God’s Good Design of the Local Church
May God’s people display the beauty of the church. Keep gathering each week and worship with those who are otherwise different. Use your gifts, talents, presence, and love to equip the saints and make disciples. I can tell people the Mona Lisa is a work of art, but perhaps it’s far more effective to show them. May the beauty of the church continue to shine until Christ returns and calls her home!
For years I sat a few pews back from Mrs. Maggie every Sunday morning. I would walk into the auditorium, and she’d already be in the front row with a smile on her face and her portable breathing machine next to her. I’d lean over her walker to hug her while she said in her soft, raspy voice, “Hey Pastor.” She would tell me she loved me and that she prayed for me often, and I have no doubt she did.
Mrs. Maggie faced several challenges with her health. But, no matter how much her physical health waned over the years, her spiritual life grew ever more vibrant. When the service began, Mrs. Maggie tuned in, ready to worship. I could see her eyes looking directly toward me when giving the announcements, I heard her heartfelt “amen” as I prayed. When the worship song moved her, even though she was in the front row of an otherwise sitting Baptist congregation, she stood and raised her hands while singing to nobody but the Lord.
Her faith had been purified through many fiery trials. I remember visiting her after finding out her daughter died suddenly and unexpectedly. I approached her with a broken heart and a nervous mind. What could I possibly say to this woman facing her worst-case scenario? How could I minister to this mother whose heart has been ripped out by the loss of a child? Adult daughters typically bury their elderly mothers, not the other way around. Only six years prior, Mrs. Maggie had lost her husband, and now grief piled on more grief. As I hugged her, I heard her soft voice, laced with grief and hope, whisper, “God is good.”
A few years later, Mrs. Maggie finished her race and was able to worship the Lord face-to-face with the same zeal and passion, reunited with her husband and daughter. I miss seeing her each week. Ours was an unlikely friendship that defied generational and racial barriers. Worldly speaking, there would be little reason for our paths to cross and our relationship to grow. But, our paths did cross in the beautiful design of God who binds brothers and sisters into a body of believers that we call the church.
God’s Plan and Design for His People
Knowing Mrs. Maggie is just one of many examples that highlight the beauty of the church. Thus, it grieves my heart when I hear people say things like: “I love Jesus, but I don’t go to church. I’m just not into man-made, organized religion.”
We too often think of the church as an organizational structure set up merely by man. Sometimes this is even done for more sinister reasons, in ways that benefit the pursuit of power and money. While it’s undoubtedly true that snakes have crept in and used the church for such ill purposes, it is also true these slimy serpents did not design the church.
God did.
The church is his plan. It’s a visual display of his glory, a gathering of people created in his image and born again into fellowship with him.
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Is the New Atheism Dead?
In addition to their own jarring polemics and personal misfires, the New Atheists failed to realize that religion, especially Christianity, was the proverbial branch upon which they were sitting. For example, the freedom of expression depends on a number of assumptions, that there is objective truth, that it can be discovered, that it is accessible to people regardless of race or class, that belief should be free instead of coerced, that people have innate value, and that because of this value they should not be silenced. Every one of these ideas assumes the kind of world described in the Bible and mediated across centuries of Christian thought. Not one of these assumptions can be grounded in a purposeless world that is the product of only natural causes and processes.
Though it’s not always clear when a movement is over, there are many indicators that suggest this is the case of the “New Atheism,” a cultural wave that rose in the 2000s and aggressively attacked religion in the guise of scientific rationalism. Despite the name, the New Atheism wasn’t really new, at least not in the sense of presenting new arguments. Instead, leveraging the global shock of 9/11, New Atheists pushed an anti-religious mood along with a vision of a society free from the cobwebs of religion, defined by scientific inquiry, free speech, and a morality not built on God or religious traditions.
In 1996, prominent New Atheist Richard Dawkins articulated this mood in his acceptance speech for the “Humanist of the Year” Award: “I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils,” he said, “comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” There was a commercial aspect to the New Atheism, with bumper stickers and T-shirts carrying well-worn slogans, such as one coined by Victor Stenger: “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”
Though, at the time, it grew into somewhat of a cultural force and platformed a group of minor celebrities, the New Atheism now seems to have run out of steam. Divided by progressive politics and haunted by the obnoxious tone of many of its own founders, the movement is being devoured by other ideologies. Concepts like freedom of expression, scientific realism, and morality without God have all met their antitheses, often in clashes featuring the New Atheists themselves.
One watershed moment was a conflict over the role of science. Just last year, the American Humanist Association revoked Richard Dawkins’ “Humanist of the Year” award for his long history of offensive tweets. For example, Dawkins told women who experience sexual harassment to “stop whining” and parents of babies with Down syndrome to “abort and try again.”
