Thoughts from The Bible

Thoughts from the Bible

Thursday, 29 August 2024 09:13

The Church of God..Part 2
by Joey Carroll Corinth Missionary Baptist Church

We started last week looking at the phrase “the church of God.” Paul, in an effort to put down the boasting in men that was taking place at the church in Corinth, begins laying a foundation of how everything and everyone in the church belongs to God. From the giftedness of the people to the people themselves, it all belongs to God. Paul will do this throughout the letter (see 1 Corinthians 1:2, 2:4, 3:9, 3:16, and others). Since the Father built the church on the testimony of His Son and paid for each and every member through the blood of His Son, God can govern and guide the church the way He desires.
When we enter the conversation about the church, we need to make some distinctions.
Because the way we refer to the church today is very different than how the Bible uses that word. When the Bible uses the word “church,” it is referring to a particular people – a people who trust in Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of the world. A people who belong to God because they have trusted in the person and work of Jesus as sufficient and necessary for their salvation. And you find those people gathering for the worship of God. When we have conversations about the church today, we usually refer to the church as a building, a campus or something we do or somewhere we go. It almost is never used to refer to a particular people in our day. We use denominations to refer to the people. So rather than being “the church,” we might attend “church” or walk into the building we call the “church.”

Here’s the potential problem. People and money build buildings. And when people and money build, they build it like they choose. We have several beautiful buildings in Scottsboro and the surrounding communities. We also have several beautiful church buildings in our area. But like I used my home as an example last week, when we build it, we design every feature according to our desires. Which is expected because we, after all, are paying for it. But the problem arises when we carry that attitude over into what takes place when the church meets. If we are not especially careful, the attitude that we used in building becomes the attitude when the church meets. We hire music leaders to sing what we like, how we like. We hire preachers to preach what we like, how we like, and how long we like. In other words, we do what we want, when we want, for how long we want, and if we don’t like something or someone, we change it. Or leave that group of people and find a church that does things the way we think they should be done.

This attitude makes the dangerous assumption that we are the ones who know what God wants and doesn’t want, and we think that we and God both want the same things. If we keep going down this path, we approach three very dangerous end results. One, the church could become more about us than God. It happened at Corinth, and it has happened in our day as well. We focus more on humans and their feelings and desires rather than on God and His glory. Secondly, God begins to look like the person in the mirror. And the more God looks like the person in the mirror, the more we become idolaters and not Christians. And thirdly, if we think we know everything God likes and dislikes, the less we see our need of Jesus. Which would make God’s diagnosis of man wrong when He says of us, “ There is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one,” (Romans 3:10-11, NASB).Actually when you begin to really understand the desires of the human heart, you should understand our overwhelming need of God’s grace in Jesus. Well, if the church should be guided and governed according to God and not ourselves, then where are we to understand what that would look like? Hopefully, you know the answer. He has written us a book.