Why bother with church?
That’s our question for this morning.
I meet people from time to time who tell me that they are keen Christian people, they just don’t go to church much.
Nationally, church attendance is declining.
There’s no shortage of things that people would do rather than come to church. The favourites are sport and shopping. Sport’s clear: Football tournaments, half marathons, swimathons, and one day cricket matches all seem to take place on Sundays. Shopping has become a national pastime, and Sunday trading laws allow us to pile off to Homebase, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Bluewater. Or if you prefer there’s always the car boot sale.
Some of the tide is turning. In some places, church attendance is on the up. But that doesn’t always translate into committed church membership.
I don’t know if you caught an article in the Chronicle two weeks ago. Apparently there’s a trend for growing church attendance across the Sevenoaks area.
“Simon Duan, pastor of the Vine Evangelical Church, said: "We have recently had a number of young couples join the church who have moved into the area as well as others across the ages who have come to faith largely through involvement in the Alpha Course we run.
"We now have a much broader spread of nationalities which enriches our life as a church family – Germans, Italians, Brazilians, South Africans, Filipinos and Latvians, to name just a few.
"The church is not just about coming for a couple of hours on a Sunday but serving the community we are placed in and over the last few years there have been more opportunities to do this.
"We're optimistic about the future and the continued involvement of God changing people's lives.
But Fiona Murray, of the Vine Baptist Church, said that while attendance was up, frequency of worship was down.
She said: "The average age of church members is getting older and full commitment on a regular basis from the younger generation is difficult due to busy lifestyles."
We can certainly no longer take it for granted that people go to church.
So why bother?
Recap
That’s the question that the writer of Hebrews is tackling in the two verses we’re looking at this morning.
We’ve been looking at the paragraph that is Hebrews 10:19-25 for a few weeks now. This is the last week; next week we’re going to back to Jesus’ sermon on the mount, Matthew chapters 5 to 7.
So why bother with church? Well if we want to understand the answer we get here, we need to remind ourselves how the paragraph has run so far.
Christians enjoy two great privileges. The first is that God has opened the way into his presence; God need not be a stranger; we can know him; we are friends once again. He did that through the death of Jesus. Our sins, our failure to recognise God’s number one place in our lives, had cut us off from him, but Jesus died to pay for that himself, and so the way to God is now open.
And second, Jesus now lives; he’s in heaven, where he’s the perfect priest, representing us to God and God to us. We couldn’t want any better.
Those are great privileges, and on the back of them the writer has three exhortations to throw out to us. Three “lettuces” – they all start “let us.”
Elsewhere in the Bible, we get a trio of ways we are to respond to what God has done. It comes a number of times, but most famously at the end of 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the great chapter on love. These three remain: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.
So it is that our writer has urged us to respond to what God has done in faith. Verse 22: Let us draw near. We can approach God in full assurance of faith. That is our privilege.
Then verse 23, let us respond to what God has done in hope. The real blessings from being a Christian come, not now, but when Jesus returns. We need to hold onto our hope. Keep waiting. Keep trusting.
And then today, he urges us to respond to what God has done in love. We sentimentalise love today, but when the Bible speaks of love it means doing things that are for the benefit of other people, putting them above our own preferences and needs. It’s what Jesus did when he left heaven, lived on earth, then died on the cross to save us. Saving us mattered more to him than his own comfort and security, and we see that in what he did.
Faith, hope and love. And today we come to love. How we can respond to what God did for us in the ways we love each other.
To Encourage Others
And the answer is: To come to church.
Actually it’s a bit more specific than that, but that’s what it boils down to.
Let’s see how the thought flows through this paragraph.
We have this great privilege of access to God. But the best enjoyment of that is in the future. So we need to keep going. We need to keep holding onto what God has promised. We need to keep living in the light of it.
The problem is that that isn’t easy. Following Jesus can make life more difficult. Life can throw hardships at us. And sometimes we just get tired of trying to do the right thing. Our love for Jesus grows cold.
Which is why it’s good that we don’t have to persevere on our own. God has put every Christian in a family. Our fellow Christians are our brothers and sisters; we’re on the same journey together, so we’re surrounded by others who can encourage us, spur us on, keep us going.
The story is told of a famous baptist minister from the 19th Century. He visited a member of his congregation who had gradually stopped coming to church, and wanted to see his pastor because his spiritual life felt dry. It was a cold day, and the two sat in silence for some time around the coal fire that was burning in the living room. At last, the minister said nothing. He simply picked up the tongs that were beside the fire, picked up a large, bright-red coal, and placed it on the stone hearth by itself. The two watched as the orange colour faded, until it was a just cold, black lump of coal. The fire had gone out. He then picked the coal back up, and placed it back in the fire. Within seconds, it was ablaze with red and orange light.
