2 Constantine the Great

all right third century last week I was noting with you that the church was battling on three fronts they had course the political threat persecutions and then they had theological threats coming both as I characterized it from the left and from the right by the time we get to the third century the political threat has died down so beginning by the Year 200 or shortly thereafter and for the bulk of the third century Christian people are more or less free from persecution I don't want to overstate that because it still was going on to some degree but not nearly as severely as it had in the second century the only exception to that comes toward the end of the third century with the most ferocious persecution of all that took place under Diocletian and we'll take a look at him in just a moment the challenges to Christian teaching however did continue unabated and if anything became even more severe at this time and again it was an assault from two different angles one more or less emanating from the city of Antioch and the other from the city of Alexandria so we have two cities that more or less stand for two quite different approaches to a Christian understanding Antioch is north of Jerusalem so we were mentioning a few weeks ago Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD Christian people who were Jewish fled the city escaped the bloodbath that took place in Jerusalem gradually over time as the dust settled they wound up north in Antioch and Antioch is about 200 miles north of Jerusalem and it became a kind of neo Jerusalem a place where a highly Jewish approach to the Christian faith and a highly Jewish population of Christian people resided at the same time you have a city down in North Africa called Alexandria which I'm calling neo Athens so my arrows come down from Athens and up from Jerusalem and you kind of get the picture there by this time in history Athens was no longer a great intellectual capital it was more of a great museum most of the real work that was being done in the Hellenistic world was being done in Alexandria so it had become kind of a center of academics and even Christian intellectual pursuits were carried on to a significant degree in Alexandria the problem is Antioch was representing a very Jewish approach to the Christian faith Alexandria was representing a very Gentile or Hellenistic or Greek approach to the Christian faith and obviously those two didn't see eye-to-eye and so there is in the third century a kind of developing cold war in the Christian world between these two very diverse approaches to how we understand Christian teaching the main character who dominated Antioch in Christianity was a fellow whose name was Paul of Samos Atta Samuel sada is a little town about 20 miles outside of Antioch so he grew up as it were in a suburb of Antioch II eventually became the bishop that is the chief leader of the Christian Church in Antioch I want to emphasize that because when you when we reflect here briefly on what he taught you'll wonder you know how he got to that position but it is a comment on the form of Christianity that was really flowing out of this as I say very Jewish approach to the Christian faith what did he stand for he rejected outright the doctrine of Trinity this is the leader of the Christian Church in a major Christian Center in the third century repudiates the idea of Trinity he repudiated the term logos as applied to Christ we mentioned last week that John's Gospel begins of course famously in the beginning was the word the Greek word logos and that became one of the most important descriptive approaches to Christ was especially interesting to the Greek person because logos had a rich tradition and Greek thought going way way back and now for Christian thinkers to come along and say this that the Greeks have been growth broke groping for all through the centuries this is it this is what you've been looking for Christ you see was something they could they could follow that they could appreciate it but the Jewish world found that objectionable and rejected logos Christology more than that they rejected the first fourteen verses of John's Gospel Paul of Sammis Addison that is not part of John's Gospel it was added later that's how severe was his commitment he adopted or I should say he affirmed what's called adoptionism adoptionism is a view that says Christ was adopted as the son of God at his baptism he was a man he was a man specially given grace by God but he was only a man but at his baptism he was given some great gifts some great anointing and as a result of that he began to dynamically change and he was elevated but it was always in a sense as a man so that now we can in the sense add or Christ appreciate him recognize him revere him but Paulus at Masada said we should not worship Him in the same way we worship God so here's a major Christian leader taking a position like that in the 3rd century he said that the unity of the son and the father that we hear of in the New Testament is a moral unity not a substantive unity that is they are one in purpose but not one in being you see if you looked around today for a religion that basically represents the views of Paulus a messiah it would be the Jehovah's Witnesses so it'd be like saying the one of the major Christian leaders in the 3rd century was basically a Jehovah's Witness all right in his theology that would be a pretty accurate description of him the the main student of Paul of Samos Atta that we'll consider next week as a fellow named arias and you may know the Arian controversy is what precipitated the Nicene Council which was convened by Constantine but we'll save a further description of areas for a later time on the other hand in Alexandria you have an alternative approach to the Christian faith which probably is as far out in the in the other distant weeds as is Paul of Samos Atta you know so this is kind of a real broad sort of spectrum of views here that all fell broadly within what was accepted Christian teaching Sibelius said that the Christ was an emanation of God this is the magic word emanation the Sun radiates light Santa Sebelius said God emanates being okay something like that as the