The Church Building
- Ashland Church of Christ
- Jan 19
- 14 min read
Updated: Feb 10
Guest Pastor J Cook
January 19, 2025
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Transcribed by Turbo Scribe
You know, I got to be honest with you, this week I was thinking about the message, and I remembered that this was the place where I had my very first sermon, ever. And I was standing right here, Sunday night, and my brother and priest on Sunday morning, my folks were going on vacation, that was my, I think it was the summer of my freshman year at Bible College. And I remember that I was so stinkin' nervous, I mean, just saying it to old people, that it made me so nervous.
And I thought, my tongue was like a big ol' quarter pounder cheese grater. I mean, I started to deliver, and I lost my place in my sermon. I told them about the apostles, their doctrine, the trinity, I think a pre-millennial of all of them, Moses, Jonah.
I think I listened to everything that I knew. This will go a little bit better than what it did. I want to start off by taking a poll, if we can.
I realize that we normally don't ask for feedback, but I'm going to ask by a show of hands here. Just some questions. And the question is, when you were born, your family had a particular religious background or persuasion.
And I'm always fascinated when I look at a church, and you always assume that everybody was an anti-Semitic Christian church. When in reality, we come from such a variety of backgrounds. So I'd like to ask that if you came out of, let's say, a Methodist background.
Can I see a show of hands? Ooh, we've got Bethany here. Okay. What about Presbyterian? Any Presbyterian? Lutheran background? Missouri Synod? American Synod? The LCA.
The LCA. All right. Church of a brother? That's a little bit... Okay.
Church of God? Assembly of God? There we go. Baptists? How many Baptists? You've always got Baptists. How many Baptists are sneaky? They just kind of sneak in and infiltrate your churches.
It's a sad, sad deal. I don't know. You know how many Baptists you have to take a mission with? You've got to take two.
If you take only one, you'll drink all your beer. Any Episcopals? Episcopal? All right. What about Disciples of Christ? The Christian Church of the Disciples of Christ.
What about non-instrumental Church of Christ? Okay. How many of us are Christian Church people? How many are from Christian Church? Isn't it amazing that God... It seems like somehow, randomly, people all of a sudden show up together. And they find a cohesiveness.
They find some things that they are centered in together. And it almost seems as if it's an accident or some kind of fate. But in reality, the Bible makes it clear that God builds His Church.
And that He's got specific people in mind. And your uniqueness to this body of believers is something that He expects you and you alone to use for His honor and glory. I want to talk to you about the Church being used as a metaphor for... It's described in so many different ways.
It's a family. It's a kingdom where there were citizens. Other Scriptures talk about the Church being a body.
But I'd like to talk about the Church being a building today. It's one of the lesser-used metaphors concerning the Church. And I've got to tell you, I think that we often make a mistake.
We often make it seem as if that this is a temple. I mean, there's a lot that happened through the years. I remember when you and I were talking to my mom and dad, we'd say, Oh, yeah, we're at the sanctuary.
We'd run when our parents weren't looking. And if you're running in God's house, you don't do this. We have the altar and that kind of thing.
There's all sorts of imagery that we throw into that, which is not in reality. The Bible makes it clear that God doesn't dwell in a house made with man's hands. This is not the temple of God.
This is not even God's house, forgive me. But it's not God's house. It's a house that has been dedicated to the worship and praise of God.
But it's not His house. God does not live in the Ashwood Church of Christ. And so it's important today that we look at the passages of Scripture and kind of set ourselves straight, kind of readjust some of our thinking.
I don't think there's a thing that is going to be unique or particularly provocative. But nonetheless, I'd like to say a word of prayer. And then I'd like for you to go with me to 1 Peter 2, verses 4 and 5. I can give you that again.
1 Peter 2, verses 4 and 5. Pray to God. Lord, nothing but Your will. No more than what You want to relay to us.
No less. Nothing but. I pray in Jesus' name.
You are coming to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God's temple. He was rejected by people, but He was chosen by God for great honor. And You are living stones that God is building into His spiritual temple.
That, what's more, You are His holy priest. Through the mediation of Jesus Christ, You offer a spiritual sacrifice to the places of God. We are God's building.
There's a story about the king of Sparta in ancient Greece who boasted to a visiting monarch about the mighty walls of Sparta. But the guest looked around and he didn't see any walls. And he finally said to the host, I'd like to see those walls that you keep boasting about and show them to me.
The Spartan ruler pointed to the great satisfaction of some of the disciplined and well-trained troops of Sparta's mighty army and exclaimed, There they are. Those are the walls of Sparta. Jesus uses that same type of imagery when it comes to the church.
We're the living walls. We're living stones, the Bible says, built up in a spiritual house. Ephesians 2, verse 19 says, So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners.
You are citizens along with God's holy people. You are members of God's family. Together we are His house.
Let me say that again. Together we are His house built on the foundation of the Apostle and Apostles by the prophets. And the cornerstone is Jesus Christ Himself.
We are carefully joined together now. King James would say, We are fitly framed together. I want to get back to that point in just a minute.
