Living as the Household of God – Part 1

In this brief, but massive section of scripture as far as depth of meaning is concerned, Paul writes to tell Timothy that he was planning on visiting Ephesus before long. But, just in case he was detained, he wanted Timothy to know how to carry out his temporary pastoral duties in the meantime. Since 1 Timothy was a private letter to be shared in a public manner in the church, Paul also wanted to remind the Ephesians to join in ministry with their pastor by following his leadership, which began by behaving themselves in the household of God. From what we have seen in 1 Timothy so far, the kind of conduct the apostle has in mind includes proper doctrine (1 Tim. 1:1–20), proper gender relations (1 Tim. 2:1-15), and proper spiritual leadership (1 Tim. 3:1–13) in the church.

We don’t know for sure how this letter fits with Paul’s itinerary in the book of Acts. Nor is it known if his travels ever brought him back through Ephesus after all. But in the providence of God, Paul’s uncertainty led him to write this letter, and the Holy Spirit has used it ever since to tell Christians all over the world “how everyone who belongs to God's family ought to behave.” Chapters 4-6 contain Paul’s instructions on living as the Household of the Living God.

I. The Significance of the Church – 3:14-15

Three Pictures of the Church

The church is vital to our spiritual health. Yet, a large percentage of Americans don’t believe that. The latest Pew Research report shows that 62 percent of U.S. adults describe themselves as Christians: 40 percent are Protestant, 19 percent are Catholic, and 3 percent fall into other Christian categories. In the past 25 to 30 years, some 40 million Americans have left the church - the largest and fastest religious transformation in American history.  About 33 percent of Americans say they attend religious services at least once a month, and 25 percent go at least once a week.

In contrast, most of Christian history believed that a relationship with God was inseparable from a relationship with the church. The church is not an optional "extra." While staying clear-eyed to ensnaring sin, we must persist in celebrating the church as the central community of redemption and reconciliation that Jesus is building. Jesus does not forsake his church: neither can we.

Pastor David Platt notes that “The church appears to be irrelevant or optional for many professing Christians today. After all, why bother with the Sunday morning crowds? We can simply download the latest sermon from our favorite pastor or author and - voila! - we can have church in the comfort of our own home. But is this really what God intended?

“Many professing Christians may be surprised to hear that Scripture gives us a much higher view of the church. Christ founded the church (Matt 16:18-19), He died for the church (Eph 5:25), and He identifies intimately with it (Acts 9:4-5). He even calls the church His own bride (John 3:29) or His body (Eph 5:30). Our current passage, 1 Timothy 3:14-16, also speaks to the high value God places on the church. God has given His people the privilege and responsibility of living in accord with and upholding the truth of the gospel.”

Let’s consider the first picture or metaphor that Paul gives of the Church:

1. The Household of God - 1Tim. 3:15a, “if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God…”

Greek scholar, Dr. A.T. Robertson, in commenting on this phrase, “the house of God” as translated by the KJV, states: “It is probably better translated as the “household of God,” that is “the family of God” rather than “the house (or temple) of God.” Christians as yet had no separate houses of worship and oikos commonly means “household.”

“Oikos” is a Greek word that is often translated "household" in the New Testament.  Today in English, "household" means the nuclear family. In Greek, however, its usage was much broader and included family, neighbors, co-workers and friends and those with whom we come into regular contact. Today we would refer to this as our “extended family.”

Some of the metaphors are used to describe the Churches public life and some her private life. Of all those used to describe life on the inside, none has the appeal like that of the Church being Father's House, and Sons in the House, i.e., believers, as those who make up the Household of Faith.

Father God has only one plan and it’s a Family Plan. He intends to populate heaven and earth with sons just like His Son. Life in the Household of God requires that we cultivate fellowship, practice forgiveness, and persist in faithfulness, and proclaim by our words and deeds the love and truth of the faith we have in the true and living God.

Everyone in the household of faith is wanted by the Father, loved by the Son, and reborn by the Spirit, and thus is to be loved by all the Family. Everyone has a calling and a contribution to make to the welfare of the Family.

