Preached · April 12, 2015
What's the point of church?
There are people who are not in this building, not in any church building, and they really don't care one bit about spiritual things. Or maybe they do, but they don't care one bit about the God that we worship, about Jesus. And so to them, church is just kind of this bizarre thing that they have little to no interest in.
Or, believe it or not, there might be people in this very room who really don't get this whole church thing. Who are really kind of bummed out about it, who really don't understand, like, why do we, on this weekly basis, or maybe once a month or twice a year basis, why do we gather together and listen to someone talk at us for 35 minutes, listen to a bunch of volunteers put on a so-so kind of concert? What's the point? Jesus rose from the dead and all we got was this?
Two propositions
So I have two propositions I want to make, two ideas I want to explore with you over the next two weeks. The first is this: the church is your best hope for becoming a loving, fruitful, and truthful reflection of God. And next week we're going to explore this: the church is the world's best hope for experiencing the restorative and healing presence of God.
So this week we're going to explore that the church is your best hope for becoming a loving, fruitful, and truthful reflection of God. And in order to explore that with you, I want to go to the book of Hebrews chapter 10, verses 19 through 25.
Now, the book of Hebrews — we don't know who wrote Hebrews, but she was brilliant. And the book of Hebrews is all about exploring that Jesus is the culmination of the Old Testament. Jesus, his life, his death, his resurrection, was the fulfillment, the culmination, the apex, the climax of everything that the Old Testament had talked about. Jesus was better than Moses, he was better than angels, he was better than the law, he was better than the fulfillment of the priesthood of the temple. And once we get to chapter 10, nine and a half chapters in, the author is beginning to summarize where they've been.
So let's read Hebrews 10:19–25.
Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain that is Christ's body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope that we profess, for he who promised is faithful, and let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching.
Let's pray. Holy Father God, we thank you that you are in this place, and that you have brought us here this morning to hear from your word. And God, we acknowledge that some of us this morning, we are tired. We are feeling desperate. We are feeling a little lost. And we thank you that you are telling us that you're here to meet with us, that your presence is here, God. Some of us this morning, we don't get why we're even here. We're not really sure why this whole church thing exists. And so, God, we ask for your Spirit to speak to us this morning, to respond to some of our doubts and our questions. And, Father, I pray for me, for my lips and my mouth, God, that you would take control, that you would take over, and that your truth would be what comes out, and that what your people need to hear, me included, would be spoken. So, speak to us today, God. We pray all of these things in the powerful name of Jesus. Amen.
The curtain is torn (verses 19–22)
Verses 19 through 22 are kind of a summary of everything that has been talked about previously in the book of Hebrews. These verses really need a sermon or a series of their own, but I want to give you just a brief recap, because they are the foundation of what we're going to be talking about.
"Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus." What's our author talking about? Well, in the Jewish temple, there was the most holy place. This was the place where the Jews believed that God himself resided, that his very presence was. And in the Ark of the Covenant, there was basically this little area for a throne where God's glory would sit. And then there was this curtain — this big, long, thick, wide, tall curtain that separated the most holy place from everything else. The very presence of God from everything else in the world. And so the author is saying, brothers and sisters, we have confidence to go into this most holy place where God is, where God's presence resides. We can be there with him.
And more than that: "by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain that is Jesus' body." It's not that we just get to go behind the curtain now. Because Jesus' body was broken for us, on our behalf — because Jesus bore our sin, took our punishment, because his body was broken — that curtain is broken. That curtain is no more. And so this separation between the most holy place and everything else is gone. Now God is where the people are, and the people can be where God is. This is what the book of Hebrews is all about. No longer is God kept safe in a box, tucked away where we don't have to deal with him. Now God and us can dwell together.
"And since we have a great priest over the house of God" — in other words, Jesus acts as our intercessor. He prays on our behalf. He sanctifies our prayers and our actions before the Father. Because of that, the author says, "let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings." Because the curtain is broken, because of Jesus' body broken for us, because of the veil torn between the world and the very presence of God, let us therefore draw near. Because our hearts have been sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. In other words, our insides are made pure. That guilt, that condemnation, that shame is taken care of. Jesus cleanses it by his blood, by his sacrifice on our behalf. And through the gift of baptism — no matter if you were sprinkled or dunked or anything in between — your bodies are washed as a reminder of the resurrection that we will all experience.