Becoming a holy temple for the Lord. Through Him, you Gentiles are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by His Spirit. I want to talk to you about the integrity of the building.
In the construction of a building, there can be no misalignment of stones that make up the wall. Therefore, it would be, obviously, a much weaker structure. Everything is closely joined together and knit together.
King James again says that we were fitly framed together. The one who did that was God. The Church of Jesus Christ draws us together, bonds us together in a way that nothing else can.
I'm amazed when I go, it's been 36 years, I think it was, since the first Christian in Jacksonville. And the variety of people, of backgrounds, people that you could very quickly say, here's some wealthy people, here's some dirt poor people, here's some college educated people, here's some people that got their GED. It makes a little difference.
They're here together and they seem to find a comfortability that wasn't necessarily there by chance. Something made it to where they could be cohesive. They could work together.
As you look around you at this physical building, it was nothing originally but just a pile of building materials. Period. There was a stack of two-by-fours in the lumberyard.
There was a pile of nails in the hardware store. There were squares of carbon in somebody's warehouse. There was concrete that hadn't even been created yet.
But now due to great planning and a lot of hard work and expertise, all those pieces and hundreds more have come together and been joined into one unit. The same is true of God's building, the church. I marvel at the fact that you can go to any church, like we just did our little experiment, your backgrounds are totally different.
Not only that, but your preferences in life, your walk of life might be different. Some of you who are farmers might bleed John Deere green. Some of you might use red farmers.
Some of you prefer Ford pickup trucks while others prefer Chevy and Dodge. Let's do this great experiment too. How many Ford pickup truck people do we have? Chevy and Dodge.
Wow. Wow. You guys are divided and didn't even know it.
You know, we might have some here today that would have been some of your Democrats, some of your Republicans. Whoa, you want to start a church party? Go ahead and do that. Some of you are St. Louis Cardinal fans and some of you are Coach fans.
But Jesus Christ, the master architect and master builder has taken us and put us together, joining us together in this building, joining us together at heart and purpose and mindset. We look at our country today and we see that it's in disarray. And I dare say down to a single person, would there be any of us that didn't say, you know what we could use? We could use instead a lot more Democrats and Republicans.
We could use a lot more Godliness, a revival of the Holy Spirit. We could all be in full rigor. Regardless of the differences we might have, we bind ourselves with a certain cohesiveness, a unit together.
The Bible says, but now in Christ Jesus, you who are once far away, you've been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace, who has made the both one. Second thing I want to point out is there's always a need for a blueprint. There's got to be a purpose behind it.
I don't know how that God seems to know who to pick and somehow what place in their lives. Sometimes he has to use hardship and heartache to get us to move in a direction. It's amazing how you didn't randomly someday come here.
I have an invitation from his Holy Spirit to, when it comes to the tabernacle years ago in the Old Testament, if you follow along, God was extremely explicit in what kind of polls and how many polls and how wide and how long and everything about it was details. That was the thing. It's the same thing with the temple.
God, it took over seven years and a thousand workers to try and create that temple. And much of it had to do with the fact that God was very specific. He didn't say, hey, make a nice building.
He told them specifically how he wanted things and how he wanted them from place to place. You know, I find it fascinating when it comes to the temple to remember that they've taken a whole heck of a lot less time had it not been for the fact that the quarries that they got the stone from were miles and miles away. The Bible says, well, here, let me read it for you.
The stones used in the construction of the temple were finished at the quarry, so there was no sound of hammer, listen to this, ax, or any other iron tube at the building site. Can you imagine how much more time that took to prepare everything miles away and then to bring it together and haul it back over there to where they did it together like Legos. They did it together to where it wasn't forced in place.
God placed it completely together. The one thing that unites us together, and I think it's one of the biggest problems, the church as a whole in the United States is divided. It was never intended to be divided.
The blueprint has always been what does the church of God want to do as far as just looking and seeing how God would respond, how Jesus would respond and react to certain things and deal with it. But you look and we've got so many different types of denominations that were all man-made in the very beginning. And I'm not here haughtily to say that we're the right ones and they're all wrong.
They probably know a lot of things. But the truth is when there's separation and when there's differences, many times it's because we've turned away from the Word of God and turned to our own devices. Do you know something fascinating about God's church, the building? It's never complete.
It never has been, never will be, until he comes again. I remember reading about a construction site, Sarah Winchester, the heir of the fortune from Winchester Rifles. She inherited $20 million and had an additional income of $1,000 a day.
That was a tremendous sum. Now, in the late 1800s, it was even more. She moved to California and she bought an eight-room apartment house with 160 additional acres adjoining her.
She hired 16 carpenters and put them to work. For the next 38 years, a crew worked 24 hours a day to build a mansion. When she died, which she assumed that she wouldn't die because she was told that as long as there was a building and a house, she would not die.
But she did it anyway, inevitably. The house that she started with now covered six acres. It had six kitchens, 13 bathrooms, 40 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 52 skylights, 467 doors, 10,000 windows, 160 rooms, and a bell tower.
