Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Can the Church Survive COVID-19?

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Church is more than a building. It's a people. So is social distancing a church-ending threat? Or is COVID-19 offering the church fresh opportunities for mission? https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) discuss the most important threats facing the church today. Interested in more content like this? Go back and listen to Keith's episode https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/are-we-hypocrites-learning-to-follow-jesus-luke-12-1/ (Are We Hypocrites? ) Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. If you're a pastor or you work at a church or you care about church, there's a good chance that someone has already asked you, how is the church going to survive COVID-19? The reality is I'm getting a lot of questions. Keith's getting a lot of questions about how coronavirus is going to change the church. What's going to be the long-term effects of this worldwide pandemic? Why don't we call it COVID-19? Is it a coronavirus? Like, I called it coronavirus forever.

And then all of a sudden, it became cool to call it COVID-19. Do you have an explanation for that? Well, yeah, I feel like Corona makes me think of the beer, so it sounds less serious. COVID-19 is like, you know your stuff. Yeah, that's exactly right. COVID-19 sounds like you're smarter. You put a number in, and all of a sudden, everybody's impressed. Well, and COVID, I don't know.

but I like coronavirus. Anyway, so we have been asked lots of questions about it, and I think it's from people who come from places where they really love the church, and they're worried about the church. And they're just asking, hey, can the church survive this virus? And I think what they have in mind is that people are migrating more and more online for their whole life. It's as if this virus has pushed the accelerator of this migration online in every area of our life. and can the church survive if people like online church and don't ever want to come back to what people think of as the real church?

When you think about what we do as a church, virtually every dimension of it is non-virtual. We gather together bodily and we sing songs and we have children Sunday school where kids are together and they're learning about Jesus. We do things like small groups where people are gathering together again in person. and every church operates off of giving. And so people say, well, now all of a sudden you're not passing a plate. People aren't there to give. How do churches make it? How can churches survive?

And so we're going to talk a little bit about what are the actual threats to the church in the midst of COVID-19. But we also want to sidestep this a little bit and say that maybe in some ways COVID-19 is actually providing the church with some tremendous opportunities. I mean, what you just said a second ago is that we're pressing the accelerator having to go online. And I think it's true. I think there's a lot of barriers to entry for churches to getting their services online, to getting their content online, to being online in general. And those barriers to entry, I mean, churches are just having to leap over them all of a sudden. And I'm not sure that's a

totally bad thing. Now, let's just explore this barriers to entry thing and think about it maybe in grocery shopping. For quite a while, most grocery stores were providing some sort of service where they would do your shopping for you and you could pick it up or have it delivered to your house. But not a lot of people were doing it some, but I was doing it. You're what we call an early adoption. But I don't think as many people were doing it then as they are now. So what happened? Well, there was a certain set of barriers that kept people from it.

Would the person at the grocery store pick the produce you like or how big a hassle is it? And this pandemic caused people to push through all those barriers. And now lots of people are doing it. So when the crisis is over and people can confidently go back to the grocery store, Will they, or will they keep this service that the grocery stores provide? Will they keep using that because the barrier to entry has been crushed, and now they're comfortable with it in a way they weren't before? Okay, so that's interesting because there's actually two different,

what we're calling barriers to entry. On the one hand, there are the barriers to churches. It takes a lot, whether or not you realize it, for a church to be able to move their worship service online, to equip small group leaders to be able to have meetings online, to do online Bible studies, to give online. There's so many different things, and it's hard for a church to take the leap and start doing those things. That's one barrier. But you're saying there's another barrier, which is that for a lot of people, those are things they wouldn't be interested in

trying. I'll speak for myself. I had never used Zoom in my life before COVID-19, and now I feel like I'm kind of a moderate-level Zoom pro. I'm on it every day. I have to use it for Bible studies. And so on the one hand, me as someone who wants to do Bible studies, I had to learn how to do Bible studies on Zoom. But then all the people who want to be in Bible studies, they're also learning for the first time how to do Zoom Bible studies together. And I actually think it's kind of cool. I mean, how cool will it be if after COVID people who work in offices who couldn't possibly come to the church for a lunch Bible study? What if we could still do a 30-minute, 45-minute long Bible study over lunch? Well, that's a pretty neat opportunity, something that could last for a long time after

