What Is the Point of Church?

In our day, the nominal are fleeing church as fast as they can and many of the presumedly genuine don't think "organized" churches are all that necessary. It is true that everything in the kingdom of God is supposed to revolve around love, yet organized religion doesn't come close to living out such a mantra. Furthermore, all the pedantic fuss and vitriolic disputation about esoteric doctrines doesn't make the institution any more appealing. So what's the point of church which seems so repelling anyway?

It cannot be denied that those things that are most important to God in reference to life in the Church do issue from love. Case in point:

1) Obedience 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 even an awesome testimony of power, only has point and purpose if it arises out of love. Seemingly spiritual giants are just bugs in the grass without love. Those things that are here only for a season, but are bound to pass away cannot possibly carry any weight at the threshold of eternity, but love will.

3) 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 procceed in the love that God has shed abroad in our hearts, his love is brought to fullness within us. We can never get along with God and not be loving, like him.

Obviously, the point of church is love. So where is the place of doctrine and ritual in all this?

At the end of time, it won't really matter, nor will anyone care about 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 precision of the doctrine that was held, but the reality of the love which was practiced. Don't get me wrong, doctrine is important, it's just not more important than practicing love, not even close.

As for ritual, there's only two that Christ taught the church to follow: believer's baptism and the Lord's Supper. In neither case are these rites efficacious at appropriating grace merely because they were practiced. Both are just standardized expressions of a state of faith in the heart of the individual participating. We are baptized because we've come to believe in Christ, and we memorialize his passion through a symbolic meal because we believe the death, burial and resurrection of Christ has saved us from sin and death.

What faith has received in fullness upon its existence cannot be regulated thereafter by the practice of ritual. Sacrament, truly, has no place in the church. 

Church, ultimately, is not about rites, or religious duty, or doctrine but about relationships between brothers and sisters. Love, not doctrine or ritual, drives 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 meticulously knows church doctrine, but does not know his brethren he has missed the most significant doctrinal point.

Church is the place 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 believer to believer. 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 another. That, and really nothing else, is actually the point of church.

Rock Gardens & Weed Beds

Many folks think that there is something to recommend 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. The mucky middle, on the other hand, had the look, even the promise of fruitfulness, but not the reality. Why did the middle fail? Because only by selling out, getting extreme in focus, can we see achieved what was intended to be achieved 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 truly fruitful in God.

And as God sees life, 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 that anything else would need to grow. It must not yield to anything that would retard the growth of that one seed.

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. 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 it never comes to fruit.

God wants a harvest for what he's sown into our lives. How is it that we think we can we offer him rock gardens and weed beds instead? Jesus cursed a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. When God looks for fruit, fruit better be there, or there's going to be a reckoning. One fig would have done it for Jesus... at least some fruit will do it for us.

Our Message Must Include 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 relevance. 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, Old or New Testaments.

Do we need to be proclaiming the wrath of God more in our day?

Romans 1 tells us the wrath of God is in the process of being revealed from heaven. The subject is important enough to God to include it in his self-revelation in his word and in his creation as well. This has to be something we should know about him, he wants us to understand this about him. Life, if we'll hear its witness, screams at us through death, decay and disease that something isn't right, that God is upset and he wants us to get the message.

The thunder of his wrath echos incessantly, rattling everything in time and space, shaking everything 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 we still need to hear that today. Not that we should live shivering in fear of punishment (that's 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.

The witness of that wrath and the deadness of our souls invoke a certain trembling in us when contemplating the Almighty. At even a too clear conception 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. What 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 is the sinful heart. 

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 offended cannot be reconciled to the offender until wrath has been placated. 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, so we can't casually slip into the former without giving proper notice of the latter.

Is a message which focuses on grace without so much as mentioning wrath really good news? Our message, to be the gospel message, must include 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.

What Makes Us Saints?

I've stated that what makes us sinners is that we were made with Godlike abilities in God's image, but, not being God, we possess no ability to control them. Only God can do the God thing, so in effect, the tiger was too big for our tank. We can't blame God for sharing that image with us, his vision for us is astonishing and generous, but it's not something that can be achieved with him going one way and us going another.

What can be done to rectify the situation and bring us back into the promise? 

Apart from judicial concerns (not to minimize them in any respect) it requires the machinery of our souls to be rebuilt and thereafter, to be operated on a new basis. That entails enduing God's image with God's Spirit, which we get a taste here and now, and at the catching away, remolding new flesh untainted by sin and the curse as a home for that image. Afterwards, that which is in God's image will walk on for eternity in absolute agreement with God-- on every issue, inclination, desire, and action, everything! That is sainthood.

Because God completes the good work he begins when he infuses his Spirit in the born-again, the born again are considered saints now. Everyone of them.  

If all this sounds weird to you, realize that, that is the model of Jesus Christ himself. He walked conceived by Spirit, endued with the Spirit, and in absolute agreement with his heavenly Father in every respect. That is what life as God's image is supposed to look like. It is what heaven will be like. To the degree that one can't embrace this model, he or she will look more like a sinner (supposedly saved by grace) than a saint.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think it is a misconception to adopt Miserable Worm Theology. What we start out as doesn't define us before God, but what we will end up as. It is not humility for the born again to think themselves worms before God, but lack of vision. That won't inspire anyone to walk in the Spirit-filled fullness Christ purchased for us. Since Christ has done so much to make us new, shouldn't we embrace what it is that makes us saints, and be glad, rather than slithering, stuck in an old way of life that's nothing more than yesterday's news?

