Hello, thank you so much for joining me today for Give Him 15.

The title of our post today is Representing Christ.

On the heels of this past Friday's interview with Jane Hammond, which was an awesome interview, by the way. She did a great job.

I felt we needed to look again at what it means to be the church, the Christ's ecclesia.

There is so much misunderstanding of this.

Never have we needed clearer teaching on the subject.

The church is first mentioned for the first time in Matthew 16, 18 to 19.

Jesus said, I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock, meaning the rock of the revelation he had just shared, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower

it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,

and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

When Jesus used the word church, which is the Greek word ecclesia, the disciples weren't hindered by our contemporary preconceived

ideas as to what it meant. Their paradigm of an ecclesia differed greatly from what it has become.

To us today, it can mean, one, a worship service, two, a building used by Christians,

three, a local congregation of Christians, or four, for those who tend toward a more literal

definition, it means a people who have

been called out from the world.

The last concept is the most accurate, according to a strict translation, but it still falls

far short of communicating what an Ecclesia was when Christ made his stunning announcement.

To the Greeks in Christ's day, an Ecclesia was an assembly of people authorized to govern the affairs of a city, a state, a nation.

In essence, a city council, a parliament, a congress, etc.

To the Romans, it was a governing body sent into a conquered region, not only to govern,

but to alter the culture until it became like Rome.

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