Why Is The Church So Jacked Up?

Gonna turn our attention this morning. We got three passages, one from Romans chapter seven, and then John five, and then first Peter. So as is our custom, would you join me in reading God's word aloud together? Let's start with Romans chapter seven.

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave under sin. For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good. So now I am no longer the one doing it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. Now if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one who does it, but it is the sin that lives in me. So I discover this law. When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me. For in my inner self, I delight in God's law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body. What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, with my mind, I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin. — Romans 7:14-25

I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. — Luke 5:32

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. — 1 Peter 2:9

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Now, this series that we're in, we're wrapping up over the next couple weeks, is called No Bad Questions, but I've demonstrated that I have a bad one. That's the sermon title for this morning. I realized this when several people have asked me about the sermon title, which is why is the church so jacked up? And they thought I was talking about muscular, ripped, pumped, cut. That's not what jacked up means. That's what jacked means, and we're not talking about working out this morning. If you're here for that, you're in the wrong place. But if you're here to hear and talk about the church as a mess, the church as screwed up and broken, and wonder this morning yourself, if the church has in fact become obsolete, then you're in the right place. And that's the question I'm trying to engage this morning.

One writer, Christian Smith, asks the question, is the church like the typewriter or the VCR or the cassette tape or the rotary phone? I mean, you could still use those things, but why would you? They're outmoded. They're outdated. They're obsolete. And I think much of the American culture would say that of the church. In fact, I think that a lot of people in the church are asking that question. Lots of people who would identify themselves as Christians are saying, I don't know about this anymore.

There are at least three groups of people that identify as Christians. So there are those for whom they have a distant connection to the church. There may be a generational connection. This is what my family grew up in. We were always Methodists. We were always Catholic. That's, in many cases, a mainline congregation in this country, and they're viewed in many cases as irrelevant, a dying breed.

There's another group of people whose Christianity is so infused with a political ideology that they're viewed as part of the tribalism of either the right or the left and they are considered incredibly dangerous in this country.

And then there's a third group who identify themselves as true believers, who really want to know and follow Jesus. I identify with this group, maybe many of you do as well. But don't you find yourself, if this is you, always sort of feeling like you need to apologize or qualify. Like, I'm one of the good ones. I'm not crazy like those people. Don't you find yourself always feeling a little bit like, I don't know how to talk about my faith now.

This gnawing doubt about the church and its relevancy for the future is only exacerbated when we look around at our unbelieving neighbors. Don't we all know people who are not Christians, who are nicer—it's okay to say this—and more moral and maybe live more consistently with their values, and you're really glad they're your neighbors? Okay. I'm the only person up here who's felt that before. Right. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Right. We can look around and say this is right in front of us.

So don't you see everybody's asking the question, why is the church so jacked up? And is this an institution worth preserving? I wanna get at that question this morning by asking three other questions.

What is the church? What is it? Second, what do we do with it? And third, what is God going to do with the church? So let's jump into this together.

What Is the Church?

Now that may seem obvious, but we need to define our terms because when we speak of church, you can either talk about a local institution. You could be talking about Christians throughout all the world. You could be talking about the church throughout all generations. You can be talking about an organization.

To help us answer that, I wanted to highlight that there are three tensions at work all the time in the people that we would call the church, and they all begin with an 'a' to make it good for you who can take notes. They are: aspirational and yet always failing; already and not yet; all too human and supernatural.

The Church Is Aspirational and Yet Always Failing

Have you read the Sermon on the Mount recently? Jesus' most famous words, his Sermon on the Mount is one of the highest, most idealistic statements on what it is to be part of his kingdom. We're to be people who are poor in spirit, the meek, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted.

And the Sermon on the Mount only gets worse from there, as far as I'm concerned. It gets more idealistic. We're to be a city on a hill, the light of the world. Those who, when someone strikes your left cheek, offer your right one. Those who love their enemies. Those who forgive and forgive and forgive, who don't judge. I mean, Jesus' most famous teaching is this counter-cultural call to selflessness. It's incredible.

The hard part about idealism is the flip side of idealism is cynicism. It's often the case that the people who are most idealistic and aspirational are those who are most easily discouraged and disappointed. I mean, if you're not hoping anything, you're not discouraged by it.