Without question, the gospel in the early church was clearly relational. The word often translated “household” is used repeatedly in the New Testament. While it is usually translated “household”, it was also used in a broader sense to include extended family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. The early church grew rapidly because they took the good news of Jesus back to their oikos. When Jesus healed a man possessed by demons, he told him to go back and share the good news with his family (oikos; Mark 5:19). When Zacchaeus came to faith in Christ, Jesus declared that salvation had come to his house (oikos; Luke 19:9). So the assignment to make disciples of all nations begins with going to your established relationships and telling them about Jesus (see also John 1:40, 4:53; Acts 16:14-15; 16:30-34).

Examples Abound Throughout The Scriptures:

Luke 8:39, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him. 

Luke 19:9, “And Jesus said to him (Zacchaeus), “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham.”  

John 4:53, “The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” And he himself believed, and all his household.”  All the words, home, house, and household derive from the Greek word “oikos”.

As fellow members of the household of faith, we are immediately expected to carry on the Family business in the firm of Almighty and Sons. When the business goes public it is known as Kingdom Enterprises Unlimited! Father has invited us to join Him in a co-partnership that is God-planned, God-big, God-guaranteed successful, and eternity-long.

This is “oikos” evangelism. There are numerous places around the world today where we see the household of God functioning as it did in the first 2 ½ centuries of church history.

One of those places is in China. Although we hear a lot about China these days, usually regarding the Chinese economy – that’s not the only thing that's grown over there in the last 75 years. The church in China has grown at a rate history has never witnessed before. Although public Christian assembly remains either banned or heavily monitored, the house church movement has exploded, with much of the growth now migrating from rural areas into the urban centers of the country. In 1949, when the rest of the world was virtually cut off from the Chinese church, there were an estimated 500,000 baptized Evangelical Chinese believers. Today estimates are as high as 130, to perhaps 200 million or more. And it's not just China, The underground church in Iran is experiencing unparalleled growth as well. In fact, Christianity is growing most rapidly in all the regions of the world where you would least expect it.

Many tend to think that the reason for such explosive church growth is because of persecution, with the inference being that if we Westerners get a good dose of it, we’ll start growing. But it’s not persecution that’s the cause of the growth; it's the ministry model that political oppression forces the church to embrace. When the church is forced out of an institutional, traditional leader-centered ministry model, where the focus is on the platform ministry of highly gifted leaders, into a more relational household model, where the focus is on the personal ministry of every member as a ministry model, it begins to make reproducing disciples. As individual believers, living as the household of God – representing Him wherever they are in their daily lives, they make contact and as a result are having a powerful impact for the gospel. The results are staggering. Ask a typical Chinese believer where they go to church, and they would think “what kind of silly question is that?” They don’t go to church; they are the church!

But here’s the bottom line, of all of those who placed their faith in Jesus, from every generation, culture and denomination for the past 2,000 years, about 95% came to Christ primarily through the influence of someone in their oikos.

God has given each of us, on average, anywhere from eight to fifteen people whom He has supernaturally and strategically placed in our relational worlds. The Greeks used one word to describe this personal world— oikos, or "extended household." This is the world God wants to use each of us to change, our individual world!

2. The Assembly of the Living God – 3:15b, “which is the church of the living God…”

The Greek word translated “church” is ekklēsia. In the New Testaments of most English Bibles, the words "church" and "churches" appear over one hundred times However what is rarely known or admitted is that the word ecclessia was deliberately mistranslated as "church" under the orders of King James I when he authorized a new translation of the bible.

It is generally agreed among etymologists who study the origins of words that our English word "church" comes from the Greek word kuriakos. This word is an adjective and it means belonging to or in some way related to the Lord. The word kuriakos is found twice in the Bible. It is in 1 Corinthians 11:20, where it is translated as "Lord's" in the term "the Lord's supper." And it is translated "Lord's" in the term "Lord's day" in Revelation 1:10.