So, basically, the author is saying: because of all this, because of Jesus' sacrifice, because of the holy place made available to all, let us draw near to God. Which leaves us with the question: how?
"Draw near" — but how?
Now, I have a brother who has a bit of a temper. And when we were growing up, something would make him snap, something would get him all fired up. And me, in my sarcastic wisdom, would always like to say, "Hey, Dave, cheer up." Cheer up is the last thing you say to someone with a temper, right? Not helpful. Not going to work.
Or maybe you've been in a place where you've been kind of sad, down in the dumps. Maybe you've experienced some sort of depression, clinical or otherwise. And someone comes along and says, "You know, get over it." Not helpful, right? Just not the thing to say.
And so maybe you're in a place where you are feeling a little distant from God. It seems like, man, God and I, we just haven't connected in a while. He seems distant. It doesn't seem like he's near. I'm in a dry spell, a dry place. And someone comes along and says, "Oh, I've got some great advice: draw near to God." Not helpful. "I'm feeling distant from God." "Well, why don't you draw near to him?" Well, "how" is the question that we're left with.
Now, the good old author of Hebrews doesn't leave us hanging, and answers this question. In verses 23 through 25 he gives us some idea of how we are to draw near to God. And it culminates in verse 25, and the author writes this: don't stop meeting together. We draw near to God by not giving up meeting together.
What I want to suggest this morning is that God's number one intended way for you to experience him is in the context of the local church community. The only way? No. But I think it's his number one intended way for you to experience him. Is there value in solitude and meditation and alone time with God? Of course. I think those are some of the most powerful ways to experience God. But solitude without the context of the church community is just unnecessary loneliness. And so what I want to suggest is that God's number one intended way for you to experience him and experience growth through him is in the context of the local church community, because the church is your best hope for growing in truth, fruit, and love.
There are a lot of different ways we could say this. Our character grows — we grow in love. Our deeds and actions get better — we grow in fruit. We are more in tune with reality, with what's really real — we grow in truth. At our church, we talk about it in terms of connecting and serving and growing. In our missional communities, we talk about up and in and out. If you were part of 4-H, you talked about your head, your heart, and your hands. We are the people of God — I talked about this last year — the people of God on the mission of God with the power of God. God wants you to grow in truth, in fruit, and in love. And how does God want you to grow? By not stopping meeting together. So let's explore this one at a time.
Growing in truth (verse 23)
Verse 23 says, "Let us hold unswervingly to the confession of our hope." Our faith, what we believe, our creed, our confession, is best believed in community. Because if we think that our beliefs are just something we can do alone, then we've missed much of the point of our beliefs. Author Paul Tournier puts it this way: there are two things we cannot do alone. One is to be married, and the other is to be Christian.
And I think it gives us three protections when we believe what we believe together. It protects us from error, from stagnancy, and from forgetfulness.
From error — what do I mean? It means that if I try to believe the Christian faith, the creed, the Christian life by myself, I'm prone to lose my way. I'm prone to start thinking God is angrier than he is, that God is condemning me, that God has forgotten about me. My beliefs about who God is and who I am are likely to get out of whack if I try to believe alone. But in the context of community, I can be alongside brothers and sisters who can pull me aside and say, "Anthony, are you sure that that's what God's saying? Are you sure that that's what the Bible says about this?"
I have a friend who for years always said, "You know, I love Jesus, love God, believe in the resurrection — not a big fan of his church, and I really don't need the church to grow." And he believed this for years, and we watched as his beliefs got more and more not only wrong, but just bizarre. And so, literally, he moved his wife and his five kids to a faith community, a commune, a cult out on the East Coast. Now, am I saying if you skip a few Sundays you're going to join a cult? No, it's not my point. But what I'm saying is that if you pull yourself away from church life, if you pull yourself away from the community of brothers and sisters in Christ, no one's there, no one's around to say, "Are you sure that's what God's really saying to you? Are you sure that's what Scripture says?"
Secondly, when we believe what we believe together, it protects us from stagnancy. Because if we think that our beliefs are something that we can live in just our head and never make it outside of ourselves, never take action in our limbs, then you've got your beliefs wrong. And so, when we believe what we believe together, there can be people alongside us who say, "If you really think that God is about bringing justice into the world, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to take action?"
