“Deep guile and great might are his dread arms in fight. On earth is not his equal.” So Martin Luther described the devil in his hymn, “A Mighty Fortress.” It seems to me that the devil doesn’t have to lure you into a drug gang or sign you up for the atheist society to pull you away from saving faith. He can do it with the church. In my sermon for the opening of Concordia Seminary’s 177th year, I identified three temptations of the devil. Here’s the second.
“The second temptation is the word “church.” What pops into your mind when I say the word “church?” Maybe you think of the building. Maybe you think of a church service. “I’m going to 8 o’clock church.” Maybe you think of a congregation called “Trinity Lutheran Church” with its school, its properties, its employees, its bylaws and constitution, its groups and its members. When we hear the word “church” we tend to think of a Christian institution. Guess what? There was no institutional Christian church in the decades after Jesus died, rose and ascended, not in the way we think of it. There was no institutional Christian church that first Pentecost when thousands and thousands of believers were added. In fact, the word “Christian” didn’t exist at Pentecost. The word “Christian” came later, in Antioch in Acts 11:26. At Pentecost the people who followed Jesus were known as “People of the Way” because they followed Him who is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). They were a small group within Judaism. Judaism had various groups, like the Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes and now this little group of people who had started to follow Jesus of Nazareth, the “People of the Way.” It wasn’t until after 70 A.D., some 40 years after Pentecost, that the church was generally considered something separate from Judaism. … And so the devil tempts us to confine Jesus to the past and to suppose that the church is just another institution.”
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