Loving the Church -- Ephesians 4: 1-8

One Sunday morning Johnny’s mother knocked on the door of his bedroom. “Johnny, it’s time to go to church.”

“I’m not going,” Johnny said. 

“Why not?” she asked.

“Two reasons. The first is that I don’t like those people. The second is that they don’t like me.”

“You have to go,” she answered.

“Why?” Johnny demanded.

“Two reasons. The first is that you are forty years old. The second is that you are the pastor.”

This story isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. In one week I once heard three pastors or pastor’s wives tell me they loved Jesus, but they couldn’t stand His church. If that’s true with pastors and their families, how much more is it true with everyone else!

God doesn’t make a distinction between loving the church and loving His people. You can’t say, “I love Jesus” and not say, “I love the church” any more than you can say to your wife, “I love you, but I hate your body.” 

We love the church for two reasons.

First, because the church is where God lives on earth—not in the building, but in the people. To get close to Jesus we must get close to His people. It is the height of spiritual arrogance to think we can separate from this living temple and think it doesn’t affect our relationship with Him.

I remember my grandmother as a quiet, saintly woman with six hard-headed sons.  They would argue religion and politics at family reunions. I can still remember the look on Grandmother’s face when they did. Every insult they hurled at each other landed on her, because she loved them both. She hated seeing her children go at each other. 

How do you think God feels when Christians argue?  Debate and disagreement between Christians is healthy, but our hatred and abuse hurts God. God tells us to walk together in gentleness, humility, and patience. With God’s perfect empathy, it hurts Him greatly to see us hate each other.

The second reason we should love the Church is because God put us in it. We did not choose to be a part of the church. It  is not a voluntary association, but a state of being. Paul describes the “seven unities” of the church—one Body, one Spirit,  one calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is over all. If we share the same God and the same Spirit, and the same Jesus, then we are already one family, whether or not we behave like it.  We don’t do church—we are the church. God put us in this peculiar family for His own purpose. We are called by God to be here.  

Suppose you work in a company run by your father, whom you love and trust. You think you should be a corporate executive, with your own privatd office and secretary. Instead, you father assigns you to the mail room.. If we trust him, then we will accept that this assignment is where He wants us to be. 

God does the same. We may think we deserve to work in places of respect and honor, but instead God puts us in places of obscurity, abuse, conflict, and frustration. He employs us as He sees fit. It may be that God has us here so we can learn something. We may not see a promotion until we go to heaven.  It may also be that He wants to use us where we are as messengers of love amid hatred and chaos in the church. Whatever the reason, God has called us to work with the rest of the church not against it. 

The church reminds me of a giant rock tumbler. It is a cylinder full of rocks and sand where we put stones to be polished. By constantly churching the tumbler over weeks,  having the rocks rub each other the wrong way, we are smoothed and perfected. To despise this occasionally abrasive environment is to despise sanctification. It is for our good that we are called to love the church.

The church is not a building or an organization. It’s people. We may disapprove or disagree with the organizational goal—that’s allowable. But if we despise the people in the church, then we have truly lost our way. God doesn’t dwell in organizations but in people. We mustn’t confuse the two. It s all right to support the people and disagree with the organizational church, but it is not all right to despise the people just so long as we support the organization. We must never allow the organization to be more important than the people.

Loving the church is both general and specific. We should support the people of God everywhere, but especially within our own tradition, denomination, and local church. Here’s how we do that.

We should all love the church universal.  Do not think because the church meets in different buildings,  has different names, practices different styles of worship, holds to different theological constructions,  and has different pastors that the seven unities of Ephesians 4 do not apply. We are brothers and sisters to every Christian church in town. As long as they hold to the apostolic doctrines of the faith—the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and salvation by Grace—they are our brothers and sisters. We may disagree with them, but we should do all we can to help them. 

Do not speak ill of other churches because we are speaking ill of Christ’s body. Who are we to judge the servants of another? We should do all we can to support other churches, and to assist them in their work. It is a terrible thing to hate what God loves. God is not pleased when we treat His children as something less than our brethren.

In this church, we should also specifically love Reformed and Presbyterian chuches. That is our branch of the Protestant church tradition. We belong to a branch of the church that goes back five hundred years. Sometmes that tradition has been wrong and foolish, but even so, we should not abuse or despise it. It has produced some of the greatest works of the church and some of the greatest saints. So many blessings our nation has received may be traced back to Presbyterian and Reformed theology and practice.  The US Constitution,  the Protestant work ethic, the rise of capitalism, modern method of Bible study, foreign missions, and so much of the roots of Western art and civilization may be directly traced to the writings of Reformed writers and thinkers.  Even now, our tradition grows in influence and provides a corrective to many of the superficial thinking we see in the church today.

Other traditions—Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal,  Catholic, and others—are also equally proud of their contributions. But this is the traditions that defines who we are, as other traditions define other churches. We are the bearers of our tradition and part of what it means to be Reformed in this modern age.

Specifically we love our denomination—the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.

Loving it does not mean that we always like or agree with it. Personally, I disagree with some of the things our church has said and done. But in love, total agreement is not required. I must respect those with whom I am working as people and as part of the Body of Christ. God put me here to love the ones around me.

This church is the product of the ARP church. These churches were the product of the denomination’s vision. It’s easy for us to forget that.  We are part of the ARP church, not just by doctrine or some chain of authority, but by love. Love is not abstract—it is specific. That is why we seek the denomination’s peace, purity, and prosperity.

Even moe specifically we must love the local church—in our case, Rogers Memorial Church.

How do we do that?

First, join it.  I often hear people say that church membership is not important. I disagree. Church membership is a commitment to a local group of Christians. It requires us to commit to a local body of believers.

If you think such a public commitment is not important, try applying that same logic to any other area of life. Would you say (for example), “I love that woman, but I don’t see why I should marry her?” or “I love that child, but why should I adopt her?” or “I want to go to war and fight, but why should I enlist?” or even “I love this country, but why should I become a citizen?” Every area of our lives requires that we make and keep commitments. We commit when we join a church to a local body of believers.

Second, support it. It’s foolish to think we can love the church and not give to it. It’s not that God or the church needs your money, its just that giving is the way we  remind ourselves that we love God’s church. Tithing is an expression of our love and faith, not our response to the churhes’ financial need. It’s the principle of first fruits—that God deserves our top consideration. If God doesn’t provide the money to keep the church going, then we should conclude that God does not want it to exist. All earthly things, even churches, must end sometime. But if we don’t surrender our first fruits to God, then our love for Him will grow cold. Supporting the church is our primary way of saying that God comes first, as we physically support and love His church.

Third, get involved with members in their lives. Working in the church is important, but more important is seekng to love our brothers and sisters.  Love is best expressed on a personal level. We must take responsibility to love members of this part of Christ’s body.  If we don’t, who will? 

In all this,  remember that our goal is to walk like Jesus walked among his people. If any disagree, then we disagree in love. If any agree, then we should agree in love for those who disagree. In  all things we should keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.