light shines from the Sun being emanates from God now if you follow that through it means that in a sense everything that is represents a kind of emanation of God and there is that which is closer to God and that which is more distant from God but in a sense God is ultimately in everything so it is a kind of pantheism you see the Jewish approach had a hard monotheism God is one only one no Trinity you know absolute monotheistic affirmation on the other hand from the Greek point of view God there's a very kind of thin line or our gray area that separates God from his creation and God is just sort of spilling out the created order as if it were something of his own stuff and sibelius gives us an idea like that however he uses an interesting term to describe this he says that Christ is homo you see ah with God now homo osya is a word a phrase that means same stuff and what's interesting is that the first major Creed of the church used that same language so the Council of Nicaea affirms that Christ is homo osya same stuff with God but rejects sub alien ISM this is where heretics help us out you know never be too hard on a heretic because sometimes they just by putting up the fight force Christians to get more clarity and it's interesting how many times heretics have given us language we found useful so we don't accept the heresy associated with the term but we like the term and so that's what Sibelius did he gave us this term homo Lucia and the church actually picked that up and also Sibelius also gave us these terms god of God light of light true God of True God you ever heard that kind of language straight from Sibelius one of the great heretics of church history gives us language we have loved ever since you know so just one of those interesting ironies Sibelius in any event used that kind of language but he used it in the sense of emanation that's what the church finally would not accept he said that Christ only appeared to be human this was called docetism from the Greek word okay which means to seem or to appear Christ only appeared to be human like a carefully contrived phantom he looked human but wasn't so do you see the kind of symmetry Antioch is affirming the humanity of Christ but denying his deity Alexandria is affirming the deity of Christ but but denying his humanity and Christian believers are sort of cut in the middle here trying to figure out just how do we understand the character of Christ in connection with our understanding of God and this is an ongoing conversation controversy continuing during this time the major theologians of the 3rd century I'm not going to take much time on them just to mention their names one was a fellow named Clement of Alexandria and the other was a guy named Origen they are interesting I almost thought I'd take a little time to tell their stories Origen especially is a very interesting character again by modern standards we would say they're a little bit off in their understanding of Christian truth within hey we've had you know another 1700 years to think about it that they didn't have at their disposal both of them however are trying to defend the Christian faith against this mounting kind of pressure that's coming from either side so just so you'll at least recognize their names the last gasp of persecution takes place in the latter part of the third century under a Roman Caesar whose name is Diocletian this is one of the most famous and maybe the most severe of all of the persecutions that occurred it was Empire wide it cut through every part every stratum of the Roman world Diocletian himself was interrupting what had been a very long period now the better part of this entire century had been rather quiet and Christian people had been able to with a certain degree of confidence move and live and have their being in the Roman world without necessarily fearing that you know the the ceiling was in a cave in on them at any moment all of this ended under the reign of Diocletian Diocletian himself was one of the most competent indeed brilliant Roman rulers to come along in years this is another irony of church history at least in the Roman world it was the best Emperor's who were the hardest on Christians it was the licentiousness assisting immoral emperors who didn't really give a Rik and so Christians got along fine when the emperor was worthless but every time you get a guy who really cares about the Roman world all of a sudden Christians are in the cross hairs of his concern and Diocletian is the last of these great pagan brilliant Roman rulers and he recognized that the Christian faith was a profound threat to everything that he understood Rome to stand for and so he launches a somewhat risky proposition from his point of view this this persecution against Christian people he came out of a military background he was a very good bureaucrat very smart guy organizationally he divided the Roman world up into four quadrants so east and west were already somewhat divided then he divided each of those into four into two more so we have four all together north west south west and so on and he was over all of it and was a very competent kind of chairman of the board you might say but toward the very beginning of the fourth century he does launch this persecution had been growing for a time and it lasted about the last three years of his reign so three oh three the three oh five horrific persecutions many people were killed many were dismembered there were Christians that had had their eyes gouged out and other kinds of you know horrific sorts of torture and persecution all in the name of their Christian faith and so that's the kind of thing that he was doing obviously it was not completely successful Christian people still weather the storm and came out the other end Diocletian died in the year 305 as soon he died somewhat unexpectedly and therefore he hadn't really set up a good solid arrangement for succession and so there was a kind of collapse of order in the in the Roman world for a time and especially in the West civil war broke out for a year or two in which both sides the north and the south were vying for control and that is somewhat important to our story Rome's first Christian Emperor course as