Mark Dever on the Use of the Church

You only go around once in life, so go for the gusto. That was an interesting slogan.

It focused on you and it focused on now. Really that's the winning slogan for much of Madison Avenue's work.

You deserve a break today. You can go through slogan after slogan, feel free and do this over lunchtime, and see how these two aspects of you and today are so much of what we see in advertising.

Really I think that these slogans capture a dominant idea, in just a few words, a dominant idea of the day, a kind of confident individualism, a legitimized self -indulgence.

So, the personal savings rate in America is almost nil, while personal credit card debt soars.

Our healthcare system reels from increased pressure on it, from an affluent and litigious population increasingly convinced that this life is all there is, and that we all deserve the longest physical life that current medical technology can give us.

Everything from the hours of our workday, to the gender of our sexual partner, are all taken to be matters of individual preference, and our own individual consciences are revered.

They are taken to be inviolable demy deities to whom our ultimate allegiance is owed.

Society has become a competitive individualism, full of self -assertion as a legitimate end in itself.

Even the Christian religion, even in the Christian religion we find the worship of God seeming to be in danger of being eclipsed by the religion of the enhancement of self -esteem and self -respect, regarding God only insofar as he's useful to that end and that purpose.

Ideas, you know, sometimes are just sort of in the air, like liberty in the 18th century, or progress in the 19th century.

Such ideas are the mental background noise, so pervasive as to be almost unnoticeable to those in the midst of them.

Such ideas are the grids through which we interpret everything, our experience of the world, life, thought, jobs, relationships, even religion.

They enhance our ability to see some things, so even those of us who are white, when we read things from the 19th century can just see an overt, wrongly discriminating racism from literature from that period.

And yet at the same time, such basic assumptions can also hide things from us.

They can obscure from our view things which would have been patently clear to earlier generations.

Sometimes those things matter very little. Sometimes those things are right next door to crucial.

One idea which was prominent in the New Testament and in the history of Christianity in our own country, but which is almost invisible today, is the idea of the church.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that churches in modern America are about to close down.

The proportion of church members in our country has remained fairly constant throughout most of this century, and many individual churches are bursting at the seams with hundreds and even thousands involved, multiple services, institutions that bear their name, which can provide all the care you need from cradle to grave.

Now, churches as an institution, many of them are doing well, it seems, in our country in that sense.

But in another sense, churches in modern America have nearly vanished. That is, in any historic sense.

They have dissolved among the acids of individualism. They have become no more than expressions of the passing interests of their congregants.

Their programs are determined by internal polls. Their services are determined by what they perceive those outside of their number want.

Their budget reflects nothing more than the aggregate desires of the members. Friends, amidst all the apparent prosperity, what is missing is the truly corporate element of the church, conceiving of itself as the church.

So we here this morning are not simply people who've all come to have our personal devotionals together one morning a week.

This is not your quiet time. We haven't all gathered simply to pray and to sing and to read scripture like we would the other days of the week, only this time, for our encouragement, we do it with everybody else.

No, something more than that's going on here. We are participating in the life of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

And when we come, we are not coming merely as individual consumers, sort of doing our spiritual shopping for the week, seeing what we find of use down the aisle of singing and down this aisle of prayer, up here over in the preaching special and over here in the conversation afterwards, and then taking it home in our carts and using it for the week by ourselves.

We are actually assembling as a living institution, a viable organism, one body.

I wonder why you come to church. Let me ask you a question that might help get to the nub of the matter.

What's the use of the church? Those of you who don't understand, if you don't have the slightest idea of the answer to that question, if you're just here exploring, that's fine.

But to those of you this morning who are here and call yourselves Christians, what's the use of the church?

Now, if in your own mind you've answered that question in terms of what it does for you, then

I would say you've missed something crucial. Something that's really very clear on the pages of the

New Testament, which is obscured to our eyes because of the experience that we've had here in our own country and our own culture for the last few decades.

The biblical answer to what's the use of the church would have to do not so much with what it does for you as for what it does for God.

And when we begin to understand this, we begin to turn the corner from a kind of compromise, self -centered involvement in the church, to the kind of full -blown

God -centered life together, which God calls and uses for his own purposes.

You see, when you get this, the Christian life becomes a lot more than simple, sustained moral effort to cultivate a list of private virtues and to avoid a list of private vices.

You begin to understand the church as the manifestation of the living

God in his world. And that we're called into that in the way that we live with and respond to one another.