What Is Church?

I believe that when we all get to Heaven, there will be many people shocked and bewildered that Jesus will not like the way that they did church while on earth. I see the church of the first century and compare it to the practices of a lot of churches today and amazed how far off the mark many have gone. I am not claiming that the first century church was perfect, just a casual study of Acts and several of the epistles proves for a fact that they were far from perfect. But there were quite a few things that they did get right. Today I want to point out three operations that the Bible says that the church ought to be involved in:

The Great Commission

Mark 16:15, “And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

The church exists to be a vehicle of the furtherance of the Gospel. This is the primary function of the church. I have been asked before, “Should the church focus on evangelism or should it focus on discipleship?” The answer is… “Yes.” I understand, some churches emphasize one over the other. Some churches focus on winning souls but they never do anything to help baby Christians to grow, whereas some churches get so wrapped up in searching out the depths of Scripture that they forget to look outward to a lost and dying world. A balanced church will reach out to a sinful world, and when those people get saved that church will bring them in, teach them the Word of God (discipleship) and then send them out to do the work of the ministry and reach more people for Jesus.

We are guilty of treating the church as more of a book club and less like an army. The point is to recruit more soldiers and then train them to go out and recruit more soldiers. The church does not continue without the Great Commission. By the way, I believe that is one of the reasons why we are seeing a decline in church attendance and in Christianity in our nation today, for more than a generation the church has been fixated on making the sinful world conform to its standards by using the government as its tool at the expense of spreading the Gospel, which will transform the sinful world, with the Bible as our tool. Satan does everything he can to stop us from spreading the truth of the Gospel, because it is the Gospel that has the power to save souls and change lives. Why has the church become satisfied with simple conformity to our way of life rather than yearning for the transformative work of the Gospel? Complacency. Laziness. Pride. The church is about spreading the Gospel.

Worship

Next time you go to a church service, I want you to intentionally think about how each aspect of the service is an act of worship. I look at Calvary Baptist Church’s particular schedule of events for our worship services and notice that each action done is for the purpose of worship (with the exception of Announcement time). The first thing that comes to mind is the singing of songs, we do not do that as a time filler so that we do not have to listen to the pastor preach an hour long sermon, we do it as an act of worship. Our tithes and offerings are an act of worship. It is saying, “Lord, you have been so good to me, I want to give you something in return.” Truly a time of worship. The preaching of God’s Word is worship, as it is approached in a desire to learn more about our God and his Word. Even the altar call at the end of the sermon is an act of worship, as it is kneeling down before God and saying, “Lord, I am convicted of my sin, please help me to please you with my life!”

The problem is, too often we approach Sunday morning as more of a routine than actual worship. “I sing because that is what we do every week”, “I give because I have to”, “Pastor preaches because he has to do something around here,” It all becomes a routine rather than an act of true worship. Let me challenge you, when you walk into your church on Sunday, have a worshipful attitude. Participate in the service as if God is standing in front of you and you are worshiping Him (because He is and you are!)

Growth in the Word

Acts 17:11, “These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.”

I was once told that doctrine and theology were for a pastor to know and not the laypeople. It is a shame that a lot of people feel this way. There are plenty of Christians who have been saved for decades but still only have a surface concept of their faith. As the average Christian how to prove from the Bible that Jesus is God and they may break out in hives out of fear. How many Christians know how to go through the Gospel and lead someone to Christ? Too few! How many Christians actually understand their salvation and all the beauty of it? Again, too few. We go to church so that we can grow in the Word of God. By the way, this does not contradict my first point at all. True growth in the Word of God will motivate me and equip me to be a better soul winner. A Christian who knows what the Bible says about eternal security can show that to another Christian who is wavering. A Christian that can show the deity of Christ in the Gospels is better equipped to show that Jesus indeed died on the cross and rose again for our sins. A Christian that dives deeper into learning everything that happened to them at the moment of their salvation will be amazed and more thankful and, in turn, motivated to reach more people with the Gospel. The Bible is an incredible book (quite the understatement!) we need to dig deep into it, and when we do, we will be motivated to serve more. That is why I suggest being in church every time the doors are open. The way I preach (and a lot of pastors do too), is on Sunday morning I preach in a series (right now in the ministry of Christ) Sunday night I typically do stand alone sermons as God leads me to preach, and then on Wednesday night we do a verse by verse study of a book of the Bible (right now we are in Revelations). That gives us a well-rounded schedule of Bible study not just in where in the Bible we are studying but even in how we are studying it. But the point is all the same- Growth.

I believe that in many churches today we have lost sight of these three things. We have become overly concerned with making the church our own little family group that gets together every week. We make it into a social club. We use the funds of the church to cater to the whims of our own rather than reaching a dying world with the Gospel. We have meals and potlucks just for the sake of having them, rather than using them to bring people in from the fields of sin. Do not forget Jesus’ purpose for the church, and do not forget to follow it. If we are to be Jesus’ church, we are to follow his rules. 

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