Dan Kent calls us to love the church as the people of God. He does this by identifying two real issues that hinder people from embracing the church and then he shows us how to overcome these obstacles as we engage the God who engages us.
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Learning to Love the Church
• Dan Kent
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In this sermon, Dan Kent draws our attention to the words “my people” in Revelation 18:4. When we enter relationship with the Father through Jesus, we are also entering into a collective which is traditionally called the Church. God’s people are not an assembly of individuals but an interconnected band of brothers and sisters. The Bible refers to the Church as the body of Christ, the bride of Christ, and the people of union with the Father. All of this sounds great, but while many find it easy to love Jesus, the church can be much harder to swallow. This sermon aims to help us fall in love again with the church of God.
Dan identifies two obstacles to loving the church. The first is hypocrisy. Church history is littered with stories of hypocritical movements that fill up volumes to overflowing. We look back on the Crusades of the Middle Ages, Slavery and Jim Crow that was endorsed by Christians in the American story, as well as the abuse scandals by church leaders, and it is easy to see why people have trouble with the church. We have far too often fallen short of the call to love like Jesus.
However, even in the midst of the hypocrisy, there has always been a remnant, a unit within the larger whole who have been a light in the darkness. During the Crusades there were people like the Dominicans. While slavery was raging, the Black Church arose. And while church leaders abuse, there are people who are standing up to this abuse to offer healing and the love of Jesus. We get into trouble when we equate “my people” with the church institution, when we conflate the Kingdom of God with the local church building. God’s people are the remnant of the committed. They are not perfect, but repentant. They don’t give up, but they continue to grow and seek. We are not there yet, but God will complete what he has started in us.
The second obstacle to loving the church is diversity that results in division. When you look at the variety of church beliefs and practices, it is mind blowing. The disagreements appear more significant than the shared commitments. However, we must rethink how we talk about diversity so that it does not lead to division. There are core dogmas that all Christians agree on. Then there are doctrines that we see differently. And then there are a variety of theological opinions that have much less importance. When we begin to think about our distinctions in this way, we can live in unity while also seeing things from differing perspectives.
Dan provides some ways to address these two obstacles in a direct way. However, there is more going on beneath the surface. Dan guides us to think deeply about what is driving these obstacles. He proposes that the underlying issue is that the God of the Church is viewed as a construct. The divine nature is seen as a compilation of ideas and concepts that we must get right in order to be God’s people in the right way. When we imagine God in such a way, our faith is founded on a set of theological ideas and ethical dictates.
However, the biblical story does not provide a set of ideas about how people have constructed God. It tells us of a God who comes, reveals and loves. This God comes in relationship and engages us personally and shows us who he is. When God’s people see God in this way, refusing to treat God as an object that we construct, we can rethink the two obstacles and thereby fall in love with the church. The hypocrisy problem dissipates because God’s people can see others as image bearers of God. The remnant can arise because the focus lies on Jesus, and the church’s shortcomings are not driving the center of the church. And the diversity problem falls away because God is not a list of theological concepts. He is one we engage, and the theological differences become less troublesome.
Hide Extended SummarySermon Series: The Unveiling, The Last Exodus
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Focus Scripture:
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Revelation 18:4
Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“‘Come out of her, my people,’
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues; ..."
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Kevin:
I didn’t understand your comment at first but went back to a prior sermon by Dan ESCAPING BABYLON and a book he recommended Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness Bobby Jamieson and after thinking about a sermon Emily gave slightly reworded your comment:
Jesus chose ordinary people like you and me to be His body…fallen, broken, stupid people, nothing personal an ethology umwelt thing, because everything’s in a fallen state so actually God had no choice but to use us NOT much to work with HEVEL – but thankfully with God all things are possible.