Why Church?

Tags

American Christianity, Christian, Church, Faith, God the Father, Gospel, Holy Spirit, Jesus

Edmund Clowney wrote in his book The Church in the IVP Contours of Theology Series that the church essentially has three functions which apply both corporately and individually, 1) Worship, 2) Nurture, and 3) Witness. For clarification as I find nurture to be an odd term, but he means nurture in terms of the responsibility of the church to care for one another, to love one another. I’ve found his simple and clear functions of the church refreshing. We live in a world where church can mean anything from a building, a people, a cult, an atheist social club, an orderly worship service, a disorderly worship service, worship tied closely to a historic tradition, worship untied to all tradition, or simply whatever anyone wants it to mean.

I would like to propose that the church has a definitive meaning, purpose, and function in the world which is both rooted in the very nature of God as revealed in the Bible. Despite the modern tendency to balk at all forms of structure, establishment, and order (Well, at least, some younger generations tend to do this – my generation), I believe something important is lost when we so quickly and flippantly discard the biblical definition and function of the church. Now, one might already be objecting in one’s mind even though I haven’t technically really said anything yet, and that’s my point.

What is the purpose of your objection to church? What is the purpose behind your quickness to claim there isn’t really a definition or structure or order to the church? Not all of you are doing this now, but many do and are. You know who you are. Just because there isn’t a Webster’s dictionary definition of the church in a proper sense in the Bible doesn’t mean that the Bible doesn’t define, describe, and detail the functions and purpose of the church.

So, what is the church you might ask? If you look at the Apostle Paul, you might say the church is those who have been called out of sin and reconciled to God by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and consists of different genders, races, ages, and people from various backgrounds. If you look at Peter, disciple of Jesus, the church is something that is built on Jesus Christ and also in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the head, the cornerstone of the church and all the faith, hope, trust of individuals lies in Jesus. Also, the church is something that the world will not like and the church will suffer, be persecuted, and endure hardship. If you look to James, brother of Jesus (granted James was born of natural means and Jesus supernatural), you will find the church is not only comprised of people who believe in Jesus and have faith in Him, but also live their lives in accordance with that faith caring for the poor, living good moral lives, and loving one another. If you look to John, the church is a community of people who have been purchased by Jesus Christ who laid down His life for them, so that they might in turn be willing to love one another to the extent that they might lay down their lives for one another. The church, in John, is also a people forgiven and saved by grace, so they are to show grace to others, to forgive one another.

The Apostle Paul also talks about the church being the bride of Christ and the mystical body of Christ, exemplifying the unique union and unity that the church is to share with one another and with God. The Old Testament is about God creating, blessing, and redeeming a people for the glory of His name. Originally, the people God called were Israel as part of the old covenant, but in both the Old and New Testaments we learn that a new people have been “grafted” into the God’s people. Those whom God would call ‘not my people’ God would call ‘my people.’ Salvation would go to the ends of the earth, not simply to Israel. At once a community bound by the Law of God, then later a community bound by grace through faith in God through Jesus Christ. Able to obey the Law because of the gift of God’s grace given to them. This is the church.

In fact, as Jonathan Edwards and others have mentioned, not only is marriage itself meant to be an experience and reflection of the unique, eternal, loving community that is God (Father, Son, Spirit), but the church is to find it’s identity rooted in the trinity as well. The Father predestined the church to be established and called out for His purpose and sent His Son by His grace to redeem us from sin. The Son revealed God to us and called us to believe in Him so that God’s redemption might be effectually applied to us, and called us to follow Him, obeying His commands, and proclaiming the Gospel together about Him. The Spirit is what turns hearts of disbelief into seeking and eventually believing hearts. The Spirit is how the believer’s life is tethered to the life of God. We are united to Jesus Christ by faith in Him which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is the spirit of Jesus within us as God is Father-Son-Spirit. 3 yet 1. As the Spirit dwells within us, the Spirit is the power of God for salvation to the believer in applying the Gospel, but also sanctifying us, making us more like Christ as we live for the Gospel daily. In addition to this, the church is to be a foretaste of the Kingdom of God in the world. In this way, it is like an embassy of Jesus Christ in the world where the world can come to find shelter and safety and life and experience a whole different sort of world, a world different from the world beyond the church. Yet…

We talk about music. We talk about projectors. We talk about lights. We read about scandals. We read about hate-filled bigots. We see wealthy and multi-millionaire pastors on tv and hear about tax fraud and various scandals. Anti-homosexual, anti-tolerance, anti-movies, anti-music, anti-this, anti-that, anti-, anti-, anti- …

We often hear about what the church isn’t and we often see the bad examples of the church, where the church fails to be biblically faithful to it’s calling, purpose, witness, mission. However, how do we respond to this? What do you say about a church that seems to have lost it’s purpose and seems so saturated with what the church would call, sin?

