The Bride of Christ

Scripture describes the church as a bride preparing to appear in unblemished splendor before her loving Bridegroom. Today, Sinclair Ferguson shows how this image helps us be patient with one another’s progress in sanctification.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast this week, you’ll know that we’ve been thinking together about some of the New Testament pictures for the church. And incidentally, if this is the first time you’ve heard Things Unseen, let me welcome you to join everyone else who listens each weekday. And we’ve talked about the church as the body of Christ and about the Lord’s flock. And today I thought it was time to mention the bride of Christ.

Like flock, it’s a picture that was already used for ancient Israel. You’ll remember the amazing passage in Ezekiel 16 where God describes His relationship with His people. They were nothing. They were like a baby that had been discarded at the side of the road, her body unwashed, no swaddling clothes wrapping her at all. And then He gave her life, caused her to flourish. And then Ezekiel, speaking on God’s behalf changes the metaphor. Israel is no longer an infant but grown into young womanhood ready for love and marriage. So the Lord married her and adorned her, but then sadly, she trusted in her beauty and in the riches the Lord had given and prostituted them. Reminiscent of the story of Hosea, isn’t it? But then we also remember the Lord’s words in Hosea 11: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?” (v. 8).

That picture of a faithful, faithful God and the church as that God’s bride comes to its fulfillment, of course, in the Lord Jesus. The church is the bride of Christ. And you remember that Paul says in Ephesians 5 that this picture is actually embedded in the original creation of man as male and female, a man and a woman made for each other. That marriage in Eden, and our marriage too, is intended to be a picture of the relationship between the Lord Jesus and His people. It’s a picture of his amazing love for us. As the hymn puts it, from heaven He came and sought us to be His precious bride; with His own blood He bought us, and for our life He died.

And this is a picture that has many lessons to teach us, but here’s one of the most important: Paul says that one day the church will be presented to the Lord in splendor, “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:27). Think about that when you reflect on your own church fellowship. Paul implies that there are spots on our face. We have wrinkles. The Lord Jesus isn’t blind to them, but He is a loving, gentle, and patient divine beautician. If I can put it this way: the Spirit is determined that the Lord Jesus will have a beautiful bride in glory. And that actually requires not just the work of a beautician, it requires the work of a reconstructive surgeon. But if that’s the case, we need to learn to be very patient with one another.

Some Christians want to see change overnight. Sometimes younger ministers can make the same mistake, but that’s not usually God’s timing, is it? He works patiently because He loves us. He does things, generally speaking, slowly because that’s the best way.

One of our children is a pediatric surgeon, and he’s been one for a quarter of a century now, so he must have operated on a lot of children and met, I’m sure, not a few anxious parents—and even some parents who have told him that they want their child to have a different operation from the one he’s planning to do, and they’ll bring in information they’ve downloaded from the web to prove it. So, he needs to be very patient. And some time ago, I said to him, “I suppose now you must get through your list of patients much more quickly.” And he gave an interesting, and I thought—he’s my son remember—I thought it was an impressive reply. He said, “Actually, Dad, I work more slowly now just because I want to be careful to do the very best job I can for every one of these children.”

Now, I was moved about that, of course because he was our son, but because it made me reflect on the fact that every operation he performs is on someone else’s son or daughter. And it made me think: “If my son works that way, carefully, making sure he does the best job, even if it takes more time, then surely that’s all the more true of the Lord Jesus, as He patiently removes the spots and the wrinkles and all such things from the church. He’s getting the bride ready for the wedding day.”

You know, this is, I think, a word to some of us who have become impatient with the spots and wrinkles in our own church family. Remember, the church is not your bride; she’s Christ’s bride. And remember that His love for her means He wants to do the very best job in removing those spots and wrinkles, and it’s His purpose to do that patiently. So you and I need to be patient and wait for the Lord to work in others, and yes, patient to learn to wait for Him to work fully in us. And when that happens in our fellowship, we become increasingly Christlike, and people begin to notice.