this. Right. The question is, will that last or won't it? Because when we offer our Friday lunch Bible studies, we're having hundreds and hundreds of people sign up for it. Now, we would have never had that idea before. And if we had offered it, say we had the idea and told people they could get into a launch Zoom Bible study, no one would have done it. They would have laughed at us. No, it's not hundreds and hundreds of people. Why? Well, there are barriers of entry. They just hadn't thought about it. But now that we've all done it, we kind of think, well, this is pretty cool. But will we think it's cool when people can come back and resume life as normal, whenever that is. And then think of the larger church. People are getting used to rolling out of bed

and watching the service on their phone or on their television. They're overcoming some of the difficulties in their head of doing that. So when things return to normal, will people come back to church? Will they continue to serve in church? Will they continue to support the church financially or with their prayers, all kinds of ways? I don't know. How will that play out? Of course, that's tough to tell. and my hope would be that, of course, people are going to come back, not the least because we're going to be desperate to see each other by the end of all of this. Beyond that, though, I think that one thing that's changing in the church is we're beginning to realize that online, the world of all digital things, is a missionary field. There is a world of people out there

who are living a lot of their lives on their phone, myself included, on their laptops, and the church has been somewhat slow to step into that mission field. Of course, There's large organizations that have been doing it for a long time. They have big blogs, big followings. But the local church hasn't been very quick to say, hey, people are going online before they ever even walk into our doors. I mean, just think about it for a second. If you're going to go buy a car, at least if I was going to go buy a car, and I was going

to go to the car dealership, I would never go to the car dealership until I had been on their website first. And I probably looked through all their cars. I knew probably exactly which car I wanted to look at. I knew what the price was. I knew the price that I wanted to get. I wouldn't walk in there until I'd done all of that. And if that's true of buying cars, it's definitely true of churches.

People aren't going to step into a church until they've already built some sort of relationship with it online. And so this is a huge barrier that I think churches have, in some cases, failed to overcome, and now we're being forced to overcome it. Yeah, so the front door of the church isn't a physical front door. It is a virtual front door. It's a Facebook page or some other social media feed. It's a website.

No one walks into the crossing, and that is their first door. experience with the church. They've almost for sure watched a service online or something before entering into it. So one of the questions that we're having to wrestle with is online attendance at all the events and worship services that you talked about before. Is that a threat to the church? Or is that something that we should embrace and include as part of the church? Is online almost like Christians giving up and accepting a lesser than? Or is it the new reality that churches need to embrace. And I'll just be honest. I'm not sure where I am right now. I think you're a little more confident than me. I don't know how confident I am in the sense of I will be honest. I don't think

I've personally worked out my theology of online church and how to think about what church online looks like. And I haven't thought about what it's going to be after this. I think it's going to be a new thing that we as followers of Jesus have to work out. And here's the deal. Whenever you deal with new problems, new horizons. There's always two kinds of people. The early adopters says, hey, this is all right. It's all good. Let's go for it. Accept it. It's all fine. Then you've got the traditionalists who say, well, it's not the way that I know before, and so it's wrong. And usually both approaches are misled. And so I hope the route that we can navigate here is something between those two that's faithful to the Bible. One analogy I've been thinking a lot about is I lead our 20s ministry.

and the vast majority of people in their 20s, if they are single, they are not meeting people by going to small group, although of course they meet people there. They're meeting people largely via apps. You mean meeting people to date? Yeah, meeting people to date. And sometimes just even meetings, real people, right? They make a relationship via Facebook. They're posting back and forth and oh, this is an interesting person and be fun to hang out with them. Or maybe I meet you once in a group and we continue to communicate via Facebook or via text message. And that's how our friendship develops before we actually really have another big face-to-face communication. So if that's the way the world is moving, then doesn't the church have to adapt and realize

there might be people who are part of the church who don't regularly show up here at the building? Or is that a compromise that we're uncomfortable making? I'm not sure. I wonder if people ever critiqued Paul for writing letters to churches he wasn't bodily present at. I mean, the letter is a kind of technology. You can take your thoughts, put it in one place, and distribute it somewhere else where you are not. And of course, Paul had to send that with representatives. But nonetheless, at least in Corinth, we know pretty much for a fact that people said this guy's bold in his letters, but when he

shows up in person, he's nothing. And so he's even having to deal with this question of what's it look like to be there in person, what's it like not to be there in person? And now we're wrestling with it in a whole new way. But my only point in saying this is that I think we have to be really careful about just totally discrediting online church as a reality. Well, it's good to see that you've progressed in your thoughts so much, Patrick. but I didn't think that's where you were yesterday. So I'll be somewhere different tomorrow. Let's be careful.

