One last time: The hardest thing a Christian will do is to live well within his church. This difficulty is mostly due to the fact that he must live with others within the church. To review previous notes, we shouldn’t confuse the biblical idea of church with something that approximates it, like:
- watching the preacher on television on Sunday morning
- showing up for church one minute after it starts and leaving one minute before it ends.
Both of these are of course not wrong in themselves but should not be confused with “member-ing” in church. And that member-ing is what we were appointed to in our baptism (1 Cor 12:13).
So, my final case for why church life is so difficult: Because so much is at stake in our living well in the church.
In the supernatural world
Just think of what God has invested in the church: His own reputation. “Through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”
In case you missed the point of this compact verse, Paul claims that God is showing his multi-layered, far-reaching wisdom to the angelic world (both the fallen and un-fallen) through God’s people being brought together in Christ: i.e., through the church. Here is another example of: Things We Would Have Never Known Unless They Were Told Us.
Why is God so concerned that these heavenly “rulers and authorities” be struck by His high intelligence? That’s a question for another paper; here, you should know just that the High God is asserting His unique intelligence as we - for instance - get out of our bed, do good work, and use our work’s profit to help the disadvantaged within the household of faith.
I said much is at stake. Paul says at the end of his Ephesians letter that we, the church, are wrestling against “the cosmic powers over this present darkness” as we attempt to magnify the wisdom of God. So this is crucial: The church is to display God’s sophisticated wisdom before the heavenly world; but too the church can be used by fallen beings to undermine the grand demonstration of the majesty and intelligence of God.
So living well at church is difficult because it is the main theater in the invisible war.
In the well-being of the believer
Now I have to leave the text behind and speak only from experience: I have observed that people are protected and blessed just as they function within the church. What is at stake here is something that can only be called well-being: success and accomplishment of persons.
No wait! I don’t have to leave the text behind. Because I’m speaking of maturity: In the church,
“we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves of teaching, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes…” (Ephesians 4)
What is at stake? The church is the place that God has appointed for persons to leave behind childishness and grow up. Of course this is not to say that the church is the sole formative influence in a person’s maturity, but it is the structure - or to use another metaphor: body - in which these other influences are given more force and definition.
For example, let’s think of two smart persons who are professing Christians and are married to one another. They both have good jobs and two kids that they love. They are readers, reflective, and generally serious. In many ways they seem poised for accomplishment.
But they are not member-ing in a church, and this omission is stunting their development. Not just stunting their spiritual development - whatever that means - but stunting their development as persons. What are they missing?
1. Guidance that will grant discernment: Of course everyone today has access to the Scriptures which easily can, and should, be read at home. But God thinks we need not just the Bible read, but the Word preached and the truth parceled out to us - by a pastor-teacher. If one is not exposed to these wholesome words being taught, he evidently leaves himself open to wrong thinking: about human nature, God the Father, Jesus, righteousness, possessions, etc.
This wrong thinking can lead to all kinds of mis-steps and misery. So go to church!
2. Rigor: Of course there is the rigor of willingly adopting one’s free time to a church’s schedule. Just that decision gives shape to the axiom: “The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness.” But the rigor I mention is more than schedule, but the resultant strain of being devoted to people you otherwise - outside of Christ - might not encounter, and might never want to.But sit at home and never undergo this rigor, and we become, or remain, egocentric.
3. Encouragement: To be human is to be influenced, and we must admit that there are few good influences to be had. But then, we must love those influences that manifestly do enable us for good. And the church, with its call to “encouraging one another to love and good works,” should be, if nothing else, inspirational.
Gotta have it!
4. The Incarnational pace: Member-ing gets us out of the smooth world of concepts and the maneuverable world of the interior self and places us in a crowd of people that we are responsible to. And so we are forced to slow down to “be patient with all.” Or we must speed up to move decisively to “bear one another’s burdens.” In other words, we are forced onto a different clock. The pace of our life is being set by the body that God has set us into. And that rhythm is the right one. It’s in the church that Lewis’s wise comment is realized: “The great thing is, if one can, to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions in one’s “own” or “real” life. The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”
In short, the church is the place where we leave behind the ignorant, grasping and complaining self, and “grow up into every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” And that’s what God intended for the HUMAN.
Of course, there is much at stake - the development of the person into full humanity, or not. Satan long ago tempted Eve to abandon the will of one he caricatured as a stilted, petty god and reach for her full potential. Today likewise we are being tempted to consider church as something confining and wooden - an obstacle to the full, accomplished life.
It’s not true - church isn’t an obstacle to who you should be. But it is tough.
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