I am certainly not a prophet for being cynical this morning. But I want to point out this tension is always at work among Christians. We have the most high and high aspirations for what we're trying to do as a community. We're never going to reach them. That's biblical. Romans 7, we just read, Paul says:

I do not do the good I want to do. But the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. — Romans 7

Did you have trouble reading that passage out loud? It's a hard one to read out loud. I had to practice it several times this morning just to not be distracting to you as we read it out loud. Because Paul is saying, I have all these things that I want to do, but in my flesh, as a person, in this life, I'm not doing them.

Now Romans 7 comes between Romans 6 on the one hand, Romans 8 on the other hand. Romans 6 is all about justification, how sinners come to faith in God. Romans 8 is about how we will be glorified and perfected in eternity. And Romans 7's right in the middle. And it's the uncomfortable part. It's the uncomfortable part of living in the life between when God has brought you to himself in saving faith and made you perfect in heaven with him.

And this life as we know it, therefore, is this time of sanctification, this time of struggle, this in-between state. That's important for us to remember. It's a stage in our lives that's always characterized by tension. Do you feel tension? Some of you, as Christians, have you felt like this sense of like, I just never quite fully cooked? I want God's perfecting work in me, and I struggle. There's always a gap, and there always will be a gap.

And I hope this is not discouraging. I hope this is encouraging to you. There will always be a gap in the church between intentions and impact. There always will be a gap. This side of perfection, of glory, we are. This is who we are, and it's okay. We are a people in process.

Remember, Jesus has never really been into his brand all that much. He gave his church, his gospel message to a Romans 7 church. People struggling.

Already and Not Yet

Now we use that phrase often to describe the Christian life. We are already saved. We are not yet what we will be. But you can apply that same statement to the church as well, and it's important that we do so.

We read these amazing words in 1 Peter:

You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation... You were once not a people, now you are a people. Once you hadn't been shown mercy, now you have been shown mercy. — 1 Peter 2

Incredible words. And yet, pair that with what Jesus says about the church:

I did not come for the well but the sick. I did not come for the righteous. I came for sinners. — Matthew 9:12-13

Again, this tension: already perfected in him, not yet. Not yet what we will be.

That means the church is always in an awkward teenage phase. We are. We look in the mirror as a church. We're always in the awkward teenage phase.

This tension that we feel is that we are will always be somewhat of a mess. We're never gonna be totally mature in this place as a church. It's a tension that we have to reconcile, especially when we look, as I said at the beginning of the sermon, at the lives of people who are not believers. When you compare the church to the lives of people who would make no claim to follow or know God, it's important that you remember already not yet. Because this is who we are right now, in tension.

Now why is that the case? Two reasons why that's the case.

Number one, it's because of the nature of our salvation. It's the nature of our very salvation. Tim Keller writes it this way. He says, Christians should expect to find nonbelievers who are much nicer, kinder, wiser, and better than they are. Why? Because Christian believers are not accepted by God because of their moral performance, wisdom, virtue, but because of Christ's work on our behalf. If the church, you look around and it's full of sinners, and it's full of weak people, and it's full of people who've got a lot of mess, then guess what? The gospel's true when the church is doing its work.

The second reason why we need to keep this in mind, why this tension will always be the case, why there's a we look around at the world and we see people who are more moral than those inside the church is because of something called common grace.

Common Grace

Common grace means that God restrains the effects of evil in this world to prevent it from being as bad as it could be, and to bless those who don't know him. There's a difference between particular grace or special grace and common grace. Let me make sure you get this. Particular grace comes from the cross. Particular grace is for people who have claimed Jesus as their savior. Common grace is what God gives everyone.

Jesus says, I caused the rain to come on the just and the unjust. The sun shines on good people and bad people.

God sprinkles the world with his goodness. He even gives unbelievers gifts that are of him. The book of Proverbs tells us this, that this is a moral universe. This is a moral world that we live in, and that unbelievers can therefore express wisdom that's not inherent to who they are, that's a gift from God, and live in ways that actually bless other people. And we should thank God for that. There are great people who don't know Jesus, are our doctors, who are our people in politics, who are people who are leaders in our community, and their gifts are worth celebrating.

However, remember this church. Common grace means that unbelievers are wiser than they should be, maybe more moral than they have a right to be. These are all gifts from God. And indwelling sin means the church is weaker and more foolish than it should be for now.

You know, when you read those car commercials, they got the little fine print at the bottom of the screen. Pay attention to the fine print around the church. The fine print around the church is that for now that's the case.

