All Of Us Are The Church

The Apostle Paul was quite different from the other Apostles. Unlike the others who had lived with Jesus and had developed a personal relationship with him based on proximity, Paul’s relationship with Jesus was based solely on revelation. Paul’s initial zeal in persecuting the early Christians was turned around and used in serving God. God saw his heart and turned him around because God saw his heart and understood that he did all he initially did out of a zeal for and a desire to please God. Unlike most of the Pharisees in Jesus days who loved themselves and wanted honour from men, Paul loved God. Therefore when God turned him around, he committed to Paul the deep revelations about the nature and structure of the Church and sent him as an Apostle to the Gentiles (that’s you and I).

Paul wrote most of the books of the New Testament. It was Paul that gave the analogy that the Church was like a body where everyone has something to contribute to the development of the Church. He therefore admonished that we should not think that one part of the body was more important than the other or that one part of the body was not needed. Unfortunately we have come to believe in the Church that the pastor is the most important person in the church because he feeds us with the word. I understand that the pastor is the person with the vision and the leader but I do believe that without people to help him achieve his vision, he would be a very frustrated person indeed. No matter how anointed a pastor is, he needs a choir leader and members, ushers, people to serve in the children’s ministry, even people to park cars and people to sit on the pews and listen to his message. In essence, we are all important in the Church of Christ. However, a note of warning. While we are all important, it is not about having a sense of pride in the fact. It’s about doing all that we are called to do with a sense of humility and thanking God for the privilege to serve. Someone recently said that even though God loves us, his investment in us is not solely because of that love. His investment in us is because of the purpose he seeks to achieve from our lives. What we are created for. If we fail to fulfil our purpose, God will find a replacement. Upon his triumphant entry into Jerusalem when the Pharisees were complaining about the people praising him, Jesus told them that if the people failed to praise God would cause the stones to praise.

When I go through a blog, I marvel at the number of people who criticise the Church. They have no church in which they are planted and all they can talk about is how no Church is good enough for their perfect natures. There is always a problem with somebody or everybody else. Either the pastor is wrong or the ushers are rude or the worship is not good enough. They criticise and complain and move from place to place, not setting down roots anywhere because there is just no church that can meet their high standards. Once in a while some go to a church so that it can’t be said they’ve forsaken the gathering of believers. They add nothing to the Church because they feel they’re not getting anything.  

I have come to understand that as long as men live, there will be problems with institutions. The high rate of divorce doesn’t mean there is a problem with marriage. The problem is not with the institution called marriage but with the people who get into it. Good sex cannot be the basis for marriage. Marriages mostly collapse because people do not know the reason for marriage neither do they understand that marriage is about the other person, not you. As long as we live in the flesh, there will be problems in the church. What we need more of is not the spirit of criticism or self-righteousness. We need less of finger pointing. We need more of people speaking in love. We need more of people praying for their leaders and the church.  We need more people led not by the spirit of their own self-importance but by the Holy Spirit who is always ready to help us. We need more of people practising biblical Christianity and not thinking it’s just an opinion we can ignore. We need more people with patience who led by the Holy Spirit are ready to change the things that are wrong.

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers.http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU000194087/Deceptio.aspx and LOST, BUT FOUND available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ/. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal.