Park Cities Presbyterian Church (PCA)

How Jesus transforms the church

by Skip Ryan

June 12, 1994

Ephesians 5:24–30

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Ephesians 5:24-30: Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of His body.

This is a familiar passage from the book of Ephesians about husbands and wives, and I have preached on this passage in application to husbands and wives and marriages.

But I also want you to note something else about this passage: The basis of Paul’s little marriage manual which he gives us here in Ephesians 5 is the relationship which Jesus Christ has to His bride, the church. There are many symbols or metaphors for the church that are in the Bible. For example, the church is called the people of God or the assembly of God or the body of Christ. But here the church is described as the bride of Christ. In the Old Testament, the gracious covenant which God made with His people Israel was many times described as a marriage covenant, as a relationship, a covenant in which God binds Himself in covenant love to His people.

Jesus takes over this image and calls Himself the Bridegroom in many places in the Gospels. In the book of Revelation we are given a dramatic picture of the church that is prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

One of the things which most of us who have been married for any length of time know is that it is wrong to enter into our marriages with the idea in mind that we are going to change our spouses. But in the marriage covenant of Christ and His bride, the church, the covenant itself calls for the bride to be changed, indeed, for the bride to be transformed by the relationship that she has with her Bridegroom.

And so the question is this: How does Jesus change us? How does He transform the church?

I want to propose to you that there is possibly no more significant question for the people of God today, because there is a lot of false or misguided teaching which puts the emphasis in the wrong places on this subject that abounds today broadly in the church of Christ. How does Jesus change us, His bride, the church?

According to verse 25 of this passage, the answer is this: Christ changes us by loving us. “Christ loved the church” is what it said there. Christ’s love for the church is not to be understood as a sentiment. It’s not primarily to be understood as a feeling or an impulse.

And this, of course, is really true about human love as well. The best of human love is not a feeling. We speak of love as if it were something that happens to us. We are struck by love like being struck with lightening—out of the blue—almost against all reason. And so, in talking about romance, we often use an expression like this: “I fell in love,” as if I fell off a cliff.

But for Christ, love is not a feeling. For Jesus Christ, love is not an impulse. Love is not something that strikes Him. Jesus does not fall in love with His bride; rather He purposes to love us. Earlier in the book of Ephesians, Paul says that God’s love caused Him to determine to set His love upon us and that He did it from before the foundation of the world. In God’s mind He knew that we would exist, and in His foreknowledge of us, as the Bible calls it, in His apprehension of our future existence, He purposed to love us.

It is a decision that is soberly made. It is not compelled by any external influence. There is nothing that influences God to love you. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about that. I don’t know if that comes as a bracing shock of cold water for you, but you and I are not a lovely bride in and of ourselves for the Bridegroom to love. In and of ourselves, there is nothing that is intrinsically worthy of God’s love. In fact, if we’re honest, as we read the New Testament, we would have to say that the whole emphasis there is that the love of God for us, expressed in Christ, happens when God should have hated us!

In the book of Romans Paul says that God loved us and reconciled us to Himself while we were His enemies. I want you to really think of the force of that for just a minute. I want you to see the overwhelming, transforming, marvelous, empowering, equipping, graceful love of Christ, which is only seen against the backdrop of how completely and totally unworthy of it we are. We were God’s enemies. We were running from God.

People say that so-and-so is “searching for God.” Well, in a certain sense I think that’s true. If God’s Spirit is at work on them, people are having their hearts changed, and they may well be searching for God. But often we use that expression as a way of being nice to somebody who really doesn’t know Christ at all, and we say, “Oh, he’s a searcher.”

Maybe. But a lot of people aren’t searching for God at all. A lot of people are running from God. A lot of people are, if they are honest, God’s enemies!

So when Paul says that God reconciled Himself to us while we were yet His enemies, it is a remarkable statement of the love of the Bridegroom for His bride.

What I want you to see is the transforming power of the love of Christ. I want you to see that the love of Christ is the only thing that can change your heart. Here I would like to speak to those of you who have known Christ for many years. You’ve grown up in the church. You would say that you are a Christian and, indeed, you are. You are going to heaven, but I want you to see that your hearts need to be changed.