And the house was never finished. I think that describes what happens to God's building. He's been building from the day of Pentecost.
Michael says that God added daily those who were being saved. Little by little, He adds brick by brick, mortar by mortar. We recognize that Christ, the cornerstone, has set the direction of the size of our church and we need to also be very aware that we're all unique.
And God has a plan for you in this place. You know, it's uncomfortable. God doesn't want us to be content with, hey, what you did for that church of Christ in Nashville.
I sit in the pew on Sunday and I listen to the sermon and I sing. It might be gosh-awful singing, but it's nonetheless I sing. I wasn't out in that part, so I was hearing bad singing, incidentally.
The truth is, you guys are very gifted with that. Every time there's a baptism, every time someone has added to the body of Christ, another stone is set into place. A room here, a fireplace there.
You know, I look at Rick and think, well, is he to the church of Christ? I think he's a fathead. One of the things downstairs, one of those wacky fatheads. Wouldn't mean it to be a nice idea.
You know, I look at my job at Bush-Krishnick for 36 years. It was the seventh minister that they'd had. There's Ron Bottins and then Ray Blow, Fred Fish, Larry Dinsmore, Tom Moore, Howard Bloom, who had installed in their apartment the ongoing structure of what was happening.
But the truth is that I had set a point just from building off of what they'd already built. I didn't take their place. I just simply was adding as God gave me the ability to add.
First Corinthians says, because of God's grace to me, I have laid the foundation like an expert builder. Now others are building on it, but whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful or no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have, Jesus Christ. It's the same way here in this congregation.
We've served as a construction crew, but there are now who continue to build and do what's right. I think one of your strongest things is that it's already been mentioned by Rick. You guys have a tremendous amount of young people.
Do you realize how many churches would give their right arm to have a bunch of little children coming in there? The truth be known, we had people that were arguing and complaining, which I know is unusual for a church. You would never see that. But we had finger hearts all over our windows out in front.
Little kids would come busting through there. They'd put their hands on it, and they'd have finger hearts all over it. I said, do you realize the churches that would do anything have finger hearts? On the windows out there in front.
The truth is, God is placing us in a spot where he's uniquely built us, and he's uniquely made us. He's got something in mind for our church. There's a purpose, and there's a direction for Asheville Church of Christ.
An old man trapped in a low and high way came to an evening cold and gray, to a chasm vast and deep and wide, through which was flowing a swollen tide. The old man crossed into twilight, and the swollen stream held no pierce for him. The church went safe to the other side of the building bridge to span the tide.
Old man cried, fellow pilgrim near, you're wasting your time in a building here. Your journey will end here at the closing day. You'll never again pass this way.
You have crossed the chasm deep and wide. Why jail you this bridge at evening time? The pilgrim looked at his old gray head. Good friend in the path I have come, he said.
There are almost two minutes after me today. A youth whose feet must pass this way. This stream which has been a challenge to me, to that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
You too must cross into twilight day, my good friend. I'm building the bridge for you. The truth we know.
In ten, fifteen years, will these same children have a church home somewhere? They're not going to have a national, many of them. The economy and everything else is keeping them from staying local here. But will they have found a place here that's so inviting? A place that was so filled with warmth and love and acceptance and embraced them.
Will it do what it needs to do to watch missionaries, if you will, out of other churches and be strong in the faith because of what you have done here today? You know, the Bible makes it clear. You have that one cornerstone. The Bible tells us that everything is in Christ.
In Him. By Him. Through Him.
Through His blood. By His death. And we are just living stones joined together on that foundation.
You know, the Taj Mahal is regarded as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Well, you may not know this, how the building of that structure came about. It was begun at the death of the wife of the Emperor Shah Jahan.
He was devastated at her death and resolved to honor her by constructing a temple that would serve as her tomb. Her coffin was placed in the center of a large parcel of land and construction of the temple began. No expense would be spared to make her final resting place magnificent.
As the weeks turned into months, the Shah's grief over his wife's death turned into a passion for a building project instead. He no longer mourned her absence. The construction consumed him.
One day, while walking from one side of the construction site to the other, his leg had been bumped into an old, dirty box. The prince brushed the dust off of his leg and ordered the worker to throw the box out. What he didn't realize was that he had ordered the disposal of the coffin of his late wife.
And so the one temple that was intended to honor was forgotten, but a temple was created anyway. There are lots of churches today that continue to build and build and try to impress men. But in reality, we need to keep in mind one thing.
We need to keep in mind that he has to be the center, the cornerstone of all of us. That Jesus blessed us as a church. He's the right size right now.
He's got you here for something right now. Yet each one of us realizes that he's going to use us. Use you uniquely.
Where is the area where he has impassioned you? Thank you, Father. Thank you that you're creating a building that honors this person. May it not be disavowed.
The size and the shape of you already nested in that heart. Hearts and minds to be what you call us to be. Father, I just pray that you would strengthen us with your spirit.
That you would continue your good work here. And we just give thanks for what you've already done.
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