“Where is the true church?”
When Jesus told his disciples, “I will build my
church”, we now know that he did not have in mind Judean sects, institutions,
denominations or even faithful local gatherings of God’s people. Still less was
he talking about a literal building of any sort. All of these may possess or
reflect the truth to some degree, and any of these may have at various times
faithfully represented God to the world, but none of these nouns truly captures
the scope of what the Lord Jesus meant to do. He intended to take Peter’s
accurate testimonial statement, “You
are the Christ, the Son of the living God”, and to build
around it a community of individuals set apart from the world to himself, a heavenly
nation that would span from the first century to our present day and beyond,
and from Judea to the farthest corners of the world.
The Head and the Body
All who believe Jesus is the Christ and confess it to the
world like Peter did are part of the true church, no matter how different their
practices and how many other questionable things they may believe along with
it. Likewise, nobody who rejects the deity of Christ has any part in the true
church. This is the case no matter how pious that person may seem, no matter how
many good works he may have done, and no matter how much ecclesiastical
authority he may wield in the world. The true church is pictured as a
spiritual body of which Christ is head. If you are not connected to the
head, you are not part of that body.
You don’t have to attend a local church to be in the church
Christ is building, though you probably should if you can find one. The word “church”
simply means an assembly or gathering. Because we have been gathered together
by Christ in a spiritual sense, our conduct in the world should be consistent
with our heavenly calling. The apostle John taught that in order to have confidence
we have passed out of death to life and in the process have been made members
of the true church by the Holy Spirit of God, we need to be loving
our brothers and sisters in Christ. It is a bit difficult to love people
you never see, so Christians who don’t go to church tend to lack assurance
concerning their relationship with God, and they don’t tend to grow in the
faith as well as they should.
Local Churches and the True Church
Local churches have come and gone over the centuries. They
are temporary manifestations of this living spiritual body which Christ is
building, and they express that spiritual reality imperfectly. As a result,
local churches shine in the world as a testimony to Christ, and over the
centuries those lights
may wink out here and there from time to time only to reappear again
elsewhere. Local churches do not last forever, and we should not expect them
to, but the light they carry cannot be extinguished. Believers and unbelievers
alike may claim membership in local churches, but no unbeliever belongs to the
true church. You will find members of the true church in every denomination and
every institutional religious entity, but in among the wheat you will also find
plenty
of weeds, and the difference between the two is not always apparent.
The true church is not something you attend, it is something you are.
But if you are a member of the true church looking for some place to meet regularly
with Christians, it can be said that, generally speaking, local churches that
are most like the true church stick closely to the teaching of the New
Testament.
___________________________
Photo courtesy Farragutful under CC BY-SA 4.0.
No comments :
Post a Comment