I want you to see that the greatest work of conversion is yet ahead. I want you to see that the biggest, largest, grandest thing that God intends to do with your life is yet before you as He changes you and transforms you by the love He has set upon you in His Son. Let’s look at three ways the love of Christ is expressed in this passage.

Sacrificing love

The first is what Paul says right at the beginning of the passage: “Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” For Christ, love is not what love feels. Love is what love does. There is no way to define love or even to recognize it apart from the actions that express it. The love of Christ for us, the church, means that He gave up Himself for us. Think what that means. He gave up the right, the prerogatives, of being God.

That’s what Christ, our Bridegroom, did. He gave up the pleasure of being in God’s presence. He gave up the holy distance He enjoyed from human sin and pain. And He gave up the unnecessary-ness of death. As the eternal Son of God, it was not necessary for Christ to die. He was eternal. He was alive forevermore. But He gave up that eternal privilege out of love.

In Romans 5:6 Paul puts it this way—Christ’s giving Himself up in love means this—“God demonstrates His own love for us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” In romantic love we talk about an undying love. But in the gospel of the love of God we are rather to talk about a dying love, a love that gives even to the point of death.

I wonder if you’ve noticed in your own experience that love changes you. On a human level, when someone loves you, it really has the catalytic power in your life to change you. When you are loved you are transformed by that love, and the degree of the transformation correlates to the depth and extent of love.

When I was in graduate school I had a friend from Uganda by the name of Cafa Simpangi. He was deep black in color, and his eyes were as bright and shining as stars. He had a piercing quality to the love in his life that was born out of enormous suffering in his country of Uganda when Idi Amin took over and bankrupted the country and persecuted Christians, including this man, who was a pastor of a very significant church in the capital of Uganda, Kampala.

One of the things that Cafa recounts is that during the time of persecution, Idi Amin’s soldiers would come to the worship gatherings and line up in the back with their guns. Gradually they would take people away from the services, one by one, either from the service itself or during the week. They would take people away and imprison them or shoot them, for that was the cost of what it meant to be a follower of Christ in Uganda in those days.

Cafa tells the story of one soldier who came to their meetings in order to pluck off more believers, to take them away. And yet, in the meeting itself he began to be loved by the very people whom he was hating. They began to care for him. They began to inquire after him. They began to be concerned about him. The cold hardness of his heart was melted and he, in fact, betrayed Idi Amin to become a follower of Jesus Christ.

The degree of the transformation which love brings into our life correlates to the depth and extent of that love. And if this is true in our human experience, how much more is it true in our knowledge of Christ’s love—He gave Himself. The self-giving of Christ’s love is measured by nothing less than the distance from the throne of God’s grace at His right hand to a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem.

The greater the sacrifice of love, the stronger is its compelling force to bend the rigid hardness of our proud hearts. The greater the sacrifice of love, the hotter is its fire to melt the icy hardness of our frozen composure. The greater the sacrifice of love, the sharper is its knife to cut through the polite and socially proper distance we keep from each other.

Saving love

Paul describes the ability of the strong, fiery, sharp love of Christ to transform us in a second way. Not only does Christ give Himself, but He also says He saves us. We get this from the word “Savior” in verse 23. The love of Christ means that He addresses the most pronounced place of unloveliness in us, the place of our active rebellion against God, the place which the Bible calls sin.

In Scripture, sin is not simply that wrong action or thought; rather sin is the peril, the sheer danger of being separated from God. God has all life and goodness in Himself. Apart from Him there is no life and goodness. Christ is called the Savior of the church because He saves us from that peril, the peril of being separated from His life and goodness. If your child runs into the street before an oncoming car, your love for your child will compel you to leap into the street to save or to rescue your child. That’s what Christ, as Savior, does. He leapt into the roadside of the world to rescue us from the peril of sin and the consequences of sin, which are separation from the life and goodness of God. The extent to which love goes is the measure of its ability to transform us.

Transforming love

The third way that the love of Christ transforms the church and changes us is to make our living and our thinking match the accomplishment achieved by saving us. Let me explain. If the child whom you love and have saved from peril by diving into the street has a dirty face, will you, after you’ve saved your child from the peril of death, refrain from washing your child’s face? Now it’s a silly illustration, but it is an argument from the greater to the lesser. If you leap before an oncoming car to save your child, then certainly you will take the trouble to make sure she has her bath.