The church is a really important conversation for us as Christians to have because it is what Jesus has left. I mean, think about it. Jesus did not come to establish a social media account. He didn't come to establish even something as valuable as a hospital or an orphanage. He sure didn't leave us with a political party or a military. But what he did leave us with is a church. The church is what he promised that he would establish.

and the gates of hell would not overcome it. The church is what Ephesion 5 tells us is that which he loves. And Acts 20 tells us that he died for the church. So the church is incredibly important. What constitutes the church? How should a church behave or act? What should our expectations of a church? It's all crucial to us as Christians because this is where Jesus has invested himself.

I remember one guy saying that he was big on the church because the local church was the hope of the world. This is the vehicle, the group, the means that Jesus is using to repair, fix, heal the broken world. And maybe that helps push back a little bit, even on what I was saying a second ago, which is the church has always been a group of people. In other words, if your whole church experience, if your whole walk with Jesus and other people who are walking with Jesus exist entirely and only online, something is missing. And I say that because Jesus calls us his body in the world. and a body has multiple parts. Me by myself, if I'm just a hand by myself, I'm pretty useless.

I've got to be attached to an arm that's got eyes that can see and move things around. And so we have to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Paul says that we've been given many gifts for the common good so that we can continue God's mission to bless the nations by announcing Jesus' kingship to the world and both word and deed. We're supposed to be the first fruits of a new creation that's coming to life right here in this old, corrupt, full of sin and death creation. And for all the those reasons, I will say I have a hard time thinking that someone's entire Christian life can really function well entirely online. We need others around us to pursue this mission that we've

been called to. So you can tell that Patrick and I, in our own thoughts, and then just as we discuss this with each other, are still trying to figure it out. And I think that's where a lot of Christian leaders are. Like Patrick said, you have your extremes, those who think it's all good or those who think it's all bad. But most of us live in between and are trying to figure out how to move forward in a world that is rapidly changing. And I think there's actually one other question that people are asking here too, which is if everything's going online right now, why is it that local churches like the crossing, why don't we kind of just shut down temporarily and let the big churches that already have

all of their online stuff going and functioning? Why don't we just point people in that direction? Why don't we just tell everybody, hey, go to the village church. Hey, go to Watermark. Hey, go to North Point. We'll be back with you in three months once COVID is over. Seems like a legitimate question because those churches have so many resources, the ones you mentioned at least, and are able to do a really quality service online. So maybe we're better off just taking their resources. And I'm sure you have some thoughts. I'll throw out a couple to get started. And one is that your local church, they are the people that know you. They're the people who know your context, who know your life, who know the place you live, who know the struggles that you have. These are people you have relationship and community with. And so the Bible isn't just some esoteric book out there that can be taught the same in every context. Where your teaching is coming from matters because it can be tailored toward the needs of a particular community. And again, I think the quintessential example here is the Apostle Paul. I mean, it's worth pointing out that him writing these letters, it was an

incredibly costly affair. Paper was very expensive in that day and age. And copying letters was also incredibly expensive. And yet Paul says it's worth it to have the cost of writing these letters and sending them out to lots of different people, it's worth it to have the cost to communicate the gospel. And not just to communicate the gospel, but to communicate the gospel appropriately in different contexts. If you read his letter, the letter to Galatian sounds really different than his letter to Romans. It's not like Paul had one big letter that he just sent every said, hey, I'm the village church and I'm going to speak to everybody in the nation. That's not what Paul did. Paul spoke to individual churches in their own individual ways. And I actually think it's a church's

responsibility, given the context right now, that they have a full-bodied online ministry because their people are online. That's the way to reach them. When I hear about churches just neglecting people online, I think that's a failure of the church. It's not a great success. You haven't become less spiritual because you're online. You've really neglected people who need to hear from you. Maybe another reason you're a local church, even if it is temporarily, exclusively online, is important, is because there's some sense of community of knowing each other's lives. Here in Columbia, where we are, a town of about 120,000 people, it's kind of a big small town, and people know our pastors.

