Church: for you? for God?

‘You only go around once in this lifetime, so go for gusto!’

The slogan above is a call to people to focus on themselves and focus on the now, a winning combination for advertisers is it not!

'You deserve a break today’
‘Quench your thirst’
‘Have it your way, right away’
'Just do it’.

These slogans capture the dominant ideas of our culture today - individualism and self-indulgence. Yet the corollary of this is the lowest personal savings rates in history, record high credit card debts, meanwhile our health system reels as an affluent and litigious society believes this life is all we have. Don’t we all deserve the longest physical life medical technology can grant us?

Big ideas often define our era - liberty in the eighteenth century, or the progress of the nineteenth century, or, I would argue - individualism today. Such ideas are the mental background noise in our culture, something so pervasive it is almost unnoticeable to those in our midst. The ideas are grids that we interpret all things through: our experience of life, the world, relationships, work, even religion. They can help us to see, they can also blind us. How much of the way we view who we are is shaped by the culture in which we exist?

Has the church today dissolved in the acids of the reigning individualism of today’s culture? Church has become only the expressions of passing interests of the congregants. Programs are determined by internal polls. Services shaped by what outsiders want. Budgets reflecting only what the members desire. What has happened?

Church is not the place for your personal quiet time. We do not gather to pray, sing, read Scripture like we do the other days of the week at home. We come to church, to celebrate the corporate element - to participate in the life of the church. And, we do not come as mere individual consumers doing our spiritual shopping for the week - cruising along aisle prayer, stopping at the sermon specials! We gather as a living body of Christ. I wonder why you come to church.

Church, according to the NT is not all about you, it’s primarily about God. When we understand this, we turn the corner from a self-centered involvement to a full-blown, God-centered life together in Christ. The church becomes a living manifestation of the Living God in this world! Get this and the Christian life begins to change.

Why? Because the character of the church should reflect and glorify the character of God Himself. We are to be holy, one and loving because God is holy, one and loving. Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘Follow my example, as I follow Christ’ (11:1).

God intends to display his own reflection in the church. We see this generally in 1 Cor 1-2. The gospel, possessed by the church is the wisdom of God, not the wisdom of this world (1:17-2:16). Paul writes, ‘We have not received the spirit of this world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may may understand what God has freely given us’ (2:12). And later, ‘we have the mind of Christ’ (2:16b).

The transforming work of the gospel therefore, in the life of the church will give it the mind of Christ and make the church look more like God, not the world. Therefore, the chief end of the church is not improve moral health in society, though a great by-product it would be; their chief end is to reflect and glorify the Living God.