The question today, which we answered partially last week is: what is the church?

And what we're going to do is dig a little deeper into that today. What I want to do is ask the question, if the church is, and then I want to put a word in there and answer, then what do members do or what do they ask?

For example, if the church is a country club, then what do good members do? Well, if it's a country club, good members, you know, attend the club, they pay their dues, something like that.

Or if the church is a business or a corporation, what do good members do? Well, they attend the meetings and they do what they can to attract customers and attract consumers to it. Or if the church is a lecture series, then you attend the lectures, you listen well.

If the church is a theater or a concert or something like that, you watch and you evaluate the performance that you've seen. Or if the church is just a counseling center, you come and you seek help for yourself, you maybe help others. How we look at or how we define the church really determines how we act in relationship to it.

What we think about the church determines how we act in the church. And this is really an important question and it's really not a simple answer as we'll see. Last week we saw that God creates the church by the power of the of the life-changing grace of the gospel. Jesus is purifying Himself for Himself.

A people of his own possession we looked at last week, a peculiar people we saw, a different kind of people, and that's what Jesus is doing. And the church was God's idea. God established the church, God maintains the church, so God has already defined the church. We are not free to define the church ourselves. It's already been defined for us.

One simple definition does not suffice to answer the question. The answer is rich and it's varied. We're going to use a set of metaphors that help us understand the identity of the church and the nature of the church. The point is that all believers are part of the church and are called to act as members of it.

We'll look specifically at six metaphors and understand the nature of the church with all the attending privileges and responsibilities. We'll dig into a little bit of what it means for us and I hope that we are encouraged as well as challenged to think rightly about it, to act rightly in the church, and to do so in a way that helps us grow because that's what it does.

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