I'll be reading at this time first from Micah chapter 7 verses 18 through 20 and then secondly from Ephesians chapter 1 verses 1 through 14 and I hope that you'll see the connection between these verses and what we'll read in just a moment from Lord's Day 21 regarding the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins. So first, Micah 7, verses 18-20, where this great little book is concluded on a note of forgiveness of sins. The question is asked in verse 18, Who is a God like you who pardons sins and forgives the transgression of the remnant of His inheritance? you do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy you will again have compassion on us you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea you will be true to Jacob and show mercy to Abraham as you pledged on oath to our fathers in days long ago and then turning to the New Testament We'll read the first 14 verses of Ephesians chapter 1. Where we see that through this forgiveness of sins, about which we've read in Micah 7, the Lord Jesus builds a church in Himself. Ephesians 1, beginning at verse 1, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love, He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasure and will, to the praise of His glorious grace which He has freely given us in the one He loves. In Him, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God's grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In Him we also were chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will, in order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of His glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having believed you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession to the praise of His glory. Amen. And if I could also ask you to turn to Lord's Day 21 in the back of the Psalter Hymnal, page 27. You'll notice that this Lord's Day is considering one of the phrases from the Apostles' Creed about which mention has been made already this evening. Three topics in a sense, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, and the forgiveness of sins. I'll ask the question and we'll respond together with the words of each of those three answers. So, Lord's Day 21, question 54 asks, What do you believe concerning the Holy Catholic Church? I believe that the Son of God, through His Spirit and Word, out of the entire human race, from the beginning of the world to its end, gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith. And of this community, I am and always will be a living member. Question 55 asks, what do you understand by the communion of the saints? First, that believers one and all as members of this community share in Christ and in all His treasures and gifts. Second, that each member should consider it his duty to use his gifts readily and cheerfully for the service and enrichment of the other members. And finally, question 56 asks, what do you believe concerning the forgiveness of sins? I believe that God, because of Christ's atonement, will never hold against me any of my sins, nor my sinful nature which I need to struggle against all my life. Rather, in His grace, God grants me the righteousness of Christ to free me forever from judgment. Amen. Well, I've been asked this evening to preach from Lord's Day 21 of the Heidelberg Catechism. I should tell you, when I was asked to preach from Lord's Day 21, I, of course, agreed. And then after I agreed, I turned to Lord's Day 21 just to check what I'd agreed to. And I read through those three articles and I thought, oh, this won't be too hard. There's a lot of material there. And then as I kept working with it, I thought, this is going to be very hard. There's a lot of material there. There's three topics here, each of which, of course, could be the subject of not only a sermon, but a series or a book, in fact. So there is a lot of material here. In some way, we'll only be, yeah, not digging in as deeply as we might hope to, but hopefully we'll be able to see that there's also a connection between these three topics. At first glance, you might say, well, these are three unrelated and unconnected questions and answers and topics. But what we see in terms of just glancing at the context is, first of all, that Lord's Day 21, of course, follows the previous Lord's Day, which focuses on the work of the Holy Spirit. So we see that the founding of the church, the communion of the saints and the forgiveness of sins are fruits of the Holy Spirit's ministry. The Spirit draws us into Christ's body as the church. He also unites us in fellowship with the other believers and causes us to use our gifts, which are called the gifts of the Spirit or spiritual gifts, which we're then equipped to use in the church. And then he also applies to us the benefits of Christ's ministry, resulting in the forgiveness of our sins. So that's one way that these three topics are intimately connected in terms of the Spirit's work. But I think a second way in which these topics are connected is if we consider the imagery of the body, which is clearly alluded to here. Believers are brought into one body, that is, the church. Brought into that body to have fellowship with and to assist the others in that body, much like a body functions in harmony when it's functioning in a healthy way. We've been brought into fellowship by the forgiveness which we experience through the blood of Christ. And of course, in this body relationship in which we function as the church, we need the forgiveness of sins. Because just like any body functioning together, we're going to rub each other the wrong way, we're going to offend each