So how did this adjective that means "Lord's" come to be the origin of our English noun "church"? As we know, words change in meaning over time. The Online Etymological Dictionary says that kuriakos "was used of houses of Christian worship since  around AD300." This was the time of Constantine the Great, who was emperor of the Roman Empire from A.D. 306 to 337. Up until this time, Christians were meeting in private houses. This brought the wrath of the Roman government upon them because, as Earle E. Cairns writes in Christianity Through the Centuries, "There could be no private religion…. The Christians held most of their meetings at night and in secret. To the Roman authority this could be nothing else than the hatching of a conspiracy against the safety of the state…. The secrecy of the meetings of the Christians also brought moral charges against them. Public rumors made them guilty of incest, cannibalism, and unnatural practices".

The other religions of the Roman Empire had public meeting places, but the Christians met in private houses even though it brought persecution upon them. That's right, meeting in private houses brought persecution upon the Christians. Contrary to what is often assumed, Christians did not meet in private houses to hide from persecution. They met in private houses by choice, and this choice made them subject to persecution.

But then Constantine (along with Licinius) granted religious tolerance in the Edict of Milan. Not only was Christianity now tolerated, but Constantine favored it and began to build church buildings. He retained the idea that worship is public and expected Christians to follow that paradigm. "Constantine brought to Christianity a pagan notion of the sanctity of things and places" (Joan E. Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places, 308).

From the time of Constantine, the state-sanctioned Christians met in special, sacred, public buildings. Over time, these buildings became intimately wrapped up in people's minds with the institution and its clergy.

When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England, he also became the head of the Church of England (as had and do all English monarchs since King Henry VIII). Due to division in the church between the Puritans, the Church of England and the Roman Catholics, King James tried to unite his church under yet another translation of the Bible, one that would be a compromise between the more Protestant Bibles and the Bishop's Bible (a Catholic translation).

At the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, in which he proposed the new Bible, he set down a number of rules to be followed, one of which being that the word Church must not be translated as assembly or congregation.

Why? Because the word translated "church" from "ekklesia" has in its root usage not a single hint or connotation denoting a building, heaven, or a religious body, or a place to go to. Its root meaning is "an assembly of those called out to rule." Paul tells us exactly the same thing when he speaks of the ekklesia's glorious calling to co-rule and co-superintend God's Creation under the senior headship of Jesus Christ. The "Church" is not a meeting, a building, a place, or a religious group. Rather, it is those elected and called out to rule under Christ by God the Father.

Church has come to be a place we come to hear from one man and after a short time, we leave church to do our own thing. This has all but rendered the church impotent and the majority of its church members unemployed because they are just members and not ministers.

What is done at church buildings on Sundays and Wednesdays is just a small part of who we are as the people of Christ. Whether it is giving, serving, or attending other places of worship, our people should have the liberty and freedom to give, serve, and attend wherever the Spirit leads. Christ's church always leaves the building on Sundays, therefore the church should never be called the building.

Whatever is done on Sundays or Wednesdays in the building should be designed to empower and encourage "the church" (you) to worship in spirit and truth every day of the week and do the work of ministry as you are going from place to place day after day.

The Dwelling Place of God

There’s a second great truth in this phrase “the church of the living God”, and that is that we are the dwelling place of God's presence. Language like “the church of the living God” would have taken first-century Jewish Christians and those familiar with the Scriptures immediately back to Jacob's meeting with God at Bethel (which literally means "house of God"). After encountering God in a dream about a stairway to heaven, Jacob exclaimed, "Surely the Lord is in this place.... What an awesome place this is! This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven" (Gen 28:16-17).

Neil Cole defines church as, “The presence of Jesus among His people called out as a spiritual family to pursue His mission on this earth.”

In every analogy in the New Testament, Jesus is central. If He is not central – the all in all – then His Body – the church – is without a head - a corpse. A bride without a Bridegroom is a widow. A branch without the Vine is firewood. A flock without the Shepherd is wolf food. Jesus among us is what makes the church the church.