We know each other in our community. We can look and see the lives that people lead. And Hebrews 13 tells us to imitate the lives of the people around us, the mature Christians around us. And you can't do that if your leaders are all somewhere else at a different part of the country. And when Hebrews 13 tells us to obey our leaders, it doesn't mean the leader out in some distant city, big city, with a lot of resources. It means the leaders in your local church who know you and know your context and know your family and know what your struggle is and you know them and there's

trust that's built on that local level that can never be built on a national level. And part of it is what we've already said. We need to be missional churches. Part of being a missional church in the 21st century in America is realizing that ministry has to happen online. Why? Because the people who we are trying to reach, they are already online. Again, you don't get extra spiritual points for ignoring online ministry. No, people are there. We need to care for them. And so my hope, again, is actually that somehow through COVID, God's going to use this in the church to help a lot of churches, not just our own, build a big, robust, digital front doors so that after COVID, they've already begun to reach people online. They figured out how to do ministry online, and as a result, they're going to be able to draw more people into the church.

You started our conversation by saying that people think that COVID, or as I prefer, coronavirus, is a threat to the church. What's really interesting is that in seeing this as a threat, we've missed the real threats to the church. No one calls me up or sends me a text and says, hey, do you think gossip or divisions or factionalism or wrong expectations, are going to really destroy the crossing or destroy the church or hinder the church. And yet, when you look at your Bible, it's those sins that are the real threat to the church, not a pandemic. It wasn't persecution that threatened the health and existence of the church Christ established. It was the sins of the flesh, the sins of gossip, pride, factionalism that were a real threat to local churches.

I think if the Apostle Paul were here, and thankfully we have his last, letters, if you wanted to know, what are the things that gets his pulse up? What are the things that got him frustrated? Again and again, it seems to be division. It seems to be factionalism. It seems to be broken expectations which are dividing and breaking apart the church. And my guess is that might surprise people. You might think, oh, Paul was most angry about sexual sins, or Paul was most angry about greed. Or Paul was most, you filmed like, no, no, no, no, no. If you read his letters carefully, when he uses the harshest language, it is almost always because someone is causing division. inside of the church. Look, I'm very sympathetic to people who have a hard time with the local church

and have a hard time loving the local church. I became a Christian when I was in college. I got involved in a campus ministry, and I thought that we were kind of the top of the Christian heap, and I looked down on local churches. I attended a local church, and then I would drive away and critique it. Critique the music, critique what people were wearing, critique every single thing about it. and I became what you might think of as a consumer. I thought the church existed for me, and I became someone who was hypercritical of other Christians, and they weren't doing it the right way, they were stuck in a wrong decade, they put too much money here, they didn't put enough emphasis on this or that, and that kind of criticalness of the church became just normal for me

and my friends and the people we hung out with. And it took kind of an embarrassingly long time for me to realize that Jesus loves his church, that Jesus cares deeply about his church. He calls the church his bride. And so it finally clicked that whenever I was criticizing the church, I was criticizing the bride of Christ. I was criticizing the people that Jesus died for. I was criticizing the one thing, like we said, that Jesus established and left here on earth. And it was pretty hard for me to come to grips with the fact that I had been in some really serious sin and hadn't even quite realized it. It's interesting hearing you say that because I became a Christian in college too. And my crowd wasn't so much to go to church and then make fun of it crowd. My crowd was the who needs a church

crowd. We thought you can go in your woods, be alone with your Bible, and you're having a great church by yourself or maybe get out on the lake, on your little boat. then have a little church service with your three friends because we're three or gathered. Jesus is there. That's kind of our approach to church. But part of what that came from, and what I'm hearing you say, was that we had wrong expectations. We were expecting the church to be something that the church wasn't. In my case, it was really easy to judge the church for hypocrisy. I'd look and say, well, look at these people. They're all just as sinful as the people that they're critiquing. They're all greedy. They're all doing the same things behind closed doors.

