Just being straight up. Sometimes, we get the wrong idea about church. Don't get me wrong, church is a great thing, no doubt, but there needs to be some clear boundaries, as to what church is for. Church is a body of believers that do life together and encourage/help each other live/love/honor God. God uses the church to speak to, to minister to, to help, to reclaim, to restore, to challenge and to aid in the growth of someone. It's a wonderful thing to be a part of and to be about...there's no telling what my life would be without being a part of the church. You can't love Jesus and not get the importance of church. Kind of hard to be real close to me and not like my wife and the same is true of Jesus. There may be some things about her you wish were different, but just as Katye and I are tied together, so are Jesus and the church, described in Scripture as "His bride" (that's a toughie for guys to reconcile, but it's okay...weirdness sometimes makes us look closer at a concept and end up understanding it more.).
But in learning about and being the church, there are a few things the church is NOT designed to do.
Here's one...the church is NOT designed to feed you. A popular thing I like to point out is that in God's world, His creation points to evidence of Him. That's not simply limited to a mountain being evidence of the majesty of God...it's all over the place. My son is 1 and Katye and I do a lot for him. We prepare his food, but even at the age of 1, he's expected to do things to feed himself. We chop up food and put it on his plate, and he's expected to pick it up, put it in his mouth and digest it. His body is expected/designed to integrate the food into his life. If it doesn't, then we take him to a doctor/hospital or something and pray and seek help to heal him, because something is wrong.
That's the way it is in our spiritual life as well. We may start out as baby Christians, but with maturity comes the skill to feed ourselves, in varying degrees. I love me some good preaching, but let's be honest, as adults are meant to be able to feed themselves, so are the children of God as they mature. We are all expected, like physical children, to be able to feed ourselves in the Word. That's important here at Bay West and at every church.
I think if Braden just continued to eat and not digest his food, just ate and ate and ate and never integrated his food into his body to sustain it, Katye and I would see him be bloated and unhealthy. I believe that this is a condition in the church as well. We see people who take in the Word of God in enormous amounts, yet they continue to wonder why they feel unfulfilled. Their natural reaction is that they "aren't getting fed" enough, so they find another Bible study or another service or another radio program or podcast to fill their spiritual bellies again. It can become an endless cycle, when the problem is not one of feeding, but of digestion. They've never integrated what they've heard into their spiritual body to sustain it and they are wondering why they feel so spiritually anemic.
God's message is not a message of quantity. Most of the time, we feel like the more we can get in the better we will be...and that's fine. But more than quantity of our intake, we must observe the "quality" of our digestion. If we refuse to listen to God's Word or integrate what God tells us into our lives, just endlessly searching for a better verse or a more palatable principle or a loophole to counteract the parts of the Scripture that we don't really want to hear...we will be spiritually anemic.
Naturally, for some, we go back to the church or the pastor and say, "I'm not getting fed" and in chasing the solution to the wrong problem, we never really get anywhere. As a staff member in other churches, I've had this subject come up and the point that I try to make is that when someone says they aren't getting "fed", it's an indictment on their own spiritual life, not the pastor's teaching or the Sunday School teacher's teaching or the Worship Leader. I have sat under some pretty anemic preaching in my lifetime...endured some music that has scarred my musician's ear for life, BUT, the only time that I have not been fed in my lifetime was due to one and only one reason...the lacking of my own relationship with Christ, because regardless of the theology or the Greek study or the historical emphasis or the amount of Scripture, God does the feeding and if I'm not getting fed, it's because there's a problem between Him and me...and it's not because He's not supplying things, it's because I'm refusing to eat what He has for me. I'm not picking it up off the tray...I don't want to hear it...I'm taking it in, but I'm refusing to ingest it...or I'm just not allowing myself to daily sit at the table and eat, because I think I can survive on the 30 minutes of teaching that I get on Sunday.
Be careful, friends, and don't fall into this trap. Never let your plate get empty...never allow sin to gum up the process and never retreat from your daily time with God's Word. Listen to what He says and live His direction...I promise you, if you do that, you will never go "unfed".
Continue to pray for us at Bay West Church as we continue to try to be a church in west Palm Bay, Florida.
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