you know is Constantine Constantine was the son of Constantius and Constantius was the ruler of the West under Diocletian to the north so Constantine comes from the man who was in fact one of these four tetrarch's in the Roman world he was himself that his Constantine was served under Diocletian in his military so when Constantine was a young man he was involved in military expeditions here and there so he had a strong military background himself and was had the experience of a soldier and so on he had had a come and that sort of thing when Diocletian died in 305 constantine returned home it's always been a little bit of a question and i don't think it's ever been definitively answered whether or not constantine was himself involved in any of the persecution of christians the weight of evidence seems to be against it it seems that he was more involved in military expeditions here and there and was not immediately involved in persecuting christians however at this point it's certainly possible that he might have been he was this is certainly before any claim to be a Christian convert he was sympathetic to Christians but he was also a loyal son of the Roman world and so it's possible and if it was the case that Constantine had been persecuting Christians that it makes him kind of an apostle paul sort of guy you know once a persecutor of the church and then a great defender of it I'm not so sure that's the way it actually happened but it's been a somewhat open question down through the years when Diocletian died constantine returned home and as it turns out his own father Constantius died the following year and so Constantine in the year 306 actually assumes position of ruling the north part of the Roman world in the West there was there had been some civil war going on that died down for a time so basically he was able to manage affairs in his own domains without a lot of hostility going on between himself and those who are ruling in southern Europe mainly in Italy the domains that he controlled were at this point Britannia which would be England up to the wall of Hadrian there which of course separates it from Scotland Gaul which would be modern-day France and Iberia which would be Spain so that was basically what he was controlling his domain did not go East as far as Italy and so this is in 306 Constantine's holdings he was generally tolerant of the Christian movement and that seems to have been a combination of his fathers philosophy and also the fact that his mother was a conspicuous Christian you may know the mother of Constantine Helena was famous in her own right she was eventually sainted by the Catholic Church but all the way through she seems to have been a heartfelt Christian and that obviously had a little bit of influence on the family life of Constantine you know so whatever his own personal views were at that stage he nevertheless out of deference to his mother appreciated her Christian conviction Eusebius the church historian quotes Constantine as saying this in this timeframe that is this kind of early moment in his career he said quote my father revered the Christian God and uniformly prospered while the Emperor's who worshipped the heathen gods died a miserable death therefore that I may enjoy a happy life and reign I will imitate the example of my father and join myself to the cause of the Christians who are growing daily while the heathen are diminishing interesting quote isn't it you see so you don't know if that's heartfelt faith or just political pragmatism it may be a little of both I tend to favor the latter I think at this point Constantine wasn't quite there yet some people think he never did get there some people he never was just anything more than a practical political Christian I'm not I'm not quite that cynical about him but at this point I think he was simply observing the effect of various perspectives and noticing especially with his own father's experience and others that he was aware of that things tended to go better if you walked in the way of the Christian movement so that seems to be as far as it went I may have been impressed with the death of Diocletian who had been such a severe persecutor of Christians and died a horrible death and in many ways I think Constantine might have taken some notes at that point you know that that didn't turn out so well for him in any event the great turning point for Constantine certainly is this incident that we call the Battle of the Milvian bridge the Milvian bridge as you probably know is major bridge that gave access to the city of Rome as you're coming down the kind of Italian peninsula there what happened was that there was a usurper who took over control of the other part of the western empire his name was max inches so the fella that had served under Diocletian is set aside pushed aside and Maxentius exert asserts himself anis takes over and he really changes the policies at this point in Italy there had been a fairly tolerant kind of attitude toward religious practice and Maxentius changes that he comes back in wanting to really push more of a principled paganism and he once again launches a fairly severe assault on Christian people who numbered a you know quite the sizable number of them in Italy and so he usurped power in Italy and Africa and the people who were living there knowing that Constantine was much more favorably disposed toward Christian people appealed to it send him a couple of emails you know come and help us and so this appeal from these folks was probably all Constantine needed I mean after all he was a Roman military character it wasn't like he needed a whole lot of encouragement to go to war you know and so when he gets an appeal from the indigenous population that they should come and especially when they mix into the appeal come and rescue us who are Christians who are being you know abused by this character Maxentius that's probably all Constantine needed and so he musters an army just short of a hundred thousand and heads for Italy crossing the Alps he doesn't pull a Hannibal and cross it in the dead of winter with 37 elephants he doesn't do that he waits till the weather's a little better and crosses and times when the the more favourable