First Corinthians 2 tells us, eyes haven't seen, ears haven't heard, no one has ever imagined what God has in store for those who believe.

So, yes, that's the case for right now, but it will not always be so. As the young people say, the church is going to glow up. The church is all too human and at the same time supernatural.

The Local Church

Now as a common thing for people to say, you know what? I don't need to be a part of the church, little c, local church, because I'm a part of the big c church. The church throughout all times and spaces. I'm kind of done with the local expression. I'll opt for the universal one. I get why people do that. The local church is a difficult place at times.

Theologians distinguish between what they call the visible church and the invisible church. The invisible church is the church from God's perspective. How God can see all believers in all times and places perfected in him, called to himself. He can even see us glorified in the future. We don't have that view. We can only see the visible church. The people around you right now who have bad breath, sing off key like me. Right? The problem is you can't play one against the other. As much as we would love to, as in, I'm done with the local church, you never can play them off against each other.

When we read in the New Testament over and over about all these grand statements about the church—Body of Christ, temple of the Holy Spirit, a people belonging to God, a royal priesthood, a holy nation—those are always words about a group of people gathered together in a room who have names, who have faces, who know each other. God is working, Ephesians tells us, to reveal the manifold mysteries of God through the local church.

The local church curates the mysteries of God. And you can't choose between them. You can't play one off against the other.

Two Sundays ago, my family was traveling in Wales to visit one of our sons who's studying abroad in Cardiff. We got to take a van and drive out to the West Coast of Wales, and so on Palm Sunday, we weren't with you. We were at a church in Pembrokeshire, Wales called Saint David's. I have a picture of it. Beautiful.

What was really powerful to me is this church is 1,500 years old. We think we know old. Right? Liberty Bell's old. It's nothing. That's the last week, y'all. 1,500. Our church will celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary this coming August. This church has been around 60 times that long. They have a list in the church of all the pastors going back to May. This church was burned down twice by Vikings.

I was struck by two things. One is the faithfulness of God. But the other is that people have loved and worshiped Jesus on that place for fifteen hundred years. Guys, church has been through a lot. You think 2024 is a problem for Jesus? He's wringing his hands, worried. Oh, no. What about church? Is it gonna make it? Fifteen hundred years, y'all. Incredible.

What do we do with the church? What do we do with our disillusionment? What do we do with our discouragement? What do we do with our church hurt? I got some applications for you.

Deconstruct the Right Things

First is deconstruct the right things. We're in a moment where deconstruction is all over the conversation, and I think it's a helpful phrase. It's a helpful term for us. Some people view it as an enemy of the church, and yet I think it's really helpful. Alan Noble, one writer, says about deconstruction: "When we discover error in the church, we return home with good news." And why would he say that? The news is that there's an opportunity to correct and to clarify. And that view on the church helps you not run away, but run toward.

The process that many of your friends, and maybe many of you, have had over these last few years of picking through the rubble of the local church and saying, really, what of this is of God? That process is, I think, something the word can use, and I want to legitimize that as a pastor for you this morning.

In fact, we have a theological term for that, and it's in Latin, which means it's really important. It goes like this: ecclesia reformata semper reformanda. I took Latin in high school. I couldn't tell you what that means, but I memorized it. It means the church reformed, always reforming. We know that this isn't the highest and perfect expression of what God meant when he said the church. There's always an opportunity for the church to grow closer in Christ likeness and in likeness to God's word.

I want to encourage you this morning to take that movement toward wanting and longing for things to be made right back toward the church.

You know, we could see this at Saint David's Cathedral two Sundays ago. It's funny because right next to the church building I showed you is a ruin, and the ruin was an abbot's house that dates back to a time when the church in England and in Wales was incredibly corrupt. And so this dwelling was one of many houses that belonged to the bishop or the abbot that was opulent and over the top and impoverished lots of people to pay for it. And you know what it is today? It's a ruin. But next door, people are still worshiping Jesus. And it reminds me the hope of the church, always reforming, always having to check ourselves.

Cling to Jesus

Second application: cling to Jesus. I'm married to a very wise counselor who helps a lot of people with their church hurt. Her advice to those who are hurt by the church is always this: cling to Jesus, draw near to Jesus. Yes, the church will hurt you, fail you, sin against you. Jesus never will.