In the New Testament, we see that a great change has taken place. There is no special city, no tabernacle, and no temple (no building) where God dwells. Instead, God now dwells with His people. Christ the Lord has liberated Jewish Jehovah from the Holy of Holies in the temple and declared Him to be Father of all nations. (John 4:21-24; John 20:17). He destroyed the brick-and-mortar temple and shifted His residence back into the hearts and homes of the people. He changed the covenant written on the stone tablets and locked up in the Ark of the Covenant and rewrote it in the hearts and minds of the people. Now every place that we tread becomes the holy ground.

He disenfranchised the monopoly of Levitical priesthood and franchised “Priesthood of all believers” to be a light to the Gentiles. Every follower of Christ is now a Royal priest to the nations. In the Old animal blood Covenant, God spoke only to the priests and prophets who acted as “go betweens” but now with Christ Jesus’ blood Covenant, He speaks to us directly and so do we.

The instruments of worship in the Old Testament were the sword, the fire and the sheep (Genesis 22:5-7). The instruments of worship in the New Testament are the double-edged sword (the word of God-Hebrew 4:12; Ephesians 6:17); the fire (the Holy Spirit - Acts 2:4; Luke 3:16) and the lost sheep (John 10:16). He redefined worship from offering four footed animals to offering two legged repentant Gentiles as spiritual sacrifice. Making abundant disciples became the primary form of worship to glorify God. (Romans 15:16; John 15:8,16; 1Peter 2:5,6,9; Psalm 51:17).

He changed the temple-centric gatherings to scattering to the ends of the earth by pouring out His Spirit on all flesh to make disciples of all nations. The Ethiopian Eunuch, the Samaritan woman and Cornelius the Gentile could not meet God in the temple, so He met them on the road, at the well, and in their homes and declared their homes to be a house of prayer for all nations. (Mark 11:17 Matthew 28:19; Acts 1:8; 2:17,18).

Paul said to the church at Corinth in 2 Corinthians 6:16, "For we are the sanctuary of the living God," and to the church at Ephesus he wrote, "You also are being built together for God's dwelling in the Spirit" (Eph 2:22). Make sure you hear this - We are the dwelling place for the living God!

When we come together – be it on any day of the week – preferably Sunday where possible – and it doesn’t have to be at 9-12 – we are the people where God lives and dwells and manifests His presence. Consider how significant this makes our weekly gatherings: the church gathers and the Lord, the living God, is among us. We are His house, worshiping in His presence, listening to His Word, and partaking of the elements at His table. How awesome is the privilege of being the dwelling place of God's presence!

Church historian, Alan Kreider observes that early Christianity grew explosively - 40 percent per decade for nearly three centuries - in a very hostile environment: “The early Christians did not engage in public preaching; it was too dangerous. There are practically no evangelists or missionaries whose names we know … The early Christians had no mission boards. They did not write treatises about evangelism … After Nero’s persecution in the mid-first century, the churches in the Roman Empire closed their worship services to visitors. Deacons stood at the churches’ doors, serving as bouncers, checking to see that no unbaptized person, no “lying informer,” could come in … And yet the church was growing. Officially it was a superstition. Prominent people scorned it. Neighbors discriminated against the Christians in countless petty ways. Periodically the church was subjected to persecutions … It was hard to be a Christian … And still the church grew. Why? God’s Presence in the believer’s lives!

The church grew because it was attractive and it was attractive because of the manifestation of God’s presence flowing through them. Kreider writes, “People were fascinated by it, drawn to it as to a magnet.” He goes on to make a strong historical case that Christians’ lives – their love for God was tangibly shown in their love for one another, their concern for the weak and the poor, their integrity in the face of persecution, their economic sharing, their sacrificial love even for their enemies, and the high quality of their common life together - attracted nonbelievers to the gospel. Once nonbelievers were attracted to the community by the lives of Christians, they became open to talking about the gospel truths that were the source of this kind of life.”

Believers are the church. God dwells in us. Where we are, there He is. We don't behave one way 'at church' or another everywhere else. We can't do this because we ARE the church. Further, since the life of God is in the individual sinner who trusts Christ, there is no hierarchical authority in the church. Every believer is a priest unto God.

Let the church be the church - gathered for edification and scattered for evangelization and cultural transformation!