I believe there is a misconception in the world about the church and there is a misconception in the church about the church as well. Which came first, I don’t know. However, what I do know is that many people look at the church as if it were supposed to be perfect. The church should be just like Jesus Christ. Christians and non-Christians tend to hold the church on this incredibly high pedestal. However, we’re forgetting something. Christ came to save sinners. The church is comprised of sinners. The bride of Christ is called to be faithful, but that doesn’t mean the bride doesn’t have a history of adultery. Look at the prophets, especially Ezekiel, who commonly refer to God’s people as adulterers. As we learn not only in the Old Testament, but also through Jesus, God loves even the adulteress and calls them to repentance and faith. Someone once said, “the church isn’t a museum of saints, it’s a hospital for sinners.”

I believe this is a very wise saying. We often forget the Bible when we look at the church in our world today. We forget that Paul wrote to a church in Corinth where some members were apparently committing such grievous sexual sins that even the surrounding non-Christian culture was looking at them like, “Whoa! That’s messed up.” We forget that the famous Apostle Paul which many Reformed Christians love to quote and read so frequently once lived for the purpose of destroying Christianity by going around and ensuring that Christians were rounded up and killed or imprisoned or both. That’s in the Bible, look it up. It’s in Acts. We forget that David who bravely slew Goliath and wrote many beautiful Psalms and was a great king was also a man who betrayed a friend by sending him to the front lines to die in order to have sex with his friend’s wife.

We forget that Abraham was called by God to wait patiently upon the Lord and that God would provide a son to him, but instead of waiting he took matters into his own hands and slept with his wife’s servant. We forget that even Peter who proclaimed in the Spirit who Christ was only just after was used by Satan to dissuade Jesus from even going to Jerusalem which merited an incredibly strong rebuke by Jesus to Peter. Then, Peter who would die for Jesus instead denied Him 3 times. We point at Thomas as the doubter, however, we forget that all the disciples abandoned Jesus and that all the disciples needed to see Jesus to believe and that Thomas was singled out only because he wasn’t there when Jesus first appeared to them, the others had already seen and touched Jesus.

We sometimes get the idea in our heads that the church is comprised of Mother Teresa’s and Billy Graham’s, then when we see the news which constantly shows only the extreme sinful cases of Christianity, suddenly we are shocked and ask, how can the church be like this? Shouldn’t the church be perfect and holy, like Jesus? The answer is a resounding “YES!” and amen, but we also need to remember that Jesus is the only one without sin. All of us are sinful. If we are human, we are sinful. When we believe in Jesus, our sins are forgiven. However, that doesn’t mean we become like God in the blink of an eye. That’s naive, although that seems to be what the majority of people in the church and outside believe. When we believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit who has caused us to believe already having transformed our heart from unbelief to belief, then works in our lives helping us more and more to be transformed into the image of Jesus. We will not attain the perfection of Jesus until He returns according to the Bible, but we are still called to strive for Jesus and to run the race and to persevere by faith.

So, what is prompting this post? Why a message about the church? The reason for this post is we live in a world where everyone is redefining and defining church in their own eyes apart from Scripture. American Christianity has become a Christianity of convenience. Much like a store. If a church is convenient for you, you go and get what you want. If it isn’t, you move onto the next store. As R.Kent Hughes has suggested in Disciplines of a Godly Man, we have become a country in the US of church hitchhikers, constantly hitching a ride from church to church. We need to reclaim the discipline of cultivating both a healthy theology of church (ecclesiology) as well as the discipline of being a part of the local manifestation of God’s church. We should not let postmodern confusion of truth and disillusionment dissuade us from taking the Bible, the church, and our lives seriously.

