Prayer: “My dear Heavenly Father – I thank you that out of millions on earth, you saw fit that I should understand your great plan of salvation and have the privilege of accepting your son, Jesus Christ, as my own personal Savior. Thank you for saving me!– Now, help me to understand the privileges and obligations that are mine as your child. I pray this in Jesus name.  Amen.”

The Church is a organism ­ "a called out body" made up of every person who has accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior since the day of Pentecost, and will not be completed until the last soul is saved, before the coming rapture when the Church: (all saved people) are raptured up to meet Christ in the air. I Thess. 4:16 ­ "For the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first." I Thess 4:17 - "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them, in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord." 

We shall study this great event in detail in a later lesson. 

The true Church is made up of all races, tribes and tongues of all denominations; Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Anyone and everyone who has accepted Christ's atoning work on the cross and whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life each one becomes a member of the true Church which is also the body of Christ. 

There are local assemblies, called the local church. In Revelation, we read of the Church in Asia, the Church in Lacodicea, etc.  In I Cor. 1:2, we read about the Church in Corinth.  The born again believers of these local churches of all ages, make up (though unseen) The Church.
 
We think of the church or temple as the place where God dwells. That was so during the Old Testament time. But, now during the dispensation, after the death, burial and resurrection of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the body of each believer becomes the temple of God, where the Holy Spirit dwells. I Cor. 6:19 – “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God...”

What a sobering fact; our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit. One scripture says, How can we commit adultery and join our bodies with that of a harlot? How can we then destroy God’s temple (our bodies) with nicotine, etc.? knowing this should make us purify ourselves and have a clean holy temple. 

The local church is often spoke of "as the church that meets in (so and so) home, so the church is not the building." 
 
The smallest local church is where 2 or 3 believers are gathered together in His (Christ’s) name. Matt. 18:20 – “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

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