by Dale Reeves
Story Pastor
How many times have you heard someone say to you:
“You don’t want me to come to your church. If I did, the roof would probably fall in”?!
If I had a dollar for every time someone has said that phrase to me in over forty years of ministry, I’d have a lot of one-dollar bills in my wallet. Why is that such a common phrase? I’ll tell you why. It’s because many people have bought the lie from our enemy Satan that you have to be “good enough” to come to Jesus and go to church. Spoiler alert: you’ll never be “good enough.”
So many people know that their lives are a mess, but they feel like they need to clean themselves up before coming to church. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We can all agree with what the apostle Paul says in Romans 3:23, “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard” (NLT). We realize that God has created us with free will—we have the ability to choose between what is morally right and wrong—and we know we have “missed the mark” God has set for us.
The Bible teaches us that all mankind has sinned—intentionally resisted and defied God. Paul puts it like this: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10-12, NIV). We all have a propensity to sin every day, sometimes every hour. The most common word for sin in the New Testament is the Greek word hamartia. It is used in the New Testament 221 times. The word was used in Greek literature to refer to a character’s tragic flaw that ultimately would lead to his downfall. It can be translated as “sin,” “error,” or “missing the mark,” as in missing the target that has been set up for us, just as an archer might miss his target when shooting an arrow. Try as we might to aim at God’s best for us, in our own power, we often miss it.
Belong . . . Believe . . . Behave
Because people inherently know this about the wrong thoughts they’ve had, the bad words they’ve said, and poor actions they’ve committed, they feel unworthy of coming to God and/or attending church. They may have grown up in a church that operated a certain way in how you could get connected to Jesus and the church. That process goes like this: Behave, then Believe, then Belong. They basically heard this, in so many words: “If you behave the right way, and believe the right things, then you can belong.” You may have heard this growing up in your home, or at a church as a child. And, therefore, you may have never felt like you fit in with “God’s people.” If this doesn’t describe you, I have no doubt that it describes some people you know.
But Jesus comes at it from the total opposite direction. He says, “With me you belong—no matter who you are and what you’ve done in the past. We’ll get to how your beliefs will change as a result of our relationship, and then your behavior will follow what you believe.” The way Jesus reached people was through this process: Belong . . . Believe . . . Behave. It’s not about behavior modification, it’s about transformation.
This past Sunday at Christ’s Church, our lead pastor Brad Wilson talked about how Jesus—throughout his three-year ministry on the earth—demonstrated the blueprint of how to tell others they belong in the body of Christ. Brad said,
“Jesus led with relationship, not rules; with presence, not performance; with love, not legalism.”
In case you missed Brad’s teaching last Sunday, you can check it out here.
Longing to Belong
If you’re like me, then you know what it feels like to not belong. You were picked last as a child when team captains were choosing who would be on their team in a game in gym class. You were passed up for a promotion at work because you were told you were underqualified. You felt like a fifth wheel at a social event that you attended with two other couples, but you didn’t have a partner with you, due to a divorce or a death. We know what it feels like to not fit, to not belong, to not be chosen. But Jesus calls out to us just as he did when he called his first set of disciples—a bunch of misfits—to follow him. The very things that make us feel distant from God—our hamartia, our sins, our flaws, our mistakes, our messes—are the very things that make us the perfect choice for Jesus. Because it is our sin that creates the need for us to be rescued by him.
That’s why Dr. Luke writes, “There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12, NLT). By choosing to follow Jesus, you have hope, but apart from him you are hopeless, lost, and may spend your whole life trying to “belong” . . . somehow, somewhere. But Jesus invites you to be a part of his kingdom, his body, his church. And when you belong to him, you are not just signing up to belong to a country club. You are not just getting admission into an aquarium, where you just sit and observe the other fish swimming about. You are saying that you are checking yourself into the hospital, where you can get the help you so desperately need. And, then you are accepting the invite to go back into the battlefield, searching for more wounded souls in desperate need of a place to belong.
As Brad shared last Sunday, getting involved in others’ lives often gets messy. Then he asked,
“Do we get uncomfortable when grace gets messy? . . . Jesus didn’t come to make us comfortable; he came to seek and save the lost.”
In 1984, Sally Field received the Oscar for “best actress in a leading role,” for her portrayal of recently widowed Edna Spaulding in the movie, Places in the Heart. Upon her acceptance of the Academy Award, she said, “You like me, right now. You like me!” She said that she wanted to be accepted in the film community.
I truly believe that the church of Jesus Christ exists for those yet to be a part of it. Jesus says to you today, “You belong . . . you really do!” That’s good enough for me. How about you?
“You belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:23, NLT).