We need bold Christians to live out their faith and to show this world what the church is really about. We need bold Christians to live out their faith in community and to show the church, other Christians, what the church is really about. If we don’t reclaim what the church is called by God to both be and to do, I’m concerned that the McDonaldization of American Christianity will take the church out of it’s high calling in Christ and transform it into merely a human institution for our own glory as opposed to the glory of God. In many places this is already taking place. We need bold Christian leaders to start showing this world who Christ is and what Christianity is really about. We don’t just need leaders, we need lay people. We need garbage men, fast food employees, city workers, stock brokers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, engineers, architects, scientists, and all manner of worker in the marketplace to show this world what it means to believe in Jesus, that it isn’t simply lip-service, but there is a life lived unto God that is connected with our message.

May we reclaim a biblical understanding and theology of church, and may we live as the community of the redeemed, called out, chosen, and elect of God, for the purpose of proclaiming the great acts of God to the broken and faithless and destitute and downtrodden. May we serve in this world while we worship God individually and corporately, nurture one another, and witness to the world for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not for any human glory, but for the glory of God and that His name might be magnified all the more. Amen.

Be Holy

Tags

Church, Genesis, God, Holiness, Holy, Image of God, Jesus

“Holiness, holiness, is what I long for… Holiness, is what I need… Holiness, holiness, is what you want from me…”

Do we really want holiness? Do we yearn to be holy? If we’re honest, I don’t think we do. Perhaps a monk walled up in a monastery somewhere might actually yearn for holiness (God bless him.), however, we don’t typically yearn for holiness. Holy is a word we use a lot in Christian circles, but what does holy actually mean? Also, why should we long to be holy?

That’s what we’ll be discussing in this post. I’ve been reading Kevin DeYoung’s book recently The Hole in Our Holiness. I’ve long enjoyed reading DeYoung’s blog DeYoung, the Restless, and Reformed, but in preparation for a sermon on the call of the church to be holy I thought I’d check out his book. Something he mentioned which I’ve found to be true is that mentioning holiness today, even among Christians, will likely merit looks from others akin to people looking at you as if you have a bit of cream cheese on your nose. Holiness is not something we talk about often, yet, holy and variants are mentioned numerous times in the Bible. If we desire to be biblical Christians, with our authority rooted in Scripture and not our own ideas or opinions of Christianity, then it is important that we not neglect the church’s call to be holy.

The word holy means to be set apart or consecrated (set apart for a divine purpose). It implies separation on some level. In a Christian world that is increasingly conscious of legalism and it’s dangers, holiness has gotten a bad rep. In Leviticus 19, a book with a central theme of holiness, God instructs Moses to tell God’s people: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord God am Holy.” Then, there are lots and lots and also lots of rules about being clean, not unclean, and being pure both before God and before the eyes of the surrounding nations. Israel was called to be set apart for God. Peter picks up on this in his first letter in 1:13-21, but in addition to a reference back to Leviticus, he seems to imply that part of being holy is being like Christ. The apostle Paul in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 5 alludes to holiness as putting off the old self and putting on the new self in Christ. Therefore, the New Testament seems to promote the idea that holiness has to do with redeeming the image of God in man as perfected in Christ, and humanity’s putting on Christ as spiritual clothing individually and corporately as the church seems to show a larger theme of God’s doing which is tied closely to redemption – the redemption of the image of God in man.

In Genesis 1 and 2, we learn that humanity has been created, but also created with a purpose. That purpose is to be created in the image of God and serve as God’s royal representatives in creation evidenced in obeying God, caring for creation, naming animals, and living in community (God, man, woman // parallels the Trinitarian relationship of God, much has been written on this, see Jonathan Edwards for more). The image of God has been subject of much debate of the years, but I heard a very practical and common sense explanation which I find very convincing. I learned this during my time at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and it was in a class by Dr. Kaminski. The first 5 books of the Bible are called the Pentateuch or the Torah/Law. The New Testament refers to them as the Law of Moses. That is because it is believed that the first 5 books of the Bible with the exception of the death of Moses come from Moses. The world was already created when Moses was writing and had many, many gods. Gods of stone, metal, and various objects. Something all of these gods had in common was that they could not move, could not speak, could not hear, and could not see. They were statues, nothing more. No life in them, and thus, people were able to control their deities the way they saw fit. This is still the case even today. Indeed, the image of god in many cultures is an object created by man that cannot speak, see, hear, or move.