kind of conditions there but he does come with a very substantial military force and so he comes from basically from Gaul comes across the Alps marching down into Italy in response to this appeal as he's approaching he's aware that Matt cinches also has a very respectable military force and as the story goes and again people will dispute how much of this is legend how much is fact I'm just telling you the story as it's been reported largely from Eusebius who knew him personally the man who sometimes called the father of church history was a contemporary of these events and so I'm relying rather heavily on his account of it but as the story goes Constantine the night before what was going to be a major battle that was going to take place at the Milvian bridge is praying and concerned about this and in this moment he sees a vision and the vision of course is a vision that either he saw in his in a dream or a waking vision not clear which and it's not altogether clear exactly what the vision looked like or what form it took but certainly you have this very very famous incident from the career of Constantine in the year 312 in which he reportedly saw this vision and of course the message was that he should use the image in the vision as a symbol and in this sign conquer you're probably familiar with that it's probably the most famous single incident that comes from the career of Constantine the the debate continues to this days you can well imagine just what did he see some people say this was pious fraud that constantly just made this up because he was trying to find something to spark his guys give them a new kind of sense of enthusiasm to go into this battle and fight with all their hearts some people on the other hand think that Constantine actually had a true and genuine vision certainly his report of this for the rest of his life was consistently always affirming something was actually before his eyes there he never implied in any sense that this was some sort of fiction or fabrication on his part and so for whatever it's worth we just have to leave that I'll leave it to your own judgement as to how much credibility you want to tax to it but that is the story the image of the vision is famously this Cairo symbol you know Greek know that the two Greek letters there the Chi which is kind of the X letter and then the letter that looks like a P is actually the Greek letter Rho and it makes the R sound in the Greek language it's the it's the Greek word Christo's which starts Chi Rho iota Sigma Tau Omicron Sigma Christo's you know and of course the first two letters of the word Christ Chi Rho have become then traditionally a symbol for Christ and for the Christian movement and that was presumably at least that was what Constantine reported seeing in this vision and so he emblazoned that on the military hardware that was going to be used by his soldiers as they headed into battle and the Cairo symbol has continued to be to this day an important symbol of Christ of the Christian movement the Milvian bridge looks something like this this is not the one that was standing at the time because what Maxentius did was destroy that one and his strategy was this he wanted to fight Constantine on the other side of the river so he's going to cross out of Rome across the bridge fight Constantine he destroyed the Milvian bridge and he put up in its place a bunch of kind of a makeshift pontoon bridge and his strategy was if he beats Constantine then all is fine if he is if he's losing then he's got an escape route and he can run back across the bridge and immediately destroy it before Constantine can follow across the bridge so that that's max inches plan all right so that bridge was not there was a pontoon bridge he crosses over he is definitely being bested by Constantine Constantine was a brilliant military strategist and tended to win when anytime he was fighting in the open battlefield and so Maxentius is getting the worst of it and finally called to retreat and on the signal all these guys run back to the bridge and they're crossing but they're crossing in such a panic that the bridge collapses and the pontoon bridge falls it was supposed to be destroyed once they cross but as it turns out it destroyed itself a little too quickly max inches wearing all his military hardware sunk like a rock drowned and most of his soldiers it almost brought back images of the exodus and the chariots of Pharaoh and the Red Sea kind of scene you know and in fact that parallel has been drawn more than once so Constantine comes running up to the river and all he sees are sort of glub-glub-glub coming up to the the surface of the river and what used to be the army of Maxentius has now largely died at the bottom of this sea so anyway it was kind of a miraculous victory you know I mean certainly Constantine was was on the winning side of it but it had such a dramatic and final conclusive end that he himself took this at least by his own testimony as evidence of the gods intervention and miraculous care for him and for his armies in that particular moment Constantine entered as a hero the city of Rome he was welcomed by these people they had asked for him to come he had come and indeed had been successful he does not do what every other Roman military commander had done up until that time in history when returning to Rome after a victory and that was to go to the temple of Jupiter to offer sacrifices he's the first guy in history who in fact refused to do that it was almost taken for granted that he would because it was much just tradition you know and yet he said he would not do that instead he got up and gave a speech to the people there who were enrollment at least this one quote has taken from that speech in which he says quote by this saving sign and it was the Cairo symbol that he held up at that point the true token of bravery I've delivered your city from the yoke of the tyrant he of course said more it was a longer speech than that but that was the flavor of it he gives credit fully and completely to God he claims that it was the god of the Christian movement that had intervened at this point and that this victory was in the direct result of God's work on his behalf and