They're telling other people not to do. But us, we're the serious, people. We're the pure people. We're going to take this seriously. We don't have to be a part of that organization. Patrick, I think you put your finger on one of the criticisms that people have of churches, and that is that they are full of hypocrites. But I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what hypocrisy means. Enliven us. What? I said enlighten us. Well, I've been asking people, what do you think it means to be a hypocrite? And people say, well, you live inconsistently with what you teach. Well, no, that is not what hypocrisy means. Hypocracy means to be pretending to be something you're not. All of us have an inconsistency between what we say, we believe, and how we actually live.

And while we wish that weren't true, that's not hypocrisy. Hypocracy is pretending. That's the key word pretending to be something you're not. So hypocrisy might be pretending that you're generous while you're a order. Hypocrisy might mean putting up an image of being a good friend while you're really attacking them behind their back. The word hypocrite comes from the theater in Greece, and the actors didn't have all the costumes. There weren't as many actors as we think of today in a production. So they would have a little stick with a face on it, and that face represented the character they played. And so the word hypocrisy in the New Testament kind of comes to mean play acting, pretending to be something that you're not. And that kind of hypocrisy, Jesus is very much against. So we need to

be against it. We need to fight against it in our life. We need to fight against it in our churches, but we have to understand what it is. All churches are not filled with hypocrites. All churches are filled with people who don't live out exactly what they believe, but yeah, that's all of us. Hypocrats, again, are people who pretend to be something they're not. Okay, so if I'm tracking with you here. If I walk around and with my friends, I pretend that I'm Mr. Patient. I'm the most patient guy. I know. I have no issues with impatience. I never get frustrated and angry. But behind closed doors, I'm yelling at my kids. I'm frustrated with my wife all the time. That would be hypocrisy. But if I went to my friends, I said, hey, the Bible calls us to patience. And personally, I really

struggle with patience. I get angry. I get frustrated pretty frequently. That's not hypocrisy. That's just being an honest person who's trying to live up to the Bible's expectations of how we should walk with and walk with others. You might even say there are days where I really am patient, and there are days where I'm not. I really want to be patient. I'm trying to grow impatience, but I'm not there yet. So one of the problems with our expectations for the church is what we're talking about, hypocrisy. Another little bit of it is that we expect the church to be perfect. We're all looking for the pure church. I can't tell you how many times I have conversations with people who will ask me, essentially, where do the serious Christians go? Like when they come to your church, where do the

serious ones who really want to walk it out, live it out, be faithful, where do they go? And as I talk to people, it'll become evident that what they're really looking for is a group of people who maybe don't have any serious sins in their life, which I think is funny because if that group of people exist, keep them away from me. The minute I show up, I'm going to wreck it. I'm going to ruin it. And so, well, you too. And a part of this, too, is people say, well, I want to be back in the first church. I want to go back to the days when they did things right. And again, it makes me want to laugh. I'm like, you must not read your New Testament very well. I mean, just think about the church in Corinth. We have people in Corinth. They're getting drunk on communion wine. The rich people are

expecting the poor people to serve them. There's a guy who's sleeping with his stepmom, church members who are suing each other. There's people getting divorces unnecessarily. There are women who are prophesying so ecstatically that their clothing is falling off of them. The worship service, if you went there, it doesn't sound like a service. It sounds like a zoo. It just keeps going on and on and on with issues. So if you want to go back to the first church, be my guess, but it sounds a little bit raucous. And it's not just Corrine. In Philippi, Eodyos, inectady two leaders are arguing and fighting with each other. In Galatia, they have false teaching.

In Rome, the Jews and Gentiles can't get along. So the list goes on and on that most of the letters in the New Testament are written to address problems in the first church. Back in Act 6, there were people who were upset because their racial group was not being fairly represented in church leadership. It just literally goes on and on. And this debate, people who are looking for a pure church and demanding a pure church, it's as old as the churches. We can go back to the first few centuries of church history, and we'll find a group called the Donatist. And essentially what this group said was, if your pastor isn't perfect, if he's not morally living out a perfect life, he's not trustworthy. He's not just trustworthy.

