When I was a young boy (back when the crust of the earth was cooling :) ), I would often get a rash on my arms. My mother would take me to the doctor and he would prescribe a tube of white goo to rub on the rash to make it better. I was looking at the tube one day (didn't have anything better to do) and I noticed that it was rather imaginatively called "The Ointment". It may as well have been call "the white goo". But I digress.
I believed the ointment worked. It always worked. However it wasn't of any value until I applied it to my skin. The word of God is like that. You can believe in it, cherish it, recommend it but it doesn't do any good until it is applied to your soul. Application is what the point of the Bible is.
Reading it and studying it are an important part of the process God has planned but they are bordering on useless if the word is not applied to your heart. James 1:22 puts it this way. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”
By all means, search and find the meaning of the text. Certainly teach it and proclaim it. But don't nullify all that good work by not applying it to your life and teaching the application.
Some of us love words a little too much. We enjoy the academic experience of Bible Study a little too much.
We need to ask the question when listening to God's word, "What does God want me to do?". And then go out and do it.
Applying the ointment. What a concept?
Institutional Christians
After talking with many Christians lately I have been impressed with the huge gulf there is between having an institutional connection to God and a relational one.
An institutional one is one where we see our relationship with God being through the group that we are in. We think, “I am in the church, therefore I am connected to God”. We see all our relationships with people in the church as “group” relationships and many times that means that they are not that personal. Other Christians soon become just the “people I see at church”. It doesn’t have to be this way but I am seeing it far too much in the wide range of churches I am moving amongst at the moment.
This is not the complaint of one who is looking for the perfect church. That animal doesn’t exist. Didn’t exist in the first century. It is futile to look for it in the 21st century.
No, what I am talking about here is a paradigm shift in the way we look at God and other Christians.
God has planned for his church to be a people, not an institution. “As he says in Hosea: “I will call them ‘my people’ who are not my people; and I will call her ‘my loved one’ who is not my loved one,” and, “It will happen that in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God’.”” Romans 9:25, 26. Christians are an organic body not an organization (1 Corinthians 12:13,14). We are a family not “co-habiters”. Our connection is not that we end up in the same place each week, it is the one who draws us to that place.
We are brothers and sisters, a people who belong to our Father, God. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” 1 Peter 2:9, 10. We are all sinners who have received mercy.
Warning Signs you are an “Institutional Christian”
- You really don’t want to hang around with Christians except at church for a brief period on Sunday.
- You only get concerned about others at church when they are not “at church”.
- Your social connection with other Christians is minimal and mostly formal.
- When Christians get in trouble, you run away from them.
- You hit the carpark 1.5 seconds after the final prayer at church. Sometimes even after the communion.
- You never hang around for lunch with the church.
- You would rather have hernia surgery than volunteer to help out with anything to do with church.
- You haven’t invited anyone to a Christian gathering of any sort in years.
Is this you? I see myself in this list and I am an evangelist. I should know better, but I fall into bad habits. What about you? Be honest. This is important. Is "this" what Jesus is about? Enter the conversation. There is life in the church.
Next blog: How to get out of the institutional Christian trap.
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