What this passage in Hebrews does is turn the tables on that. God has kindly given you other Christians to encourage you and to help you keep going. Which means that God has given you to the Christians around you to encourage them and to help them keep going.
And goal is all this is love and good works. If the other Christians in this church are to grow in their love for Christ, and in their love for those around them, and if they are not to grow weary of doing good, they need you to keep them going.
And this is all the more important because one day Jesus will come back. The verse ends by urging us to do this all the more as you see the day drawing near. If this life were all there was, it wouldn’t matter that much. But the return of Jesus is 30 minutes closer now than it was when this service began. One day I will meet Jesus, and so will every person here and all who live in this area. We all need to be ready for that day, which is why it’s so important that we help each other to live for him.
At a funeral service this week, someone shared a traditional Arab proverb. Translated into English, it says: “Work hard during your lifetime as if you are going to live forever and prepare for your next life as if you are going to die tomorrow.”
Well I’m not sure we should work as if we were going to live forever, because that’s to base our lives on a lie. We won’t. We ground our work too on the fact that we will meet Jesus one day.
What this passage adds to this is the notion of love. It’s not each of us making sure we’re each ready to meet Jesus when he comes back. There’s no such thing as solo Christianity. It’s each of us, encouraging everyone else to live in the light of the fact that Jesus will return.
What this means is that I need you. I need you to come to church every week, so that you can all encourage me to keep going at the business of loving others and doing good things. And you all need everyone else here to encourage you as well. We need each other.
Now, I realise that life is very pressured for some people. In particular, some people here have jobs that mean they work shifts and cannot get to church every week. You have to do your job.
Others have families who need looking after, and it would be wrong to neglect your family.
But even then, this passage has something to say to us as we try and work out what part church does play in our busy lives.
Before we finish, let me draw out for us three things that this will mean in practice.
Come
First, we need to come. Come.
We can’t be an encouragement to others if we’re not here.
Contribute
But second, we need to contribute. Contribute.
That’s the startling thing that these verses have told us about coming to church. The reason we mustn’t give up coming is not because of what we would lose if we’re not here. We come to church for other people’s benefit.
But what does it mean to contribute? On a typical Sunday, perhaps two people hand out sheets at the door, someone else does a reading, someone leads some prayers, and we have a handful of musicians. How do the rest of us take part?
Remember that the point of taking part is so that we can encourage each other to keep going with love and good works. That’s not best done from the front. I don’t know what it’s like to be a Christian civil engineer, accountant, lawyer or teacher. But there are people here who do, which is why we all need each other.
Coming to contribute, to encourage, isn’t so much about what rotas you are on. It is more about who you sit next to. Who you talk to. Coming in time for coffee. Getting to know people you don’t know so well. Finding out what you can pray for the person next to you.
Because there is only a limited opportunity to build friendships in a busy Sunday service, and to encourage each other in this way, I think we also need to belong to smaller groups in the life of the church. There are a number of groups that meet either weekly or fortnightly to read the Bible together, pray together and support one another. The best way to contribute, to encourage others, is to belong to a group like that, where everyone who’s there has the chance to take part. If you’d like to join a group like that, please speak to me afterwards and I’ll link you up with one.
Contribute.
Consider
And third, we need to consider. Consider. Did you notice that verses 24 and 25 don’t say that we should encourage each other. They don’t say that we should go to church. Or rather, they do say that, but it’s not the main instruction. Instead of let us encourage each other, he says let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.
We need to consider. To think.
This is the word Jesus used when he told us to consider the ravens. Study them. Think about what you can learn from them. It’s the word that James used when he describes the man who studies himself in the mirror. What’s that hair doing there? Is that something stuck in my teeth?
It’s easy for going to church to happen almost by accident. We just turn up. Some weeks we are a help to others. Some weeks others are a help to us. But it’s a bit of a lottery.
But if encouraging others matters to us, things could usefully be a little more planned than that. We can pray before we come for some of the people we will meet. We could sit down with a cup of coffee this week and make a list. Not a list of how I can get more out of church, but a list of how I can be as much use to others as possible. What habits could I get into? Get here 10 minutes early? Always sit next to someone I don’t know? And so on. We’d each need to draw our own list.
Consider. It’s planned.
Conclusion
So why bother with church?
Because living as a Christian is hard. We all know that. Which is why you can be sure that others find it hard too.
So we bother with church because they need us and we need them.
So please come. Please contribute. And please consider how to be as much use to others as you can./h3