DO YOU “GO” TO CHURCH?

No, you don’t have to put your armor on and start defending your faith as compared or contrasted to mine. Just relax and consider a few thoughts dancing or prancing around in my head.
Isn’t it amazing how man has reacted to religion throughout time? The number or amount of “gods” is probably beyond counting so I won’t try. If we are to believe the first inkling of a person wondering about God or gods, the “fire” god or the sun god probably head the list. Then there must have been the scary experience of lightning and thunder; and the beginning of the “tater wagon” being upset (that’s thunder in case this is a “local” colloquialism in Ohio).
The Jewish segment of the religious worlds had its beginning with God appearing to Abraham in a dream telling him to “take off to a land that I will show you” and he left his kindred probably wondering what kind of signs he would receive next to “go there” or “stop here”? Or was it more certain than inklings? We’ll have to “fast forward” quite a bit to get to the scene of the “boiling mountain” where God etched words into two stones. Did you ever wonder why there were two stones? The most probable answer would be one could not hold the Decalogue but that is just a guess. I would be more inclined, with my inquiring mind, to know just how big those stones were! But, with that experience, you could say, man was given “some definite instructions” about religion or God. Before, it had been merely in dreams.
I am firmly of the opinion that even after the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob wrote on the tablets of stone, He was more interested in what those children of Israel did in their everyday life than what they did when they “went to church” or came around their family worship centers on the Sabbath or gathered specifically at the mobile assembly (the Tabernacle). If we can believe the incidental lessons shown in the great film, “Fiddler on the Roof”, it appears the Jewish Family had their own worship service in their home and tradition was the key. In fact, you may or may not know “Tradition” was one of the theme songs in that film story. A preacher I once knew said there were more gospel sermons in that film story than are preached in most pulpits across the nation in any given Sunday. You’ll have to study that I am sure to make any sense out of it.

A preacher in the times of the Nazi regime in Germany expressed “religion” with these words:
“Only he who believes is obedient; only he who is obedient believes.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this, and he still believed it as German soldiers machined-gunned him to death.

Now I can ask my question again, “Do you ‘GO’ to church?” What I believe is that we are not to “GO” to church but rather, we “ARE” the church – in fact, those who attend church are probably the only “church” that many unbelievers see. They watch how we work around our houses, they might sit at a desk next to us at our job, they might hear how we talk at the filling station as we pump $3.45 a gallon gasoline into our tanks. They might hear some non-religious words when we mistake the nail on our fingertips for the nail in the wood. They might see the kind of movies we attend or the kind of books we buy at a newsstand. They might hear us dicker the price of an item at a yard sale and wonder about that. Although I think there are subtle examples in the Bible where we can learn that dickering prices or maybe even “challenging God” to change his mind about circumstances in our lives is not an ungodly practice.
A circumstance sticks out in my mind about actions speaking louder than prayers to God. Remember when Abraham made a deal with his wife when they were in the presence of Egyptians? He told these foreigners that Sarah was his sister. Then, through simple observation the Egyptians saw Abraham was lying. They even accused Abraham of (nearly) causing them to sin because of this lie! I have no doubt that God shook his head in disbelief as the ”The Father of the Jews” made a complete fool of himself. By the way, this was not a single incident in his life nor was he the only one who tried to pull this off.
Now we’re getting warmer to the gist of this essay — “Pull this off”. Is the purpose behind religion or “going to church” some kind of game that we play, trying to prove to God, or our neighbors, how good we are? If that is the case, then we might as well forget it. The Scriptures are replete with examples, comparisons and principles that God is more interested in our hearts than our money or sacrifices. We could not find a bill of currency large enough to put in the plate to cover our guilt of sin. God knew this already, but for reasons that I still have difficulty in seeing, God allowed centuries to pass before the coming of Christ who, in essence, stomped his foot on the ground, exclaiming, “This is what God wants – your hearts!”
When the great lover of God, David the King, sinned the sin that sparked the beginning of the fall of the Kingdom of David, he pleaded with God to re-make him, to put him once again into his mother’s womb and allow him to be re-born! “Make me new, God!” (Read Psalm 51 again. Scholars say this rebirth is the essence of the original language in this passage.) God washed David’s soul and in the words of Isaiah the prophet, his sins were made “white as snow”. Changing the color of his sin was only figurative though—the penalties or consequences of those grave sins were not to be erased or ablated, reduced or made to disappear as courts do today to destroy the very evidence that a person once existed! We see the perfect example if a man falls out of a tree and breaks his arm—once he began that fall, the consequence was his arm would break—pure and simple. Truly God forgave David for his lust, lying, using people and even murder, but David had to “pay something” in a real personal way because he sinned. And in David’s prayer he hit the nail on the head – even though he cheapened the life of another man’s wife and even though he planned a strategy to get a man killed, he knew in his heart that he was sinning against God. Today’s society likes to pretend that sin does not exist. Wishing things away is comparable to expecting a bucket to hold water when the bottom is full of holes.
Forget the church building. Forget the solemn prayers offered at church. But notice the heart behind the mouth of those prayers. Is it a re-born heart, a re-born person? Is it a life different from the ungodly world around us? Merely “going to church” – whatever the church, is not what God wants. He wants us to be “good for something”, godly and righteous, so when others see us, they will know we’re different, and they don’t even have to know what church we attend!
THE WORDWRIGHT