And thirdly, I think it protects us from forgetfulness. And not just forgetting Heidelberg Catechism question 32, but forgetting our story, forgetting where we came from as individuals, as families. When we are living alongside our fellow brothers and sisters who might be struggling on a different day than we are, they can remind us, "Hey, God's taken action in your life. Do you remember when God did this, when God spoke this way to you?"
So don't stop meeting together, because we do this so that we can have a creed, a belief system — what we believe can be done together to protect us from these three things.
Growing in fruit — spurred on toward good deeds (verse 24)
Now, in verse 24 the author continues and says, "Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward good deeds." Have you ever been pricked by a spur? I really hope the answer to that question is no, because what were you doing? But you know what a spur is — the spur connects to the boot, you kick a horse to make it go faster. Clearly, my only experience with horses is a John Wayne movie, but that's the general idea, right? Or maybe something you're a little more familiar with: the idiom of iron sharpening iron. And there are sparks flying.
My point is that this process — spurring, iron sharpening iron — it's painful. It's not a fun process, right? But the author says, "Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward good deeds." Do I think the author is suggesting that we need to intentionally hurt each other? No, I don't think that's the point. I think there's something going on in terms of inspiration, growth together. But I also think that the pain we experience together in community as a church is part of what helps us grow — or it's an opportunity for growth. The pain that someone feels in our community is felt by all. Like a body: you stub your toe at night, and it's not just your toe that hurts — all of you is pretty upset. And so when someone in our community is in pain, we all feel it. And I believe the author is saying this is an opportunity for you to be spurred on toward good deeds, toward good action, toward right response to that pain.
Do I think God is the author of your pain? Probably not. But I think he is the expert at using your pain to encourage growth.
The church I grew up in as a teenager had a pastor named Pastor Cloud, and he was an avid motorcyclist. He and his wife would go on these vacations, and they would motorcycle their way through the Smoky Mountains and Appalachia. During one of these vacations, they were doing all the right things — they had on their helmets, they were in the right lane — and they were taking a curve around the bend, and on the other side of that curve was a semi-truck on the wrong side of the road. And he died, as you would expect when motorcycles and semis meet. And his wife, who was riding with him on the same bike, was flung, of course. She was paralyzed temporarily from her waist down.
Now, our church experienced a horrific tragedy. And it had a couple of options in terms of how to respond as a body together. It could say, "How dare you, God," and turn away. And to be honest, I'm sure many of us did that for a while, because I think God can handle some of our deepest and darkest emotions. But our church could also respond in such a way that here was an opportunity to respond in love to a woman who had just lost her husband. And so some people gathered together and put on an auction and raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay her medical bills and pay off her mortgage, and to come around her and comfort and love and support her. We could have said, "Nope, too painful, too awkward, too much, we don't want to be involved in that at all. If God's going to do that to people, then we don't want to be involved anymore." But instead, they took it as an opportunity to be spurred on toward good deeds.
When we run away, when we avoid being spurred on toward good deeds, when we avoid pain or awkwardness, when we see that someone else is experiencing heartache or hurt and we say, "Ah, it's your problem, not mine," then we are robbing ourselves and robbing God of the opportunity to make us better, healthier, more Christ-reflective people.
And so the author of Hebrews says: because Jesus was broken for you, the veil is broken, and you can experience the very presence of God. And how can you draw near to God? By not stopping meeting together — because it protects our beliefs. We confess our hope together. Together we are spurred on toward good deeds. When you experience pain, we can experience it side by side and grow together. And not only in good deeds, but being spurred on toward love.
The statistics — and when church drives you nuts
Now, studies regularly have shown that by attending church you will be a healthier, happier, and more fulfilled person. A couple of statistics for you, because who doesn't love statistics: doubling the rate of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1% and decreases welfare participation by 16%. Changing from never attending to attending weekly is comparable to a happiness effect of moving from the bottom 25% of income earners to the top 25% of income earners. Attending religious services can increase lifespan by an average of seven years. Attending religious services on a weekly basis reduces the risk of death the following year by almost 50%. So if you don't attend, you're 50% more likely to die next year. No pressure.