of course the people living there in Italy accepted that and in fact embrace that as the explanation without any particular protest whatsoever as a result of that Constantine took control of the entire Western Empire so now this is essentially what Constantine controls as of the year 312 all of North Africa Spain England of course Gaul and Italy now as well so the dividing line between east and west is really the line that separates the control of Constantine from the rest of the Roman world in 313 Constantine issues what's called the Edict of Milan so just one year later this particular decree which is sometimes called the Edict of toleration establishes a new public policy in all of Rome of full religious tolerance he doesn't make the Christian religion the official religion but he does establish a principle that no religion is going to be persecuted just by virtue of you know being a particular religious expression with certain limits if your religion call for child sacrifice or something like that that was a limit you know but but aside from that we would call it a kind of experiment in religious toleration very early in Western history it didn't quite look like religious toleration in America in the 21st century but it was certainly a dramatic step in that direction and so this is this is the first thing that Constantine does and and it doesn't make Christianity official but it sort of puts it on an equal playing field as it were with the other pagan religions of the day second thing he did was restore all the property that had been confiscated by Diocletian to the Christian people from whom it had been taken there have been huge amounts of property confiscated by Diocletian all of it is returned there was a meticulous accounting that Constantine undertook to make sure that everything was reinstated at least to the degree it possibly could be over the next ten years he put in place multiple laws which how can I put this if for the lawyers in the room this would represent violation of the Establishment Clause on steroids you know he did he passed all kinds of laws which were highly favorable to the Christian faith so if you know if for example and there were many like this if a person was a slave and they became a Christian they were immediately emancipated you know things like that now we look at this from 1700 years later and think oh come on man don't you know you can't buy people's faith I mean we understand that I agree I get that but I think we need to appreciate that this was a very early time in Christian history and a lot of experiments that we have tried and found wanting hadn't been tried yet and Constantine I really do think while some people are very cynical about this I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt he was prepared to set up any inducement he could think of to get people into the Christian Church including buying them you know well that doesn't work so well we understand that you can't torture people into faith you can't buy them into faith you can't bribe them into faith you can't even argue them into faith ultimately faith is something God gives as a gift we understand that Constantine I'm not sure quite got it but he was he was really trying I think to get people into and encourage them in the direction of Christian understanding and so for the next 10 years or so you do have a pretty significant not surprisingly growth of the Christian Church I mean a lot of people became Christians you know and I have no doubts that at least some of those people while they may have entered the church with very mixed motives might have over time actually become true and genuine Christian believers certainly not all but enough that we should at least you know give credit their words do all right so anyway toward the end of this period at about the year 324 war broke out between Constantine and his brother-in-law licinia's who was ruling in the East there had been sabre-rattling for years and again I'm not going to try to sugarcoat it I think Constantine may have been spoiling for a fight I think certainly that's possible and you can look at some of the things that happen lice India certainly was himself and so the fact that there would inevitably be a conflict between these two I think was pretty much in the cards all the way through it just what the particular circumstances would be remains somewhat controversial or unexpected but anyway in 324 we have this war that breaks out between license and Constantine Constantine easily wins and so at that point he becomes the ruler of the entire Roman world and so from 324 on Constantine is now has United the entire Roman Empire and of course he never does impose Christianity as the official religion that is to say you've got to be a Christian or else but he certainly does everything he can to favor it as time goes by probably the single biggest black mark on the career and history and reputation of Constantine is that after this war was over he not only had lice any Asst executed even though aliased his sister are not his sister his wife it was licensed with his brother-in-law so it was his wife's brother and he had him executed even though he'd promised to his wife he would not do that he also had the son of lice Enya's executed people who don't like Constantine will invariably lock in on that and I'm not trying to defend it you know sometimes political decisions are made which in retrospect we think we're very unfortunate I think that's probably the case here but in any event that that would probably be of all the things that happen in Constantine's career the thing that is that he's it's most controversial and people are who are critical will seize on that probably most quickly the very following year after this uniting of the Roman world the biggest problem Constantine deals with is the squabble going on among Christians over the Arian controversy and so he convenes the Nicene council in 325 I'm going to save discussion of that for next week this is a mosaic of con in that you find in the Hayek Sophia that great Christian cathedral there in what was Constantinople originally now Istanbul and I want to just remind you of this text that we read in Revelation and return