One of my favourite sermons I have ever heard is by Erwin McManus. If you are interested, you can download it here. It’s not necessarily theologically without holes, nor is it a message that will send you running to the altar with tears filling your eyes. At the time I listened to it for the first time, it was about two years ago and I was struggling with the concept of church and grace. This message just happened to bank on both ideas.
He talked about our modern perception of church and how we look at church as our place to get ‘fed.’ How often do we hear (and did I say) “I just want to get fed,” “I need a place to feed me spiritually.” Erwin simply says, “YOU’RE FAT.” Our churches are full of fat Christians. He says that church isn’t there to feed us, but to make us hungry. Church should be the place you go to get hungry so for the rest of the week you are looking everywhere for God, you are searching your Scriptures, and seeking God in everything. If we settle for just eating out all the time, that means we are starving ourselves the rest of the week.
It was then that my mind started moving. How often do we create church into the fast-food restaurant (spiritual food)? We show up at church once a week, get our fill up and then run off that for the rest of the week. Imagine if you did that physically, one McDonald’s meal a week, you wouldn’t be very healthy would you? Your week needs to be full of nourishment, so that when you go to church its simply an overflow of everything that you have been struggling through and learning throughout the week.
My favourite article I have ever read in Relevant is called Starving our Worship. He makes the most interesting parallel to the Lord ‘s Supper. In 1 Cor 11 when Paul talks about the Lord’s Supper he points out that people are getting drunk, there were divisions and people were going ahead of one another and leaving others hungry. There was a lot of crap going on in the church (you’ll find that a lot with the Corinthian church). Here is what Paul points out:
“Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in?”
Everyone was coming to the table for the wrong reasons. They were coming to get their fill, and coming to replenish themselves. Why does this ring so closely to our church today? Paul is telling us the same thing. Don’t we have homes to spiritually eat and drink in?
These two messages run alongside of each other and give us the same idea. Church is not meant to be our fill-up fast [spiritual] food joint. When did it happen that the only place we can be spiritually nourished is at church? We’re lazy; we don’t want to do any work. It’s easy to hear a preacher speak to us and do all the interpretation and exegetical work and apply it to our lives for us. Church should be more like the family dinner table. Every day, you are presented with a number of great choices from all the food groups (to be honest, this is nothing like my dinner table, but you get my point). So that when you do go to the church service then you are not so focused on filling up but rather you can focus on what you are there for. Which I will continue on about soon…