June 30, 2009: What If You're Not Being Fed?

A couple days ago I explained to some young people that it is the duty of all Christian believers to attend church services regularly. To refuse to do so is to defy God, reject his commandment to assemble together, and deny him the worship that is his due.

I dared to set myself forth as an example. On Saturday August 8 – by God's grace - I will be wed to my beloved, and on Sunday, August 9, my bride and I will rise from the marriage bed and go to a church and worship the Lord in the company of his people. Why not? Why should the Lord's Day following our wedding be a day when God is less worthy of praise? Will we really be that tired?

One of the youths asked me, "But what if, at the church you're attending, you're not being fed?" That is an excellent question and I'm afraid I flubbed the answer, so I thought I'd take some time to think it over and craft a better response. Here's what I think:

It is definitely the duty of every minister to feed his congregation. Jesus said to Peter, "Feed my sheep," and pressed that obligation onto him by repeating it three times (John 21:15-17). Peter himself passed it along to the elders he trained: "Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care" (1 Peter 5:2). Shepherds must see to it that their sheep are fed with all that's good for them.

What's good for Christians is the Word of God. As a minister I have no other food to give. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). "I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word" (Psalm 119:16). "Like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation" (1 Peter 2:2 - NASB).

So I would urge Christians to flee churches where the Word of God is not on the menu very much. This would include churches on the far left and the far right that pursue political agendas more than the Word; it would include large swatches of the trendy middle that base sermon series off of hit TV shows and current movies; and it definitely would include an abomination like the church of Joel Osteen, who manages occasionally to drop a Bible verse into his message like it was a bay leaf in a tub of spaghetti sauce.

A long-standing frustration of mine is that widespread biblical ignorance on the part of evangelicals means that, whenever I point out that some favorite Christian phrase is not in Scripture (e.g. "God's unconditional love" or "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ"), and why I believe that such sloppy phrases lead to sloppy thinking and bad doctrine - you would think, by the look on the faces of my dear Christian brothers and sisters, that I had just stomped on their puppies. You have no idea how many times I've contemplated how much easier my job as a shepherd would be if the preachers my flock had been listening to had just preached the Word, fed them the same old boring Word, on its own terms, rather than invent evangelical catch-phrases and perform inspiring riffs on them.

But if your minister is faithfully preaching the Word of God Sunday by Sunday, verse by verse, then you are being fed. You may not like it, and it may not excite you, and you may not even realize that you are being nourished. But the Word faithfully proclaimed is what you need to chew on and swallow and digest. Jeremiah 15:16: "When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight."

Having said that, there are still two important points to make:

First, keep in mind that you don't go to church mainly to get fed. You go to worship God. Sunday morning worship is not about you getting your spiritual sustenance (we must get our eyes off ourselves!), but about God getting the glory, honor, praise and thanks that all creatures must render to him. You can do that, you can honor God, even when there are no morsels for your starving soul to feed on, and even if you leave the service hungrier than when you began. You go to church for God's sake, not yours.

Secondly, I believe the only Christian believers who have a right to complain about not being fed are new Christians, those who have only known Christ for a few months at most. The rest should not only be able to feed themselves, but should be doing what they can to feed others. The writer of Hebrews admonishes veteran believers on this point, saying "by this time you ought to be teachers" (Hebrews 5:12). A baby Christian might legitimately ask, "What if I'm not being fed?", but the better question for the older Christian is, "What if, at the church I'm going to, I'm not feeding anybody?"