Why is that helpful? I think that it's validating. If you're a person who's been harmed by spiritual leadership, can I tell you this? Jesus is more angry than you are. His harshest words in the gospels were against those who had spiritual leadership who used it to harm others and to gain by it.

Jesus is the man of sorrows. He can handle all your honesty and your pain and your anger. He really does know how that feels. He knows how it feels to be betrayed and hurt and spit upon, used, and sidelined, and talked about, and lied to, and lied about, used for gain, and misrepresented.

I think sometimes when we talk about Jesus this way, people are like, yeah, yeah, Jesus. He was perfect. What does he know? Imagine, if you're a person who's been hurt by someone in spiritual leadership and you know a bit of what it means to be an innocent victim, can you imagine that every day of your life? Even those who are innocent in a place of church harm know that in the rest of their life they're not perfectly innocent in every area.

And yet Jesus walked through this life with a level of innocence, a level of purity, a level of sinlessness that we can only imagine. He knew every day what it was like to experience sin and hurt at the hands of other people. If anybody knows what it feels like to be you, if anybody can imagine what it's like, if anybody can identify with you in places where you've been hurt and you're innocent, your savior can. He is a man of sorrows and you can take all of that to him.

And finally, he is the healer of souls. He is the great physician. He is a spiritual doctor. He can bring restoration and wholeness to even the hardest places.

Forgive the Church

My final application point here is to forgive the church. Now I don't want to say that lightly or glibly. There are cases where authorities need to be brought in, things need to be put right and brought out into the open. I'm not saying that against those things. But for many places, we need to take a step to forgive the church.

Why is that so hard? Well, it's hard because the church is not an individual. It's a collective. It'd be really great if there was one person we could blame and be mad at, but one of the hard things about the church is being mad at a group or a group of leaders, trying to figure out who you're really mad at.

Compound that by the fact that often the church has hurt people by sins of omission, not commission. Things that we failed to do, not things that we've done on purpose. Failing to love, failing to ask, "Hey, how are you doing?" Failing to come alongside, failing to be tuned in, failing to observe what's going on. Anybody feel this? Yeah. I'm sure there are people sitting under the sound of my voice this morning who could raise their hand and say, "Yeah, Jeff, I know ways that you've hurt me. This church has hurt me."

I feel like one of the things I do regularly as a pastor is apologize for the sins of omission. I think I'm regularly doing that. Yes, we failed again. It's hard. But sins of omission are tricky, aren't they? Because it's hard when it's like, it's not what you did, it's what you didn't do. It's when you didn't do this that hurts.

But my call is to take a step toward forgiveness this morning. You know that adage about forgiveness? Ann Lamott writes this in her book Traveling Mercies. She says, "Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die." It hurts you.

Or that old adage about how you trap a monkey. Have you heard this one? I've used this a couple times before. I don't know if this is true—I've never hunted monkeys. But you get a coconut and you drill a hole in the top of it and you put a treat down in it. You drill the hole just big enough that the monkey can slip his hand into the hole in the coconut, but then when he grabs the treat, he can't pull it out. Of course, he's free to pull it out. He just has to let go of the treat, but he doesn't want to. So he sits there stuck in the coconut.

I think this is many people with regard to the church. We find ourselves stuck on something we can't let go of.

So here's my invitation and my call to you this morning. Can you forgive the church? As a representative of the church, I'll say this: we're sorry. Sorry. Wish it was different. It will be so.

What is Jesus gonna do with the church? You know, Jesus isn't done with the church, and that is good news for us this morning because that includes us. He's not done with us either. He's not done.

What do we read about in scripture concerning the church? What's he gonna do with it? He's gonna heal the church. He's going to adorn the church. He's going to delight and rejoice over the church, and that includes us.

So stick with the church. Yes, church is unimpressive. It may make you look bad sometimes. You may find yourself wanting to qualify yourselves in conversation: "Hey, I'm one of the good ones." But of course, that's the whole point, isn't it? No, we're not. We're not. That's why we need Jesus and need grace, and yes, even the church.

This church. The aspirational and always failing church. The already and not yet church. The all too human and supernatural church.

In the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we thank you for your word. We pray, Father, now, Lord, that you would help us to love what you love. Lord, we pray that you would help us to hate what you hate. We pray that we would follow you in being people of forgiveness. We pray, Father, that you would be renewing us with hope. Lord, we thank you, Father, for this church, this expression of your spirit and your work among us. And, Lord, we say these things in Jesus' name. Amen.