September 15, 2009: How To Get On God’s Good Side

First let me tell you how to get on my good side.

You do that by being good to my wife. I have found that this works amazingly well. Ever since she and I got engaged I’ve had the repeated delight of learning about the people who have been kind to her over the years. I treasure these people like you would not believe. Lisa has often been tested with hard challenges and grievous sorrows, and everyone who stood by her, helped her and supported her will always know my lasting affection. I bet they’d be surprised to know the strength of my regard for them. I love them and can’t help loving them.

Of course it is a completely different story concerning those who have been mean to her, treated her shamefully, broken her heart, driven her to tears of anguish. Boy do I find it hard to be kindly disposed to such people. If you have been unkind to Lisa, you can’t be my friend. I’m not saying that it is right or wrong of me to feel this way – I’m just saying it is a fact about the way I am. All offenses against her are offenses against me. Halos hover around the heads of those who make her rejoice; clouds of foul stench arise from those who make her weep.

I think that these feelings of love and antipathy for the heroes and villains in her life are an echo (a distant, faint and corrupted echo – but an echo nonetheless) of our Lord’s feelings about the people who affect his bride, the Church. When Saul of Tarsus went after the Church, Jesus went after him. He knocked Saul off his donkey (assuming he was riding one), blinded him like a mole and demanded “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4). Where did the word “me” in that question come from? Thousands of preachers in thousands of sermons ever since have noted that, technically, Saul had not been persecuting Jesus (he didn’t even think Jesus was alive!), just his followers. But Jesus took it personally. He defended his beloved Church, saying, in effect, “You mistreat them, you mistreat me.”

It works the other way too. Let me put it in really crude terms: if you treat the Church well, you will get on Jesus’ good side. The Bible teaches that. In Matthew 10:42 Jesus says, “If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple [emphasis added], I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward." Jesus likes it when you refresh his followers. And in the famous Matthew 25 passage, where Jesus says “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” (verse 35), note that he clarifies when people did that for him: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine [emphasis added again], you did for me” (verse 40). Though some think that “these brothers of mine” refer to anybody at all, if you look up the word “brother” in passages like Matthew 12:48-49, John 21:23, Acts 11:1 and Hebrews 2:11, you will see why scholarly commentators tend to say that the “brothers of Jesus” are his followers, the Church.

Hurt a church and it won’t go well for you. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 teaches that when it says, “Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred, and you are that temple.” In this passage, the temple of God’s Spirit is not the individual human body (that’s in 1 Corinthians 6:19! Different text!), but rather the local church. Paul is saying, “Wreck a church and God’ll wreck you.”

Lend your help (through attendance, tithe, prayer, participation – all that) to a local body of believers, and Jesus will like you even more than I like the people who have been good to my wife. Or sabotage a church (whether through passive neglect or active hindrance), and you will find yourself whimpering in the doghouse of the Lord. But remember, while there, that even dogs can be redeemed (see Matthew 15:26-28), and that God, in his grace, can take a church-devouring wolf like Saul and make him the greatest Church Father the world has ever known.