other. And so we should see that this doctrine of the forgiveness of sins is very appropriately linked to the doctrine of the church. Well, Lord's Day 21 then powerfully speaks to who believers are in Jesus Christ. And we see that, first of all, in terms of the church's formation. Question and answer 54 asks, What do you believe concerning the Holy Catholic Church? And what we see is that this is about what Christ is forming. Christ is forming a body. And we see that, I believe, if we look at each of those three words in turn, holy catholic church we see our identity the people of god are the church that is to say we are a gathering of believers called out that's the meaning of the word behind church called out from the world by the power of god's grace the emphasis there is really on what god is doing a lot of times when we think about the church we think about what we're doing the programs that we might have, or the life of the church that we experience as we interact with each other. But first and foremost, the church is God's idea. The church is God's creation. The church is Christ's bride whom he, as the catechism says, gathers, protects, and preserves. So the church is not first and foremost for us. In fact, that same line says Christ gathers, protects, and preserves for Himself a church, a community chosen for eternal life. So, we need to see ourselves as the church, as the called people of God, something that God is doing, an identity that we have because of Christ gathering, protecting, and preserving work. The church is not a social club, although we enjoy social interactions with each other. The church is a body that Christ is gathering, which has much to say in terms of commitment. We're part of this body because Christ is building us into this body. So, Holy Catholic Church, but church is qualified here by the word Catholic. Now, this word, as you probably sense, is somewhat confusing because it's so easily associated with Roman Catholic Church. But the word Catholic means universal. The fact is that Christ is gathering a people from out of the entire human race, from the beginning of the world to the end, as the Catechism says. It's interesting. Actually, the word Catholic is improperly used by the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman church doesn't embrace Christians in a universal sense as we see the Bible doing. The believers are brought into this Catholic community by true faith. It's a work of Christ. It has less to do about the external organization than about what Christ is doing. The Roman church is perhaps the least Catholic of all church organizations in terms of how they limit church affiliation. One of the beautiful things about this word Catholic is it draws out that beautiful statement in Scripture that says God is no respecter of persons. God doesn't focus on particular ethnic communities. Our unity is not then based on our ethnic background or other similarities, but on the unity of the true faith, as we read in question and answer 54. Revelation 5 verse 9 speaks of this as well, that in heaven we'll be united with believers from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. that says something to us about the universality of the church, the catholicity of the church. We should think about that and say, well, if there's going to be believers from all of these ethnic groups, all these languages, we should understand that they're going to be confessing that faith somewhat differently, using different language, different expressions. Yes, there is a unity in the true faith, but it seems that we should respect some diversity if we take the Catholicity of the church seriously. And then the word church is also qualified by the word holy, the holy Catholic church. That is, the church is a gathering of people who are distinct from those who make up the unbelieving world. In Ephesians 1, verse 1, we read that Paul is writing here to saints, that is, to the holy ones. Paul doesn't know every single person that he's writing to, but he still calls them the saints, the holy ones, those who are separated from the world in the church. So there's a sense in which the word holy is describing what is true of believers through the work of the Holy Spirit, but it's also something that we're called to, isn't it? If we confess ourselves to be members of a holy Catholic church, and we need to be pursuing holiness. As we read in Hebrews 12, verse 14, without holiness, no one will see the Lord. And it then goes on after that phrase to list a number of unholy activities which we should not be engaged in. We should be pursuing holiness as the church of Jesus Christ. Hopefully this glance at the church in terms of its being holy and Catholic and being a called gathering of the Lord Jesus Christ should help us to avoid two errors. On the one hand, there are those who claim to be Christians but who have no interest in the church. And probably that's true even for those who will make up the membership of the church, who are Christians even in a church but really have not taken seriously the fact that Christ is building us into a body. This kind of view severs the head from the body, the Lord Jesus Christ from the church. And we need to not take this view that we love the head, but we have very little to do with the body. We're part of a body. On the other hand, there are those who have no vital connection to Christ. And yet, because of their affiliation with the church, or perhaps even their interaction with programs in the church, say, well, I must be right with God, because I'm connected with the church. But you see, that's flipping around