What Makes Us Sinners?

That mankind has a sin nature is clearly taught in scripture. Romans 7 gives an adequate description of how it displays itself, even in those who are "good," but what, exactly, is the sin nature? I think it could be described in terms of the bondage of the will accurately enough, but where exactly did that bondage come from and how does it work?

I stated before that mankind was made in the image of God, but in ignorance (innocence). That condition was called good by God, despite the claim I've made that it was not his ultimate aim, nor will it be our condition in eternity. Our higher abilities (like will, choice and creativity) were made complementary to God's because he wanted mankind to live on his level as his family and friends. Though he is the omnipotent God, scary on so many levels, his aim is to have us be one with him.

What does all this have to do with the sin nature? Well, God alone is good: only he has what it takes to express Godlike attributes in harmony with his perfect will. Only he can manage those things which make up his image. The sin nature arose in mankind when Adam and Eve, despite having the breath of God (a living Spirit), exercised Godlike capacities in opposition to God. Sin is the exertion of will contrary to the will of God.

As a consequence, the breath that God imparted lost its connection with the God who breathed it (spiritual death), mankind was thereby separated from God, cursed, and whatever capacity pristine man had to walk in the will of God was lost irretrievably. Since then, we walk in dying flesh apart from God, godlike to some degree, but anything but like God. We possess some godlike capacities, but without the ability to harness them to "good." We do what we have an urge to do regardless of what God wants: some more, some less. 

That is the essence of our sinful natures. Adam and Eve had their life degraded to that level, and at that level they reproduced what would become all the rest of us. They passed on their broken nature as sinners, because it was all they had to pass on. The machinery of our soul cannot function without God being in us, and us being in agreement with him. That disagreement, and the disability that results in being without God is what makes us sinners.

Raisins Or Grapes

"Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards,

for our vineyards are in blossom."

The Song of Songs 2:15

Big challenges present big problems, and can produce epic failures. But small things can accumulate and ruin everything as well. Like a constrictor, slowly but efficiently they squeeze the life out of us by tightening their grip on every exhale. We breathe out but don't breathe in. Sometimes the constrictors in our lives seem like good things-- anything but slithery (Revelation 2:2-3). 

In spiritual constriction, the Spirit goes out in word and deed, but isn't given the opportunity to refill the vessel. The constrictors can be something as mundane as the mere distractions of living (Luke 8:14). The Spirit is replaced by that which is not Spirit, like inhaling nitrous oxide instead of oxygen, which makes the constrictor's clinch no laughing matter.

The soul of our existence is our oneness with God (John 17:20-26). When the congress between the Spirit of God and us is free, without competition, we know who He is and who we are in him. We're anchored, standing on solid ground. When we begin getting too occupied doing things, even holy things, we end up getting out of Breath. We go stale, we drift, doubts increase, and unfortunately, so does sin.

Jesus was incredibly busy and yet never seemed in a rush. He knew what his source was. He didn't substitute action for interaction with his heavenly Father. Somehow, whether in our rush to do good, or just to do, we lose track of that lesson, and forget that what makes us what we are and fuels what we hope to be is God's presence in our lives.

What hope do we have apart from the warmth of our fellowship and the depth of our conversation with God? Jesus masterfully got that point across by using the illustration of the vinedresser and his vines. He truly is looking to bring the very best out of us. However, I don't think that we can take that in any way implying that he would be happy with raisins rather than grapes.

When Less Is More

What are the three best things anyone can do to aid evangelism?

1) Love (John 13:34-35; 1 John 4:7-8; Hebrews 10:24; 1 John 3:16-20; Galatians 6:10);

2) Demonstrate the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:4-5; Hebrews 2:4; 1 Thessalonians 1:4-5; Luke 24:46-49)

3) Be ready with your answer (1 Peter 3:15-16; John 9:24-38; Acts 26:1-29; 2 Timothy 1:8a; Luke 9:26).

We don't need to drink liquor with the world in order to win them, or to gyrate and grind with them at dance clubs, or to use vulgar language, or to entertain them, or to be entertained with them in order to have something to talk with them about around the water cooler. Evangelism is not offering the world more of what it already has, but that which is divinely different! Not different just for difference sake, nor different by artifice, but the difference that arises naturally, really supernaturally, when God is in the place.

If people will not heed the invitation to put their trust in Christ and walk with him now, when that invitation is accompanied by the demonstration of love, Holy Spirit power and personal testimony, then they don't need to be in God's company in eternity. Not because they are anymore wicked than any of us, but because they will not surrender to the will of God and the leadership of his Spirit. God alone is good, and if one can't agree with him, he or she needs to burn in hell! 

No one is fit for, nor could they possibly stay in heaven if they're not absolutely surrendered to God's will. Such surrender is the very stuff of faith, hope and love. It's what Jesus demonstrated during his earthly journey. So whatever Christians do in the name of evangelism, that whatever has to resolve in a call to the not yet surrendered to surrender unconditionally to Christ.

A church that accommodates human willfulness for the sake of evangelism, instead of confronting it, provides no service to anyone except Satan. Silencing the call for repentance, or expanding the tent of salvation to enclose sinful human perversity is not evangelism, nor even pre-evangelism. It's just participating in another's sin. If that is actually what it takes to grow the church in post-modern society, then growth is a diminishment which actually makes less more.