Tag Archives: the church

Gripped by the Cross

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“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
(1 John 4:10 ESV)

How would you define love?  Is it an emotion or feeling that you get when you are around someone you adore, someone who makes you feel good just being in their presence?  Is love an act of the will, a conscious decision to show someone kindness, compassion, mercy, and tenderness?  When we say “I love you” do we really mean “I love me, and I want you”? 

The Apostle John defines love for us saying, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”  God defined what love means by demonstrating his love for us in Jesus Christ.  When we were lost in our sins, unloving and unlovable, God loved us still, and sent his son to die for us (John 3:16, Romans 5:8).  Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13), then proceeded to demonstrated that love by going to the cross.  During that same conversation in John’s gospel, Jesus also told his followers, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).

Dr. Joel Beeke writes in his Epistles of John that “the great motivation for practical, Christlike living is the doctrine of the cross; hence, every failure to love can be traced back to a failure to understand the cross.  When the cross of Christ grips us, everything in our world changes.”

If love has been defined in the cross of Christ, then our failure to love in the church, in our homes, in our community with a Christlike love is simply because either we don’t understand what the cross really means or we forget to that the cross should affect every relationship and every decision.  Either way, our failure to love belies our failure to really understand the cross.

When we have been gripped by the Cross of Christ, when the beauty, tragedy, and grace of the cross really shakes us, our lives will never be the same.  J.I. Packer writes “Christ as crucified is the great object of our live, or should be… in the death of Christ do his love, his grace, his condescension, most gloriously shine forth.  Sin nowhere appears so hateful as at Calvary, and lust shrivels up in the Christian’s heart while he keeps Calvary in view.”  If we keep the cross before us, we will learn to live like he lives and love like he loves.  If we really want to be a more loving church, a more loving people, let us keep the cross of Jesus before us. 

SDG

A New Way of Thinking

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“Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God”
Romans 15:7 (ESV)

Last Sunday I began a series of sermons here at Memorial Presbyterian Church on the New Life in Christ, focusing then on Ezekiel 36:26-28, how we recieve a New Heart from God to replace our hearts of stone.  In God’s mind-blowing way, and with no contrivance on my part, the sermon tied in so well with the “Midweek Message” which I wrote about being a loving congregation.  One of the reasons why the church has a hard time being the kind of loving community that Christ intends for us to be is our cold and wandering hearts.  This week, I am preaching on what it means to receive a New Mind from God, a mind not fixed on the things of the flesh, but on the things of the Spirit (Rom 8:5-8).  (You can listen to the sermons at www.cmpres.com.) If we’re honest, our old minds are another reason why we are not always the kind of community Christ has called us to be.

If you’ve done any reading on Church Growth, Mission Development, or just plain Church Management (though I can’t imagine why you would have), you’ll find most of the literature is written from a corporate or sociological perspective.  After all, if the business models work for corporations and non-profit agencies, shouldn’t they work for the church?  So many attempts have been made to model the church after the world, to judge the success of the church by the world’s standards – have we forgotten what it means to be the church?

If we are to really be the church, the body of Christ in the world, shouldn’t we look different from every other business model that the world offers?  We are not a corporation who gathers to put on a good show to entertain our audience.  We are not an organization that exists to serve its members. 

We are a community called by God, and when we come together, we are to renew and re-commit ourselves to the God who has covenanted to be with us.  We are a community marked by the cross, and when we come together we remember the calling of Christ to die to ourselves, our passions, our goals, and to follow Him.  We are a community filled with God’s Holy Spirit, and when we come together we need to listen to the Spirit’s teaching in God’s word, sing and pray in the joy of the Spirit, and go into the world to serve God in the power of the Spirit.

Too often, the worldly mind, the mind that is “set on the things of the flesh” can creep into and overwhelm the church.  When we start thinking about church in worldly ways, in ways that lead to death as Romans says, the life and joy of what the Christian community dies.  The church will not survive if it operates like the world, and the world will not survive without the church. 

If the church cannot be a place of forgiveness, what can?
If the church cannot be a place of peace, what can?
If the church cannot be a place of grace, what can?
If the church cannot be a place holiness, what can?
If the church cannot be a place of purity, what can?
If the church cannot be a place of love, what can?
If the church cannot be a place of service, what can?

What we need, once God renews our hearts, is for God to renew our minds as well.  We need to come to church, to do church, with our minds set on the things of the Spirit.  Letting the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) guide and direct our every word, our every decision, our every action will dramatically transform the church from a gathering of man to the community of Christ.

SDG