the reality. Our vital connection is, first of all, with Jesus Christ as the head. And so we shouldn't presume on a right relationship with God simply because we go to church or even are active in the church. There's, first, a vertical relationship with Jesus Christ that brings us into the church and connects us with others. So, the Catechism teaches us, first of all, what we believe about the Holy Catholic Church. In a sense, it's teaching us who we are, who we are as this body. And the second part in this Lord's Day, then, when we speak of the communion of the saints, is building on that statement of who we are as a Holy Catholic Church, who Christ is making us into. And it's saying then, this is how we're to fellowship. This is how we're to relate to each other as we've been brought into a body. Now, as we look then secondly at the church's fellowship from question and answer 55, let's first of all look at sort of the principle of communion or fellowship and then look secondly and briefly at the practice of communion or community or fellowship. So first of all, the principle of fellowship or communion, community. This is so important to think about the principles behind the idea of community because community or fellowship is kind of a buzzword today. Everybody wants community. But the problem is, I think, when we think about community in the way that it's often thought about, it's more about what we're doing, right? We need to be more friendly with each other. We need to have more activities outside of corporate worship. It seems to be presented as something that we're doing to promote community. And certainly there's something to that. But this is not what the creed is talking about first and foremost. We need to remember that the communion of the saints, this community, this fellowship, is based upon, again, who we are. We are a community. Christ is building a community. We have the Holy Spirit in whom we fellowship. So, maybe one way of saying this is, we don't create community. We're brought into a community. Christ is bringing us into a community. So we first need to come to the terms with that. If we are a community, it's because of what Christ is doing. We're brought into the community of Christ by His blood. Ephesians 2.13 Dietrich Bonhoeffer has written a little book called Life Together. It's, I think, a wonderful little book. At least the first chapter was just so helpful to me to think about community and what it means to be the people of God. He has one line in that chapter that says, Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality. Sometimes when we think about brotherhood or community or fellowship, We're thinking about some ideal, some goal that we have to be working towards. And he says, yes, there's something to that. But first of all, it's a reality. We experience community. We're kindred spirits with each other through the Holy Spirit. Christian fellowship then is not first about what we do, but rather a reflection of who we are. I think this is evident even as we look at a dictionary definition of community. I've sort of spliced together a definition from Webster using various parts. And what I read there is that, and this is of course just in a sense of not speaking just about the church, but community in general. It says a community is a body of individuals unified by a common history, common character, common policy, common interest, and common activity. That's true for the church as well. We are a community with a common history. Outsiders brought in. We have a common character. The Holy Spirit is a common character. And we're being conformed increasingly into the image of Jesus Christ. We have a common policy. We have the Scriptures. We don't decide how we live or what our community should look like. It's the scriptures that teach us. We have a common interest. Hopefully our interest, actually the interest of all true believers, is the glory of God and the salvation of sinners. That's something that binds us together. It's not something we create. It's something that's true of us. And then common activities, the activity of worship and prayer and life together. So when we think about what question answer 55 is talking about, what do you understand by the communion of saints? we need to first of all understand the community of the saints. The community of the saints is something that already exists. It's a reality. It's not simply a dream. But based on that reality, there are some elements here that we're taught to strive toward, to strive for. Let me just enumerate a number of things, I believe, based on what this answer sets before us that we should engage in to practice community. Number one, this is something also that Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasizes strongly in that first chapter. It took me a bit off guard because I wouldn't have thought about this as one of the most important things. But he says, we need to count our blessings. If we're talking about practicing community or communion of the saints, we first of all need to count our blessings. We just think about how many believers around the world, how many missionaries are standing alone, Not surrounded by 100 or 200 other people who love Jesus and who can raise their voices together and who day after day, week after week, just have this sense of being alone. We need to be so thankful, brothers and sisters. I'm not sure what this community is like here in terms of the interaction, but if there's any degree of dissatisfaction or if you're longing for more, let's at least start by saying we have so much to be thankful for. We gather for the