For almost a year now I’ve been publishing a weekly blog piece under the Ask RC heading on the nature and calling of the church. I have been persuaded for decades that one of the great weaknesses inside the church is our radically low ecclesiology. Or, to put it more plainly, we don’t value the church like we ought to. Like all of God’s good gifts, we take the church for granted.
We are prone to seeing the church as an asset, a tool designed for solving certain problems. It provides a place to be reminded of important matters, to meet with like-minded people, to receive clean entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But those are not things rather high up in not Maslow’s but God’s hierarchy of our needs.
The church is that place where we receive every word from the lips of God. Man does not live by bread alone and the Lord’s sheep feed upon the very Word of the Great Shepherd. If we valued the transforming power of God’s Word preached we would flock to those churches where it, rather than the one delivering it, is the center of attention. In too many churches we walk in looking spit-shined and polished, but come out more emaciated than we went in.
The church is that place where we receive the bread of life, where we remember at His table Christ’s body broken both by and for us. This, Jesus said, do in remembrance of Me. We think ourselves smarter than He by thinking props, quips and smoke machines will do the trick more efficiently. Once again, we are starved because we think we know better what to serve than the Master of the Feast.
The communion table also is that place where we not only enter into deeper union with Him, but with each other. We come to the table confessing that we crucified the Lord of Glory. Now there is no more reason for our pathetic facades, nor for competing for our pathetic trophies of standing and reputation. It is in the church that we behold the body of Christ, which we are blessed to love and be loved by.
The church is that place where we are encouraged on the road of discipleship. We are led in the paths of righteousness, for His name’s sake. This may mean that we need, from time to time, the grace of church discipline. There we find comfort in His rod and staff.
The church is that place that serves us in giving us opportunity to serve. As we love one another, we become more like the One who first loved us. The church, in short, is that place where our Lord has put the means of grace by which we are being remade into His image. The gospel affords us immeasurable blessings- forgiveness, cleansing, adoption. But there is none greater than being made more like Him. If that’s not reason to love and cherish His bride, what is?
This is the fiftieth installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday June 22 at 10:30 AM at our new location, our beautiful farm at 11281 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.