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The Foolish Virgins Were Not Prepared Because They Thought They Would Have More Time
The highways of sin and worldliness lead always and only to destruction. But now life has been revealed and offered, exclusively through the Savior who died on the cross and rose the third day in order that His children might live. It is a message that demands a whole new life, a new birth, new allegiance, everything becomes new! It is the message of God unto salvation for such as are being saved! The foolish virgins liked the sound of it, they may have even known it was true, but they loved the world more and thought they would have time later to get right with the Lord.
Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them…
Matthew 25:3Country music singer Kenny Chesney begins his song “Everybody Wants to go to Heaven” with these lyrics:
Preacher told me last Sunday morningSon, you better start living rightYou need to quit the women and whiskeyAnd carrying on all night
Don’t you wanna hear him call your nameWhen you’re standing at the pearly gatesI told the preacher, “Yes I do”But I hope they don’t call todayI ain’t ready
Everybody wants to go to heavenHave a mansion high above the cloudsEverybody want to go to heavenBut nobody want to go now
Kenny Chesney, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven
Chesney highlights the attitude of the foolish virgins rather well in his song. The foolish virgins were in the kingdom. They were in church. They heard the word proclaimed. They heard of the glory that awaits God’s people in Heaven with Christ. And their response was, “Not Yet!” “I am having too much fun following my own pleasures on Earth. Perhaps later I will get right with the Lord. After all I want to go to Heaven… just not yet.” The foolish virgins thought they would have time later. Instead, the day and hour of salvation came and they passed it by. At midnight a cry was heard: Behold the Bridegroom is coming!
Looking at the modern church, it is easy to wonder if there are many foolish virgins today partly because of a lack of power, presentation, and persistence to the Gospel call. Is the call of the gospel an urgent matter in our churches? Perhaps we see so few new conversions in our churches because we are not pressing the matter home. Do the foolish virgins consider temporary pleasures to be of value because the Gospel trumpet is barely sounding?
All around us the world is dying. For those with no interest in Christ, the fires of hell are drawing nearer. The eternal punishment of sinners in that place of dreadful and endless torment is closer than it was yesterday. Diseases seem to be multiplying.
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Why Does God Ordain Suffering? A Puritan’s Response
Not only does Christ know and understand the affliction of the elect, the elect can—in a mystical sense—commune with Christ because he suffered for them. Christ, [Flavel] explains, “looks down from heaven upon all my afflictions, and understands them more fully that I that feel them.”
The Church today needs a robust and refreshingly biblical theology of suffering and it would behoove us to consider the voices of the past—in particular, the Puritans. They not only tasted some of the most bitter afflictions to befall humanity, but also carefully applied the balm of gospel promise to those who would receive it by faith.[1]
One of the most significant Puritan expositors of a theology of suffering was John Flavel (c.1630-1691) of Dartmouth.[2] Flavel experienced severe suffering within his own lifetime with the loss of three wives, children, his parents, ejection from the church in England, and the continual persecution from state officials. Because many of his writings deal directly with the theme of suffering and sovereignty and because of his own experience with it, Flavel is a significant resource for understanding a puritan theology of human suffering and divine sovereignty. While we are not exploring the questions pertaining to the origin, nature, or responses to suffering,[3] the following simply presents eight reasons (from Flavel) in answer to the question: Why does God sovereignly ordain suffering for Christians?
1. To Reveal, Deter, and Mortify Sin
When afflictions press against a believer, he or she may see his or her true inclinations, which are often full of sin. He writes, “I heartily wish that these searching afflictions may make the more satisfying discoveries; that you may now see more of the evil of sin, the vanity of the creature, and the fulness of Christ, than ever you yet saw.[4] These “searching afflictions” are meant to reveal sin to the sinner so that it might both deter the sinner from sinning further and so that it might mortify that sin exposed. God will lay “some strong afflictions on the body, to prevent a worse evil.”[5] Flavel contends, too, that God ordains suffering to mortify sin. He explains, “The design and aim of these afflictive providences, is to purge and cleanse them from that pollution into which temptations have plunged them.”[6]
2. To Produce Godliness and Spiritual Fruit
Not only does sin need to be removed, but it also needs to be replaced by those things that are pleasing to God. When believers please God by faith-filled works, they are filled with happiness and bring glory to God. Suffering is the ground from which God brings forth fruit from his people. He explains,“The power of godliness did never thrive better than in affliction.”[7]
Suffering, then, is the breeding ground of spiritual fruit so that God, as it were, plants the believer into the soil of suffering to produce godliness.
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