Fundamental Christian Attitudes: Contentment

Selected Scriptures

It's our privilege this morning to continue in this series and I looked in the Lord's day bulletin and saw that this is part 16 and 17, I never intended it to be this long and I guess I don't intend to stop now, so we'll keep going on this study of the anatomy of the church. It's so wonderful to have the clear teaching of the Word of God with regard to the life of the church and what the church should be and we've been so blessed in this study, as have many others. I was out at a large bookstore yesterday, I needed to go out there and sign some books and do some things and ran in to some pastors there who were thanking me for this series because they're getting on a weekly tape subscription and I think they want me to keep it up, as they're giving it to their people and encouraging their people along these same lines.

We're grateful that the Word of God is so clear about what the church is to be. And, of course, we've been talking about the anatomy of the church in very specific terms, as opposed to general terms. We talked about the specific characteristics of the church which are foundational or structural, give it its form. Kind of the skeleton, the hard form of the church that gives it its rigidity, the non-negotiables. And then we've been talking about the internal systems of the body, of the anatomy of the church, those...those spiritual attitudes that carry the life of the church. It's along that line that we want to continue in our discussion this morning.

But before we talk about the next in the long list that we could have of spiritual attitudes, just by way of sort of general comments, I want to talk a little bit about the reason why I think it's so important to reaffirm the character of the church. We live in a time today when there is a somewhat indifferent attitude toward the centrality of the church. And by that I mean that there are so many people who are...who are not really committed to the church. They're committed to Christ. They're committed to spiritual truth in one way or another. And I was thinking of that as I was sitting in this huge bookstore yesterday and looking at everything from knick-knacks, sort of Christian stuff that you put on your shelf, the kind you have to dust and wipe off, that kind of stuff...Christian pictures, poems, T-shirts, belts, socks, you name it, Christian records and tapes and CDs and then books and just paraphernalia ad infinitum. And the place was packed like the local supermarket as people were going up and down the aisles and collecting all their stuff.

It struck me that there is very much of a consumer mentality in the church and it leads to some interesting perceptions, and I just drew some of those together just by way of setting a context for the importance of our study. It seems to me that today we have a lack of commitment on the parts of people...on the part of people to the church as such. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. We have a consumeristic view of the church. It's sort of the mood of the mob in this particular time in which we live in our culture. People have about the same commitment to the church they do to the mall. If there's something there that interests them, they'll go there. They might even make a financial exchange, you know, they might give a little money for services rendered, if the services seem to fit their need. People have seemingly no more commitment to the church than they do to the mall. They look and say, "Well is there something there that I can get?" It's kind of a marketplace mentality, there's really no responsibility, there's no accountability that I have to the local church, but I'm willing to go there if they offer me something."

And second thing that I would notice as a contributor to a lack of real commitment to the church which, of course, leads to a lack of understanding of the church is not only the consumeristic mentality but the privatization of spirituality...the privatization of spirituality. We live in a time which basically rejects authority as such in favor of personal rights. We don't want to submit ourselves to an authority, we want to make sure that we have the personal right to do and be and believe and act in any way that we want. That's kind of in our culture. Personal rights dominate our culture. And personal rights contribute to a privatization of spirituality. By that what I mean is I'm the person who will define for me what my spiritual life is going to be. I'll pick and choose, I'll assemble my own Christianity and with a proliferation of tapes and books and radio programs and Christian TV and all of this, there's no end to the options. You can formulate any kind of Christianity you want. You can pick and choose from fifteen different views of Christianity and assemble your own...it's kind of a Burger King mentality, have it your way kind of thing. And you have the individualization, the privatization of spirituality and Christianity and it all sort of eclectically is pulled together at the whim of any individual. And the idea is that my personal relationship with Jesus Christ and my personal spiritual life transcends any compelling corporate life that a church might oppress upon me or hold me to.

I think also in this time in which we live there is a sad but true contributor to the lack of interest in the church and that is disillusionment with church leadership. Christianity is full of people who have been deeply hurt and wounded by church leaders and that contributes to their distance from the church and contributes to their indifference to submitting themselves under the authority of teachers and leaders. They're reluctant to do that because they have been exposed in the past to false pastors and false teachers and false leaders who were either unholy in their conduct or unholy in their teaching, or both. And some of you fall into that category. You've kept your distance, you're here but you're not integrated into the life of the church, and maybe it's because you've been exposed to preachers who secretly brought in heresy, they always do it secretly, and they tell you they're teaching you the Bible or they have something that God has given them to say...but they are basically unbiblical and you were exposed to that. And you've come to understand that and your trust level has been severely hampered by it. Maybe you even have been exploited by certain leaders for personal gain while they were asking you to make sacrifices, they were getting wealthy at your expense. It is also possible that you have been under leadership that indulged sexual appetites and as the New Testament says "Had eyes full of adultery" and destroyed your trust by having been engaged in sexual sin which came to light. And that continues to be a sad, sad tale.

You have been exposed to leaders who didn't know much about the Bible and who cheated you because they didn't feed you the way you should have been fed. They contributed to your spiritual weakness, rather than your spiritual growth. You may have been exposed to teachers who were authoritarian or pastors who wanted to dominate your life. You may have sat under people who had some oratorical ability but said nothing of value. And so you've sort of interpreted the church in the light of these things. You may have been in a congregation of people where there were a number of hypocrites, where there was little that God seemed to be doing, where there was a lack of power. And all of these things contribute to a sad kind of distance that people have from the church.

I also want to add a fourth and that leads me in to what I want to say to you this morning, I think another thing that contributes to people's indifference toward the church is some kind of expectation for perfection that is really unrealistic. The expectation that the church should be everything that the Bible says all the time without any failures leads people to a certain kind of disillusionment. People leave a perfectly wonderful church, a marvelous church, a good, healthy, whole, sound ministry because of some perceived weakness or some real weakness, or some real weakness, or some perceived failure or real failure or some disappointment that came along and they wander away. I hear about people and it's always amazing to me who think about, "Well, we'll leave Grace Church and we'll go out and all four of us will start our own perfection because we found a failure there."

Sad to think about that but that's not an uncommon thing. I often wonder what people like that would have done in New Testament times when there was one church per city and that was it. So many people in so many places in the world would give anything and everything to have a good church, a noble church, a place where the Word of God was faithfully upheld. And yet some people will foolishly disregard that and the value of it in favor of something far less. You find a church committed to the true teaching of salvation, you find a church that believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, you find a church that interprets