Let me invite you this morning to turn in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter one, Ephesians chapter one. Given the election meeting and where our minds are with the election of officers of elder and deacon and deaconess, I'd like for us to gather our thoughts around, a few things, this morning and if you want to give a title to the message today, it would be Precious Church. Precious. Church, I've shared this, with you guys before, I think a couple years ago, but the first greeting card that I ever gave to Donna, who is now my wife, was back in 1979.
And on the outside of the card were the words Happy Valentine's Day, and on the inside were the words to one of my all-time favorites. looking back, I don't know what I was thinking when I picked that card out for her, but apparently at the time, I thought it would mean a lot for her to know. That I had other all-time favorites beside her. And that she happened to be among them.
Let's just say I've come a long way in learning how to communicate to My wife in a way that lets her know that she is truly precious to me. I'd like to try my hand this morning at conveying to you how precious the Church of Jesus Christ truly is and to accomplish that, I want us to look at three things that the apostle Paul himself verbalizes, speaks that reveal how precious the church of Jesus Christ was to him. Before we do that, I think we should take a minute or two to identify what the church is. described in its simplest form, the Church of Jesus Christ is the community of all regenerated believers in Jesus Christ.
With this understanding, we can actually think of the church in two different ways as it is spoken of in the New Testament. First, there is the universal church, which is all regenerated believers in Jesus presently on earth and in heaven. Second, The part of the universal church that is on earth right now is broken up into thousands. Tens of thousands of local churches and we can define a local church as a particular Community of regenerated believers in Jesus Christ on earth, who together do the following six things....
