What Is the Point of Church

Everything revolves around love in the kingdom of God. Those things that are most important to God issue from love. Cases in point:

1) The obedience of faith toward Christ arises out of love. We cannot force ourselves to obey Christ out of sheer will or intellect. It takes love. If one loves Christ, obedience follows naturally. It is that one who loves Christ and obeys him for whom the love of God will be efficacious in turn.

2) Moving in the Spirit with great faith and as an astonishing witness has point and purpose only when arising out of love. Seemingly spiritual giants are just dogs in the street without love. Those things that are here for a season, but are bound to pass away cannot carry any weight at the threshold of eternity.

3) A personal friendship with God arises out of love. Since God is love, to get along with him one must adopt love too. Not like a mask, but as a transforming reality of the heart. When we start where we are and "go with the flow" of love (God) living in us, his love is brought to fullness within us. Certainly, one can never get along with God and not be loving like him.

So where is the place of doctrine in all this? Well, at the end of time, it will not matter, nor will anyone care whether or not one was Arminian or Calvinist; dispensational or covenantal; pre-, post- or a- millennial; charismatic or cessationist. What will matter is not the practice of doctrine, but the practice of love. Don't get me wrong, doctrine is important, it's just not more important than practicing love.Church, ultimately, is not about religious duty, nor religious teaching but about relationships between brothers and sisters, and love, not doctrine, defines that. If one goes through life attending church, committed to the group but never connecting to people, one errs and misses the matter of utmost importance. If one studies the Bible and knows church doctrine, but does not know his brethren he has missed the most significant doctrinal point.

Church is the place (and the period) where we learn to love one another and add others to the circle of love. The central reality of any church should be love and the way it connects people to people. If we strive for all else and miss that, we will have missed everything. If we lay anything on the line, if we sacrifice anything near and dear, let it be to further the love we have one for the other. That is the point, after all, of church.

Rock Gardens & Weed Beds

Many folks think that there is something to reccomend in being middle of the road in perspective and attitude, and something bad about being extreme in the same. I can understand why in many situations that may be a wise course, but it's anything but wise when it comes to Christianity. In following Christ, the milquetoast middle is nothing but a muddle. And dangerous at that!

Offered for your consideration: the parable of the sower. The extremes were clear in their result whether for good or bad, whereas the mucky middle had the look, even the promise of fruitfulness, but not the substance. Why? Only by selling out, getting extreme in focus, can we achieve what was intended by the scattering of the gospel seed in our lives. Only a single-minded vision of submitting to what "Christ in us" is attempting to grow can make our lives fruitful in God.

In God, fruitfulness is what counts. For the seed which is the Word to get anything done in us that He came to do, there has to be singularity in the soil of our hearts. Our soil must be set apart, exclusively, for the growth and fruitfulness of that one seed. It must yield no room, nor nutrient, nor anything else anything else would need to grow or retard growth.

If our soil is a mixed bag, chunky with rocks, or infested with other kinds of seed, our appearance may seem fine for a time, but over time, our fruitlessness will reveal the unfortunate truth about our hearts. Like any farmer planting his fields with a crop, when God plants seed in us, he expects that kind of fruit out of us. Let's say that God farms by the Christ-in-Christ-out method (CICO). When rocks and weeds compete for the soil with that seed, the seed's growth is stunted and its fruit is nonexistent.

God wants an abundant harvest for what he's sown into our lives, so how can we offer him rock gardens and weed beds and expect that he'll be satisfied, or that we would be safe from his retribution?

The Message In the Wrath of God

Considering the fame and evangelistic effect of "Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God," it is surprising that we don't hear much about the wrath of God anymore. I wonder if we're missing something important in ignoring or undercutting its message. Perhaps God's wrath has something important, even necessary, to say to this generation-- there certainly is no absence of the subject in the Bible. Do we need to be proclaiming the wrath of God more?

Romans 1 tells us the wrath of God is in the process of being revealed from heaven. Obviously, the subject is important enough for God to include it in his self-revelation in his word and in his creation. In other words, this is something we should know about him, he wants us to understand this. Life, if we'll hear it, screams at us in no uncertain terms that God is upset and he wants us to get the message. The repercussions of his wrath echo incessantly, rattling everything in this time and plane until it ultimately dies.

Prophets, one after the other, tried to establish God's wrath as a stimulant to reasonable thinking on the part of their hearers. Though far removed from them in space and time we need to hear them. Not that we should live in fear of punishment (that is the Devil's ploy) but we should live in sober judgment discerning the nature of how things work and what that tells us about the wrath of God. When sky-walking upon a steel girder stories above the security of earth, that sinking feeling that discerns gravity is a boon to clear thinking and careful stepping.

Surely wisdom owes a debt of gratitude to the revelation of God's wrath in nature.

The witness of that wrath and the deadness of our souls invoke a certain trembling in us when considering the almighty Creator. At even the thought of God we hide, trembling in the bushes, knowing we are sinners and children of wrath by nature. We fear the face of him who sits on the throne. Any wrath from one eternal, perfect in action and almighty in power is enough to seal our fates for eternity, so nothing could coax us out of our hiding places but the sure knowledge that our sins were fully expiated and we were thereby reconciled to God.

The outrageousness and brutality of Christ's passion impeccably scribes the fearful breadth of God's wrath against sin on the stone tablet that was Golgotha. 

Do we even have a real purpose in ministry and evangelism without paying due deference to the wrath of God? Ours is a ministry of reconciliation. The quality and depth of God' grace and forgiveness cannot be seen in proper relief apart from the backdrop of his animus against sin. He who is perfect in grace is also perfect in wrath. Have we even delivered a message worthwhile at all if we haven't communicated the message in the wrath of God?

