As a living body united in Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit, the purpose of Grace Baptist Church is to enable our fellowship to know God personally, to love God completely, to love one another and to share God’s love with all people.

     I am postponing our study in James to help Grace focus on the purpose to which God has called us. For those of you who were able to attend the June 11th quarterly business meeting, I hope that you recognize the new purpose statement that was adopted that day. For those of you that were not present, let me introduce to you the new purpose statement of Grace Baptist Church. Yes, allow your eyes to focus again at the top of the page and reread that opening sentence. Let it rumble around in your mind. Go ahead—meditate, cogitate, ruminate, contemplate, excogitate or even deliberate on it. I hope it makes you stop and think again of what your relationship with Christ is all about.

     Our purpose statement has two important components. The first focuses on “being”, the second focuses on “doing”. Today I want to unpack the “being” part of our purpose statement. We find it in the opening clause: “As a living body united in Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit…” When the purpose statement committee began its work, it first turned to the Bible. We read many New Testament passages about the church and recognized an important context for Christ’s church: the church is a living organism not an organization.

     Paul loved to use the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ (Romans 12.4-8, 1 Corinthians 12.12-31); New Testament writers describe believers as “a living sacrifice” (Romans 12.1) and as “living stones” to be “built into a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2.4-5); John chooses the metaphor of “the bride, the wife of the lamb” to describe the church (Revelation 21.9-27). Behind each of these images lies the context of life and that the church is organic at its very core.

     It is the Holy Spirit who endows the church with this life—this sense of being. Romans 8 says it this way:
But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. (vss. 10-11)

     So the first component of our purpose statement is the realization that God’s church is a living organism that draws her life from the presence of the Holy Spirit.