Inside Today's Church

2 of 6 Pages

Feeding the Wrong Thing

When the Church Feeds What Needs to Die

As a parent, it is difficult to watch your children suffer. As loving people, it can be just as difficult to watch others struggle—especially when we have experienced that pain ourselves or know we would never want to experience it again.

Sometimes, in our desire to love and protect others, we can confuse love with enabling. We want to remove their pain, protect them from consequences, and spare them from the hardships we know can hurt. But in doing so, we may actually prevent them from experiencing something they need.

Because sometimes people have to suffer. Sometimes they have to be hurt. Sometimes they have to experience the consequences of their choices and walk through difficult seasons in order to discover healing, develop strength, and grow.

Love does not always mean removing someone's pain. Sometimes love means walking beside them through it, trusting that God can use even their suffering to bring about healing and growth.

I feel the Church can fall into the same trap with people. Sometimes we struggle to watch people hurt, struggle, or remain lost, and our instinct is to rush in and save them. We want to remove their pain, solve their problems, and make everything better as quickly as possible.

I have often thought that if today’s Church had been present during the Exodus, we might have rushed in to rescue the Israelites ourselves—trying to relieve their suffering and, in doing so, possibly interfering with the very work God was doing through their suffering.

The Church can become so focused on making people feel comfortable, welcomed, warm, accepted, and entertained that we forget something important: following Christ is not always comfortable. I know some churches do these things because they want to keep the seats filled, but I believe others genuinely do it out of love. They believe that making people feel comfortable and accepted is how they demonstrate the love of Jesus and help people experience His love.

But the love of Christ is not merely a feel-good experience. The love of Christ comes with truth. And sometimes that truth is a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes it cuts deeply, exposing the very places where sin has taken root in our lives.

Christ does not simply comfort the wound; He exposes what is causing it so that it can be healed.

It is much like a root canal. The dentist has to reach deep into the tooth, directly into the infected nerve, before the infection can be removed. It is painful because the problem is deep. But the pain is not the purpose—the healing is.

Sometimes the truth of Christ hurts because it reaches places in us that need to be changed. And if we are unwilling to endure the pain of conviction, we may never experience the freedom that comes from healing.

Whatever state a person comes into the church in, there are going to be two sides at work within them: the flesh and the Spirit.

The flesh is the part that comes with expectations. It wants to be served, cared for, accommodated, and coddled. It can become demanding and disgruntled when it does not get what it wants. And often, without even realizing it, it can become subtly disruptive to the very things God is trying to accomplish.

The Spirit comes with an entirely different posture.

The Spirit desires to serve God, to learn, to grow, and to share with the world the treasure that has been found in Christ. It does not come demanding to have its needs met, seeking its own interests, or expecting to be catered to. It comes with humility because it no longer lives for self.

It lives for God, under God, and is about God—because it loves God.

The flesh asks, “What can the church do for me?”

The Spirit asks, “What can God do through me?”

The flesh wants to be served.

The Spirit wants to serve.

The flesh wants to be comfortable.

The Spirit wants to grow.

The flesh seeks its own interests.

The Spirit seeks the things of God.

And perhaps this is one of the clearest signs of spiritual maturity: the longer we walk with Christ, the less we should be concerned with what we can receive and the more concerned we should become with what we can give.

The Church’s good intentions to be loving, welcoming, and warm can sometimes have an unintended consequence: they can actually feed the flesh instead of strengthening the Spirit. In our desire to make people feel loved and accepted, we can create an environment that continually caters to their comfort rather than challenging them to grow.

Instead of producing mature Christians, we can unintentionally keep Christians spiritually immature. We give them what they want rather than what they need. We comfort them when they need correction, accommodate them when they need challenge, and continually meet their expectations instead of calling them to surrender those expectations to Christ.

And there is a sad reality that can come from this:

When people don't grow in the Church, they don't necessarily leave the Church—they simply grow old in the Church.

They attend year after year. They hear sermon after sermon. They participate in program after program. But spiritually, they remain where they started.

There is a profound difference between growing old in the Church and growing up in Christ.

And if a person can spend decades in the Church without becoming more like Christ, something has gone terribly wrong.

The Christian struggle is real, because there is still a part of us that wants the flesh to be fed. We want to be catered to, to feel important, to be acknowledged, entertained, comforted, and helped out of our problems. I want those things too. But I also know that it is not good for me to keep feeding that part of myself. Because if you feed the flesh even a morsel, it will want another—and another—until what started as a morsel becomes a monster capable of overtaking us.

It is the Spirit that needs to be fed.

The Spirit needs truth. It needs love. It needs to be continually pointed toward Christ rather than toward man's remedies. The flesh needs to be rebuked, exhorted, corrected, and awakened so that the Spirit can be strengthened and empowered. The flesh must be put to death so that the Spirit can live. (Galatians 5:16–17, 24–25; Romans 8:13)

When I go to church, I want my spirit to be fed. And sometimes that food hurts. Sometimes it is painful. Sometimes it convicts me. Sometimes it even angers me because it exposes something in me that I don't want to see. But that is often exactly what I need.

We cannot afford to play games with the things of God. Time is short. The Church needs to stop watering down God's remedy to make it easier to swallow. We need to give people the truth of God's Word without diluting it with human remedies and worldly ingredients.

Feed the people God's food.

Give them truth. Give them Christ. Give them the whole counsel of God. (2 Timothy 3:16–17; Acts 20:27)

And then have the faith to step back and let God do what only God can do.

Because we are not the remedy. Christ is. (Acts 4:12; John 14:6)

The Church does not need to make God's truth more palatable. It needs to have the courage to serve it faithfully, trust God with the results, and allow His Spirit to do His work.