Why We Grow the Church
Good Morning,
Why do we want the church to grow? Why do we want people to come to our church?
Down in the heart of men, there is an awareness that we need God. There is something inside us that says we are inadequate, incomplete, and incapable of facing eternal things without some divine help, therefore we do want something sort of like a god.
Our flesh hates the idea of God because if we need God, then God will start telling us what to do because that’s what a God does. Mankind seeks to fill those inadequacies with things on earth that will not tell us what to do.
Humanity would like the help of God, without the authority of God
Humanity would like the wisdom of God without the Lordship that accompanies that wisdom.
Humanity does not mind people having a deity – a god that is added to life like salt to a steak – but humanity does mind when we talk about Jesus, the One Who lived a perfect life and died for their sins because all of mankind was helplessly bound for hell. They do not want us to talk about a Saviour and the Bible, both of which “meddle” in our lives and “tell us what to do” (of all the nerve).
Let us refer back to the opening questions:
“Why do we want the church to grow?"
“Why do we want people to come to our church?”
In the vernacular of the business world or the military, maybe we should ask, “What is our mission statement?” or “What is our objective?”
The answers to these questions could fill a book, but allow me to attempt to summarize the question in a few simple statements:
1. Man was created to glorify God, so the object of the church is to help mankind understand from the Scriptures what it is that will glorify God in their lives.
The church does not have as its main objective to make people happy but rather to make God happy.
2. We want as many people as possible to be in church because without the Gospel, every human being will spend eternity in hell – that is a tragic end for humanity, and certainly does not glorify God, which is our primary goal.
These two simple statements, which seem to be extremely simple among the complexities of theology, will cause us to do some things a certain way, and not to do other things.
Therefore…
1. We do not want to make the church like the world, for the Lord called us out of the world.
2. We do not want to make the opinions of men more important than the Word of God. We cannot put the glory of God first if we allow the opinions of men to trump what God has said.
3. We do not want to make mankind more comfortable in church; we want to make mankind conformable to the will of God.
This subject has much more to it, but this is why we want people to go to church, and why we want our church to grow – FOR THE GLORY OF GOD!
Pastor