This is the way Paul argues in Romans 8—from the greater to the lesser. “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him, freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

Paul says that if God did the greatest thing in giving us His Son, won’t He give us everything else that we need, too? This is the way Paul puts it in Ephesians 5:25–26:

Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish...

If Christ loves us and saves us at such enormous cost, then will He not change our inner dispositions? Will He not change our attitudes? Will He not change and transform the patterns of our living, the habits of our hearts, so that we become more suited to receive that transforming love from Christ?

Note that Christ does not first make us holy and then love us. No, He loves us first, and then that very love is at work in our hearts, making us holy. Let me put it to you this way: When someone truly loves you, even on a human level, is it not your desire to do something that is good and right and wholesome and pure for that person? When someone deeply loves you, do you return for their love evil out of your heart, or selfishness? No, even on a human level the love of another person changes your heart and makes you somehow want to respond in kind.

Christ washes us with the water, with the Word. He loves us so much that He cannot and will not leave us unchanged. But the very love that He has for us will compel our hearts to want to become more as God would have them be.

Christ makes us holy, not by one kind or any kind of a “zap,” not a once-and-for-all phenomenon, but by a relationship in which the Bridegroom speaks to His bride by His Word, Paul says here in verse 26. What does the Word of Christ teach us about? It teaches us about the power of the love and the grace in the covenant of God to change our hearts.

This is the way Paul puts it later in his letter to Titus. These are good, strong words: “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say ‘No’ [the grace of God teaches us to say no!] to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age...” The word “teach” there is the word for “argue.” The idea is that the grace of God argues with your heart. The grace of God says, “Don’t live that way! Don’t be that person!” Don’t be that old person, because the grace of God is the equipping power, by virtue of its persuasion, to change you and make you more like Christ.

The wonderful hymn we know well says it clearly:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee.
From thy riven side which flowed.
Let the water and the blood
Be of sin the double cure.
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

Do you see what sin is like? Jesus’ sacrifice, His death on the cross, was efficacious for your guilt from sin because by faith you now believe in Him and are a follower of Christ. But now that same wonderful work of Christ on the cross by grace not only cleanses you from the guilt of sin but from its power over your life.

Christ gives us the dying affection of His heart in order that we would give Him the living affection of our hearts. And yet, so many of us, if we’re honest, are not alive. Even as Christians, we are weighed down by the habits and patterns of sin. Oh, they may not seem like such sinful habits and patterns, but they are patterns and habits of selfishness. They are thoughts centered on me, my stuff, my time, my energy, my this, my fun, my games, my vacations, my life. And we are overwhelmed, even as people who are going to heaven, with a lack of spiritual reality in life, if we’re honest.

Richard Lovelace, a wonderful writer, puts it this way ( I preach this to myself as I preach it to you. These are hard words):

It is not surprising that many congregations which are full of regenerate people are nevertheless not very alive spiritually. Most congregations of professing Christians today are saturated with a kind of dead goodness, surface righteousness, which does not spring from faith and grace and the Spirit’s renewing action, but rather springs from religious pride and conditioned conformity to tradition.

You will never know how good you can be until you get rid of the false expectations and role-playing which the Christian subculture of our time puts upon you. You will never know how good you can be until you see how truly wicked you are, and that the power of Christ’s blood, by grace, to transform us is absolutely staggering.

I must tell you that I love you and that I want you to be changed, dear people. I do not want to be the pastor of a congregation that is socially proper and dead at its core. I want to be a pastor of a church that is the transforming presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in Dallas and to the world, but here’s the point: We cannot transform Dallas or the world until we ourselves are transformed by the power of the grace of God. Let the love of God overwhelm you. Let the power of grace change you. Don’t go for quick fixes. It’s a long process, this dying to self and living to Christ. But it’s a great process.

If all of our hopes are going to come true, they’re going to come true because we experience the reality of the Bridegroom’s love and grace in our lives, day by day, in our living. Dear friends, let that grace shatter you, and let it overwhelm you, and let it transform you.

O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee.
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

That’s my prayer for us. Amen.