sacraments and for worship. It's no small thing. So we should, first of all, see ourselves not as demanders, but as thankful recipients. And then secondly, living as a community must begin with love. Must begin with love. We need to love the community in which we're placed. Let me reference again Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I may not get this quite right, but he says somewhere in that chapter that if we love the idea of community more than the community in which God has placed us, we're actually in danger of destroying the latter. And I read that and it really hurt, actually. As a pastor, as a young pastor coming into a congregation, I had this idea of community that I loved and that I was striving for and that I was embracing, but I believe that I wasn't loving the community in which God placed me, but it's chasing after this dream. So we need to begin by loving the community in which God has placed us. And then another thing about practicing community is, and I apologize if this sounds a bit like a bumper sticker slogan, but we need to, I think, think globally, but live locally. We need to be thinking globally if we're going to be a true communion of saints, understanding that there's so much more going on than what we feel and experience here and now. We need to be praying for those around the world. Probably one of the best ways to ensure that we will not experience true community is to turn inward and focus on ourselves, but rather we should be focusing outward. But of course, we need to prioritize our efforts locally. So as the Catechism talks about sharing our gifts one with another. We need to be thinking about that in terms of a local congregation. How can we share our gifts in this church locally? And then we need to also include outsiders. Part of truly living as a communion of saints is to embrace those who don't have a long history with us, those who maybe are new or maybe a bit different. The catechism says it this way. What do you understand by the communion of the saints? First, that believers, one and all. Now, why say one and all? Well, it's an emphasis on the fact that there are no second class Christians. That we need to be focusing on outsiders. They all are members of this community. And then, fifthly, this call to live in this communion calls us, I believe, to be intentionally intrusive. To be intentionally intrusive. This phrase I picked up from another minister, I think, who is looking at Hebrews 10, 24 and 25, where in those verses we're called to not give up the fellowshipping of the saints together as some are in the habit of doing. And there's a few other things stated around those verses. But the minister said, you know, sometimes we take that verse and we boil it down to say what this means is don't stop going to church. You know, somebody asks you, is there a command anywhere in the Bible that says you have to go to church? And the person will say, well, yeah, Hebrews 10.25. Well, that's not all it's saying, is it? It's saying you need to be stirring each other up toward good works. We need to be involved together more and more as the day approaches, it says. So we need to be intimately involved in each other's lives, using the gifts that God has given us for the well-being of the body and allowing others to minister to us. We really have no right as a people of God to shut ourselves off from others. Of course, some of us are more introverted, some are more extroverted, but we're really called here that each member should consider it his duty to use his gifts readily and cheerfully for the service and enrichment of the other members. It means being intentionally intrusive in each other's lives. We're part of a body. We can't be disconnected from each other in that way. Well, to move beyond community as a buzzword, we need to be interdependent as a church. We need to be working closely together, intentionally intrusive. Now, when that happens, we're going to need to embrace the third part of Lord's Day 21, and that is the forgiveness of sins. If we keep our distance from each other, we may not have to think about forgiveness so much. But as soon as we're intimately involved in each other's lives, we're going to really need to focus on the forgiveness of sins. Now, there are two very important words in this question in Answer 56. What do you believe concerning the forgiveness of sins? The words sins and forgiveness really get to the heart of the Christian message. Christianity only makes sense if you first understand sin. The word sin literally means to miss the mark. The idea is that you're shooting at a target, but not hitting it. We're missing the mark. God's law sets a target. But in our lives, the way we live, we miss that target. We fail to do what God requires or do what God forbids. And this understanding of sin is so important for a number of reasons. First of all, because sin affects all of us. We need to understand sin because it affects us. The Bible teaches that all of us are lawbreakers and sinners. Romans 3.23 says, For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So what we're talking about here is something that affects all of us. And it affects us in a number of ways. First of all, sin leads to guilt and shame. And when we're talking about the church and community, that can be crippling. To try to live as a community with unrepentant sin can be very difficult. When was the last time that you struggled to look someone else in the face because you were burdened by your own sin, your unrepentant sin? It's very detrimental to our community. Sin leads to alienation. Sin has a tendency of