experience in church life either arise because, one leaders think that they’re more than servants and act like it, or two members expect them to be more than servants, or three all of us together expect certain things of the church that Jesus Christ does not permit nor promise nor call his church to.
That being said, know that there is one who is head over the church, and I promise you it’s not me and it’s not you. The only head of the church, the only one who will not disappoint us in the context of the church, the only one who can feed and nourish us in the heights of our joy and in the depths of our woes is Jesus Christ. The one who is more than faithful over the worldwide universal church, spread throughout all the corners of the earth. The one who is more than faithful over his local church, even our little local church here in Omaha, Nebraska.
Harvest Community Church trust in Jesus to lead and guide his church, because after all he’s the builder, he’s the owner, and he is the faithful head of his church.
Pray with me.