Confession Is Good for the Soul

"If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."     1 John 1 :8-9 NIV

Confession, as used in the text above, means agreement. Literally, it's saying the same thing, so confession in this context, which is about our sin, is seeing some thought, or intent, or action, or word of ours as being wrong before God, and consciously agreeing with God concerning its wrongness. In other words, confession is saying, “I agree with you, God, that this thing from me was sinful.” If a confession is limited in scope to just an admission of the facts, i.e. "I did this," without agreeing with God about its wrongness, then a necessary ingredient of confession which makes purification "take" will be missed.

There are biblical descriptions of confession that are helpful: 

• Lev 5:5 makes confession part of the sacrificial system. Each sin had to be confessed as part of offering sacrifice. In Christ the believer has but one sacrifice over a lifetime and does not have to offer Christ again and again with every failing and confession of sin (Hebrews 10:12-14). The Christian recognizes Jesus' singular sacrifice as applying to whatever sin might occur in the believer's life whenever it is confessed.

• Prov 28:13 makes confession essential for prospering in life. If one wants their life to be blessed as much as possible, confession rather than suppression that sin was committed is necessary.

• James 5:16 associates confession (to each other as well as God) with healing. This applies only in those cases where the sickness was a corrective measure applied in response to sin (as in 1 Corinthians 11:30). If your theology can't handle the thought of God taking punitive action against a believer, you need to change your theology so as to agree with the Word, or risk missing out on this potential remedy.

• The verse at the head of this post binds confession of sin to God's faithfulness in responding to such with forgiveness and cleansing from unrighteousness. One might wonder why confession would be necessary in light of the once-for-all-time provisions of the cross and resurrection, since they are one-time events sufficient in effect for our entire lives. Suffice it to say that the cross is what's effective, the confession is merely a means of applying the fact of what was already supplied to the momentary guilt of failure--the blood of Jesus cleanses us from sin, confession clears our consciences.

So, believers in Christ confess sin so that they may continue to grow in spirit and in grace, particularly so in the case where the sin is against another person, especially a brother or sister in Christ. Harbored sin, that is unconfessed sin, puts static between the believer and God. The heart is not in phase with God, or agreement, and so there's noise in between. That noise is Holy Spirit convicting the believer of sin. (John 16:8-11) Conviction in this sense is just the Holy Spirit saying to the believer, “That ain’t right.”

This does not imply or direct believers to adopt a formal, ritualistic approach to confession as some expressions of Christianity, like Catholicism, have done. That wouldn’t be necessarily erroneous if not for the formal pronouncement of penance and absolution afterwards. Like all things Christian, our only mediator is Christ, never another person. When one's sin was overtly against another person, then confession needs to be to God, then to the person wronged, not to an uninvolved party. Certainly, any resulting restitution is to the wronged party, not to the uninvolved through some abstract exercise of penance.

When we confess our sin we must not only say that something is sin, we must actually see it that way, as God does, in our own minds and hearts. If we are in agreement of heart as well as mouth with God on the matter, there is no sense of imposition or burden in our confession. We don't see it as God making us do something we don't really want to. We confess willingly to God, even though with embarassment, because we desire our communication with the Holy Spirit to be static-free.

The blood that atones for all our sin has already been shed, once and for all. That singular effusion was sufficient to wash away all our sin before God-- past, present and future. Therefore, confession doesn’t obtain something we don’t already have without it, it just makes the most, in the here and now, of what was already provided in full. When it arises from that light, and expresses heartfelt agreement with God on the nature of what we have done, confession is truly good for the soul!

The Essence of True Repentance

Repent! 

It's the first word of the gospel message. It is simultaneously commanded by God and granted by him. John baptized unto it, and commanded fruit in keeping with it, but what is it? The simple definition is a change of mind or heart, but often we have a change of mind or heart (or at least we think we have), only to find ourselves back in the same place far sooner than we ever thought possible.

Is repentance meant to be a yo-yo experience, the penitent returning to the same place of regret over and over? Not ultimately, but I think we sometimes get stuck there. We need more than godly sorrow, guilt has its place, but I think it's more stagnating than instigating. If such is to be any more than wasted emotion, we need to get up and climb over that hill to see a new horizon. Repentance is about transit-- it moves us from where we were to someplace new.

Truth is: regret is not the same as repentance, even though it is a stop on the way. It is possible for one to reach the conclusion that God considers a thing wrong, and even to regret that it’s been done, but still not see the thing the same way that God does. That point of agreement is where the journey toward repentance crests the final hill to see the quest's goal. For the one who sees what God says, but does not see as God sees, only Romans 7 can be his or her lot-- overcoming certainly will not be!

Regret can never be the source of victorious, overcoming behavior in the future. Even if determined action is taken against regretted behavior, that will only end up attaching a collar and leash to a wild leopard. It does not and cannot change the nature of the beast. The imposition of an alien viewpoint cleanses the soul no better than sweeping rubbish under a carpet cleans the house. For repentance to produce fruit, a sincere realization that God was right and we were wrong needs to arise in the soul and overwhelm heart and mind.

We can beat ourselves up endlessly for the stupid things we do, say and think, but that won't translate into victory unless that "aha moment" distills in our souls and we see it God's way. Not just see it, though, we have to actually agree with God. That's not something you can do by checking a box at the end of a user agreement and move on, it's something birthed in the soul and wakened in brokenness. Only then can we truly relinquish our will to his, come into agreement with him and achieve change.

Only then can we walk together with God. The prophet asked, "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" The answer to rhetorical questions is always obvious, but sometimes the applications are anything but. The answer to effective repentance is out there waiting for us to connect the dots. From the intersection of Godly Sorrow and the Need of Change the sign post points toward the next stop called Agreement. On the other side of that ash heap we're trying to climb over is the junction where we and God meet and travel on together. 

It's the essence of true repentance.