Growing in Godliness by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL109030/REL023000/REL012000
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2019-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

6

Love His Church

For as long as I can remember, my son Jude has loved the salad bar at Jason’s Deli. He begs to eat there whenever we are in the area, and each year he chooses Jason’s for his birthday dinner. With eyes bigger than his stomach, he grabs an empty plate and heads to the back right corner of the salad bar, preparing to feast. Ironically, he has zero interest in vegetables. Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers—yuck—he’ll pass. He chooses the salad bar and places none of the healthy options on his plate. Why then, does he love the salad bar? Because hidden in the back right corner there sits a bountiful basket of gingerbread minimuffins. It’s not the salad bar he loves. It’s the sugary appetizers in the back. If the muffins disappeared, he wouldn’t love the salad bar at all.

As a “Gen Z” teenager, you are surrounded by people who call themselves Christians in the same way I call my son a salad-lover. They say they love Jesus, but they don’t love the church. Statistically speaking, more than half of your generation see involvement in the church as unimportant, and only 20 percent regard it as “very important.”1 According to research, teens tend to think they can find God elsewhere or that church is just not relevant to them personally.2 The majority of your peers feel the same way about the church as my son feels about eating vegetables. It might be beneficial, but it sure isn’t desirable or necessary.

It’s understandable. Without ever involving the church, you could look to God’s Word for wisdom, identify a few Christian friends, read good Christian books, listen to Christian music, and pretend the only pastor you need is a podcast. Why not outsource the role of the church and tutor yourself in Christian maturity? In an interview, Pastor John Piper addresses this recent phenomenon of people who say they love Jesus but are done with the church:

To say, “I love Jesus, but I don’t submit to his word” is a lie. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word” (John 14:23). Jesus founded the church. . . . So the choice of Jesus over church implies a choice of your opinion over the Bible, because the Bible is where we meet Jesus. You can’t make Jesus up. . . . He is the Jesus of the Bible or he is the Jesus of your imagination. If he is the Jesus of the Bible, you take the whole Jesus. You can’t carve him up in pieces. And the whole Jesus is the Jesus who loves the church. He died for the church.3

In this chapter, I want to show you that just as you can’t say you love the salad bar and hate veggies, neither can you say you love Jesus without loving his church. The church is another necessary means of God’s grace in your life, a helpful tool used to conform you to Christlikeness. And as we look to Scripture, I’m confident you’ll find the church not only necessary, but gloriously worthy of your pursuit.

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