separating. Angry outbursts tend to drive others away. secret sins tend to drive us away from others. Sin leads to alienation. Sin also has physical consequences. Some sins bring disease on us. Others bring poverty. And of course, sin can have eternal consequences. Ultimately, our sin, if not dealt with, will separate us from God. The wages of sin is death so sin is affects us all in significant ways also understanding sin helps us to make sense of life and we confess here yes we will get to the forgiveness part but we're confessing the reality of sin in our lives and it's so important because the unbelieving world without a concept of without a biblical concept of sin can't make sense of pain how do you make sense of pain without a doctrine of sin. How can we say that human murder is any different than animals killing each other without a doctrine of sin? So we need to understand sin, but of course we need to move beyond understanding sin and embracing what the Catechism teaches us here concerning the forgiveness of sin. The good news is that Christ came to call sinners to repentance. that Christ came to embody the promise of the Gospel. The promise of the Gospel is that God will take all of my sins and charge them to the account of His dear Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, meaning that He'll no longer hold our sins against us. Just as a way of illustrating that, just think again about Micah 7, verse 19, where God says that he will cast our sins into the depths of the sea. Now, just take a moment and think about that, not from the perspective of a 21st century American, but from the perspective of a person even three or four hundred years ago, before diving equipment was invented, or submarines. When you think about throwing something to the depth of the sea, how deep does it have to go before you can't retrieve it anymore? You know, a thousand years ago or 1,500 years ago, I don't know how deep you can dive, but, you know, if something was even 50 feet deep, no one could retrieve it, right? Or 100 feet deep. But God says here that he casts our sins into the depths of the sea. Now, we took a boat out on the channel in Newport Beach yesterday, and I was trying to take a picture of my daughter. She was leaning over the boat a little bit, and I thought, you know, if I drop my phone, there's no way I'm going to retrieve it. I'd have one second to try to grab it before it sunk. Otherwise, it'd be gone. God is trying to help us picture that. Our sins in Christ have been cast into the depths of the sea, that they are irretrievable. So, when God forgives, He takes away all of the guilt and shame that sin causes. He begins to restore the alienation and the physical consequences caused by sin. This article on the forgiveness of sins helps us to realize that we'll never be perfect in this life. And importantly, also the person that you're sitting next to with whom you have communion in the Lord Jesus Christ will never be perfect in this life. But God is calling us to live as His people, embracing forgiveness and not living as a community based on our own performance or the performance of others, but living in community in a way that relishes and demonstrates this glorious doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. And so, this Lord's Day, if I could just wrap up by saying this, that this Lord's Day teaches us that the church is who we are. Fellowship is how we're called to live out of that reality. But forgiveness of sins is a reality that we embrace when we fail to live as the communion of the saints, as the people of God. We find comfort in the midst of our fallenness through the forgiveness of sins. So, brothers and sisters, as we look at this phrase in the Apostles' Creed, we see that Christ is building a church by turning sinners into saints who are able to enjoy true fellowship together. We'll not experience full communion with each other until sin is completely done away with after the return of Jesus Christ. But through God's forgiveness, we do experience together something of a foretaste of that glorious reality that God is building in the church. Let's take a moment to thank the Lord for this and to ask the Lord to help us to live as the people of God in communion with each other in the forgiveness of sins. Let's pray together. Great and glorious Lord God, we thank You for what You are doing in the church. We look around us and we look inside of us and we're prone to discouragement. We may sense any number of weaknesses in our own lives and in the life of our community. We're prone to think so much of ourselves that we struggle to interact with each other in the way that Christ teaches us to and calls us to. But we thank You, O God, that the Holy Catholic Church and the communion of saints is a reality. This is something that You are doing. And in this task, You will not be frustrated. And we're so thankful for that. And in the meantime, we thank You, O Lord, that in the meantime, prior to us experiencing the fullness of blessed fellowship with one another and with You, that we have this wonderful gift called the forgiveness of sins. That we can come to You, O Lord, and experience the renewal of fellowship with You. Hearing You say to us through Your Word, I cast your sins into the depths of the sea. We pray that we would live in this forgiving way toward each other as well, not holding each other's grievances against each other, but covering over them with forgiveness and with love. We pray that you would bless this particular community here and shine your glory through her. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.