However, there is a notable difference between the biblical image of God and other images in the world. That difference is God created the image, the image is a living thing, the image can see, speak, hear, and move. False images cannot do any of these things and thus represent false gods who can’t do any of these things. However, humanity, created in the image of God, is a living representation of God who truly sees, hears, speaks, and moves. God is real and living, unlike all other gods in all the world and history, and humanity is living proof that the God of the Bible is the One, true God. I’ve found this explanation for the image of God to be the most convincing explanation. That humanity is the image of God is one thing, but what does the image do? According to Genesis 1-2, it reflects the sovereign rule and authority of God over all things while doing God’s will in creation. In Genesis 3, sin interferes with that purpose, although it doesn’t interfere with the fact that all humanity is made in the image of God. Therefore, when humanity sins, they are not simply doing something bad themselves, they are falsely representing God and in their disobedience to God not living according to their intended purpose.

People try to work their way back to that purpose on their own throughout Scripture, but it doesn’t work. Their sin has so separated them from God that they have become the opposite of holy, the opposite of God. Humanity’s inability to redeem itself is evident in the entirety of the Old Testament. Something more is needed, something greater is needed. We don’t simply need better behavior, we need new hearts. That’s precisely what prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel prophesy about in the coming of the Messiah and the next movement in God’s history of redemption. Then, God sent Jesus, His Son, the preexistent Word of God who has taken on human flesh in order to reveal God to humanity and to reconcile a people far from God, to bring sinners near to God by way of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His perfect life would fulfill the requirement of the Law which humanity could not perfectly obey as well as showing us how humanity is meant to live. His death would atone for the sins of those who would believe in the name of Jesus and give us forgiveness and eternal life. His resurrection marks God’s victory over sin and death. He defeated it Himself in the past, but it will be finally defeated in the future. The life of Jesus in believers by the Holy Spirit puts sin to death and gives us no fear of death because we know that our life is eternal and although our physical bodies decay and pass away, we will be raised to life as surely as Jesus was raised and then be given new bodies without blemish when Jesus returns (1 Corinthians 15).

Now, we view holiness in this world as a burden because it goes against our natural inclinations to be sinful and to not abstain from earthly pleasures. However, in Christ we have been given the power by His Spirit to live by the Spirit in the world and not according to the flesh. Putting of the old desires and behaviors of our former lives apart from Christ is not a burden, but a privilege as we understand our purpose is redeemed in Christ and we live not to image ourselves in the world, but to image God. It is not holiness that saves us from sin, only Christ can do that. However, it is holiness that is expected of all those who have truly been called out of the world by faith in Jesus. If you have truly been saved by grace in Jesus, then you are called to be holy as God is Holy. We are called to imitate Jesus Christ, to clothe ourselves with Him, to find our identity no longer in ourselves but in Him. He is the perfect image of God, and we are called to mirror and reflect that image to the world, to the nations.

We might view holiness as a list of do nots or can nots, but the reality is that it should not be a burden but a joy for those who are redeemed. It is not a burden, but a life of worship. It’s also not done to save us and to gain acceptance, for while ‘while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.’ God accepts us as we are, and has already paid the penalty for our sins so that we can be reconciled to Him. Our lives are to be lived in thankfulness for what God has done, not what we can do. We are to be humble, not prideful in our pursuit of holiness always mindful that we are of the dust and it is God who has shown grace to us and thus we are to show grace to all. What does not characterize God we are not to be characterized by, and what God delights in we are to delight in. That is the essence of our calling to be holy. We should long to be holy because we should long to be like our Heavenly Father. Not in an “I want to be God and supplant the throne sort of way” which was emulated in Genesis 3, but as a child desires to be like their father we ought to seek to be like our Father in Heaven. The essence of holiness lies in practically living the beginning of the prayer that Jesus provided, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” not ‘my will be done.’ Amen.

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For more works on holiness, read Jerry Bridges’ The Pursuit of Holiness, Kevin DeYoung’s The Hole in Our Holiness, A.W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy, and R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God.