to it now briefly as our Sunday School lesson of the morning so once again back here this text of course is often associated with heaven it cannot be heaven where all the discussion here is about earth and so this is a description and I think good commentators have recognized this for a long time that this is a description of God's people at work on earth and everything that's stated here is really properly descriptive of God's work in history through his church so for example John starts by saying I saw no temple in the city for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the lamb conspicuously absent from the Christian religion is a temple we don't have a central sanctuary we don't have pilgrimage we don't have that kind of holy Trek indeed it's just the opposite for us Christians we are the temple on a holy Trek to the world the pilgrimage has taken just an opposite direction we are told repeatedly in the New Testament we are the temple of God and so we are now a living edifice you see Peter says in begotten in his letter we are living stones you see we are living rocks and you take all of us together and it makes a building a building of living bricks and the Holy Spirit resides in us and where two or three are of us are gathered there is a place of worship there is the presence of Christ and so there's no temple in this city in the sense that there had been a temple and a temple centric worship in the Old Covenant regime the city has no need of Sun or moon to shine on it for the glory of God as its light and the lamp is the lamb how many are we told in the New Testament Christ is the light of the world and then we're also told we are the light of the world we are the salt of the earth we are those who carry the light of Christ with us and so wherever we go and wherever the Christian movement has gone cultures light up people treat each other more civilly under the influence of the Christian message that is demonstrably the case through history I know people fixate on wars in the name of Christ and I realize the Crusades are out there and so on but in the greater scheme of things there is this is one of the most uncontestable hypotheses we could possibly consider that where the Christian message has been faithfully preached people settle down it is a civilizing influence and that is because Christ is the light of the world and my friend sitting here in Sunday school you are the light of the world you're the light in the office where you work you are the light in the places that God sends you you walk into a room you light it up by the glory of God residing in you because you are his temple and the light shining out the windows he continues the nations will walk by its light and notice the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it I love this image Constantine he brought immense glory into the city of God brought immense glory into the place of worship and he was only the first and as we look through history we find that repeatedly again and again the kings of the earth you see this is referring to human history what about console what about Charlemagne what about Otto the first what about Christian rulers in Europe and England and so on down through history and increasingly in other parts we find rulers of the earth bringing into the community of faith they're the best of their treasures you see again we see that kind of thing all through history its gates will never be shut by day there will be no night there they used to say of the British Empire you know the Sun never sets right on the British Empire I tell you the Sun never sets on the kingdom of Christ in this world you go anywhere in the world and you will find the Christian movement sometimes persecuted sometimes beleaguered sometimes underground but there is no place you can you can go and the great quadrants of this planet where you don't find you know God's people there faithfully carrying on their worship people listen to this will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations how much of the great music in history has been in celebration of the Christian message how much of the great art in history has been in celebration of the Christian message how much of great architecture in history has been in celebration of the Christian message how much of great literature has had to be conversant with and participate in the conversation about the Christian myths how much has the Christian message conditioned the very best the very glorious expressions of the very best of what we are as human beings how much of it everything from Handel's Messiah you know right through 20th century a 21st century news is constantly coming back the best of it and celebrating the Christian message and again it's a remarkable realization of what seems pretty unlikely when these words were written nothing unclean will enter it nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood but only those who are written in the Lamb's Book of Life we are said to be as those people who enter into the Christian community those who have been washed we've been washed by the blood of the Lamb we've been washed by the waters of baptism we have come into this we obviously have a mixed bag in the Christian world we understand there's the visible Church and the invisible church and the visible Church can have a mixed population but in terms of the true people of God the true Church of God in history the true City of God it is populated by those who have been redemptive ly by Christ and have been washed free of the taint of sin and in Christ we stand before God as those who are perfect and justified sanctified and it is all because of course of what Christ has done for us so I just want to say all of this to you because that's us we're talking about we are these people and never underestimate the potency of the effect of the presence of Christ in you as you go into the various places to which God calls you

Channel: Bruce Gore

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Keywords: Constantine Milvian Bridge Bruce Gore Chi Rho Nicene Council Creed

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Length: 44min 27sec (2667 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2015