Now, that's all well and good, but what happens when the church starts driving you nuts? Or the people you go to church with — or, God forbid, the people who lead your church — start driving you nuts? What happens then? Will you be twice as likely to die? No, no.
There's a story of someone taking their in-laws to church, and the in-laws said that the only reason they kept coming was because, quote, "it was so horrible, we knew there must be something else there to make people come."
Now let's be honest. We're not the best. I'm not the best worship leader. This is not the best preaching you can possibly find. You can find better music. You can find better preaching. You can find slicker programs and better organizations. And, let's keep being honest, there are some awful people here, right? Now, we shouldn't be surprised, because if you have a God who says, no matter what you've done, no matter where you've been, no matter what your history has been, no matter who you are — you're invited; if you have a God and a gospel that says, no matter what your past has been, you can be forgiven, you can be redeemed, you can be reconciled with God — then of course there are terrible people in the church. We shouldn't be surprised.
Eugene Peterson says the church is composed of equal parts mystery and mess. And I tell you what, we are not about perfection here. What we are about is discovering who God really is, discovering who we really are, and removing all the fakeness in between. And I tell you what, yeah, I think that deserves an amen. We are about discovering who God really is, who we really are, and removing all the fakeness in between. And I tell you what, that can get painful, like a spur.
And so if you're expecting perfection, then I would suggest that what you're looking for in a church and what God's looking for are misaligned. Because God is not calling for perfect people; he's calling for broken people. As we like to say in our staff meetings and church meetings and elder meetings and everywhere: if you're not uncomfortable, you're not growing. And so when we bump up against people's ugliness and sin, and we bump up against that person in the row next to us — don't look around right now — when we bump up against the people who drive us nuts, when we bump up against people's selfishness and gossipiness and their temper problems and the fact that they don't know how to organize an event worth a darn — when we bump up against all those things, that means it's working. That God's grand social experiment of bringing all these different kinds of people, all these sinful, broken people together, is working.
Scot McKnight says the church is God's world-changing, active social experiment in the world, about bringing the unlikes and the different to the table together to share life with one another as a new kind of family.
And so we have a choice. We bump up against the things that drive us nuts. Sure, we can bail, but in doing so we're rejecting the very way that God wants us to grow, because the church is your best hope for becoming a loving, fruitful, and truthful reflection of God.
Scot McKnight continues: the Christian life is not just about how I'm doing as an individual, but especially about how we are doing as a church, and how and what I am doing in the mix of others called the church. In other words, if you think you're super mature spiritually, but you just can't get along with anyone, you're probably wrong. If you think you're really mature, and yet people in the church are what is driving you away, and away, and away, then there's something lacking in your maturity. The virtuous soul that is alone is like the burning coal that is alone: it will grow colder rather than hotter.
The group Alcoholics Anonymous came out of a discovery that Bill Wilson made in his first meeting with Dr. Bob Smith. On his own, Bill Wilson had stayed sober for six months, until he made a trip out of town where a business deal had fallen through. Depressed and wandering through a hotel lobby, he heard the familiar sounds of laughter and ice clinking in glasses. So he headed toward the bar thinking, "I need a drink." Suddenly a brand new thought came to him, stopping him in his tracks: "No, I don't need a drink. I need another alcoholic." So, walking instead toward the lobby telephones, he began a sequence of calls that put him in touch with Dr. Smith, who became Alcoholics Anonymous' co-founder.
Church is a place where I can say unashamedly, "I don't need to sin, I need another sinner." God has brought us together in this place, and in places like it around the world, to grow us, mature us, spur us on toward growth in love and fruit and truth.
Response
So I want to invite the worship team forward and our ushers to get ready to take the offering, and I've got some response questions for you. Three "if-it's-true" statements.
If it's true that the local church is God's primary instrument in making me healthy, how do I need to reorient my schedule, my relationships, my resources?
If it's true that the people in my church that bug me are actually God spurring me on toward love, what actions of love can I take toward those people?
And if it's true that God is using our pain to spur us on toward good deeds, toward truthfulness, how can I join people in their pain? How am I unnecessarily running away from it?
Next week we'll talk about how the church not only grows us, but is God's plan for the world. But if you want to be part of God's plan for the world, let's not forsake gathering together. Let's pray.