His sacraments don't count. His church doesn't count as a real church. And if the people in that church are messy too, that's not a real church either. And this actually became a heresy because it became apparent, one, that this was actually impossible to achieve. But two, that messiness, while it's not what God wants for us, he doesn't want people to have messy lives. It is part of God's plan for us. He's going to work through the messiness. And so it's really a heresy to walk into the church and say, hey, everybody here should be perfect because what you're doing is you're limiting the Holy Spirit's work in people's lives.

I've always thought when it comes to this issue that churches are caught in this catch-22. because if you go out and try to reach people who don't know Jesus and you invite them into your church, their lives, like our lives, by the way, are going to be messy. They're going to be people who are selfish or angry or lustful or whatever the sins are that they struggle with. Then, so you bring them into the church and they bring their sins with them because we all know that spiritual growth takes longer than we would like. It takes a while to grow out of selfishness and impurity and impurity. all the sins that we struggle with. It takes quite a while to grow into humility and love and patience and kindness and the other fruit of the spirit. But all the meanwhile, people are looking at people

who go to your church, people on the outside are, and going, well, you have people in your church who are sinners. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's who the church is for. The church is a refuge for sinners, of which I am the chief sinner. So if you aren't out reaching people who are sinners, as people go, well, look, your church isn't really going out and meeting people like Jesus did. But then when you go out and do that and those sinners come into the church, then people go, well, your church is full of sinners. And I just saw it my hands and I'm like, it looks like there's no way to win. Either you aren't reaching the people you're supposed to or you're not pure as you're supposed to.

But guess what? There's no way to do church in a way that reaches out to sinners. By the way, that's all of us, and be a pure church. It's just foolishness. and yet we have these expectations that are impossibly live up to. So we always get to criticize the church. The church can never win. One last thought on expectations, and then we'll talk just briefly about division in the church.

This is more of a modern era problem. If you are living in America in the 21st century, whether or not you realize that you have been profoundly influenced by a philosophy called Marxism. And Marxism says that essentially everything in the world is about power. Everybody wants power, and anyone who's doing anything is probably doing it for the sake of power. And part of the Marxist ideals that power is bad. Power needs to be taken away from the powerful given to the many so that it cannot be misused. And one of the interesting things that comes from that worldview when people come into the church

is that that's what they expect to see in the church. They say, look, if there is any leadership, any power, that's wrong. I don't want to have people with power. Those people need to be taken down and removed. But here's what's interesting. The Bible is not anti-power. It's really not anti-power, nor does the Bible believe that everything is about power. It doesn't look at leaders and say, well, if you're a leader, you must want power. Here's what the Bible says. The Bible says that power is a gift from God, which is given to people for the sake of helping and loving and caring for others. Jesus is the quintessential example of this. He has all the power in heaven and earth, and he comes down to earth, and he uses that power to bless and love and serve others. If you want to know what kind of power you should be looking for in the church, don't look for a powerless church. Look for a church that takes their power and uses it to bless others, to serve others, to put other people first. So people are asking, is COVID-19 a threat to the church? Well, if we were going to start listing threats to the church, I don't think

COVID-19 would make the top 10, the top 100, maybe. I think if you look at the New Testament, like we've been discussing, wrong expectations, are a much more significant threat to the church. or I think also high on the New Testament's list would be division, factionalism, gossip, those kinds of things. When you read through your New Testament and you see those list of sins, one of the things I've always been surprised by is that on those lists of some of the most serious sins are factionalism, gossip, quarreling, divisions, that they're the sins right there are next to sexual morality or hating your brother or anger

jealousy, that these sins that cause so much relational disruption inside a church are really serious to God. I think they're more serious to God than they are to us. Let's just take gossip, for example. Here's a fun question. How many of the Ten Commandments does gossip break? Well, let's start here. One of the commandments is not to steal. When you gossip about someone and they aren't there to defend themselves, you have stolen their reputation.

Or how about the commandment against murdering? Well, Jesus says that if you speak slanderously about a brother or something, sister, you've already murdered them inside of your heart. Or maybe we think about the commandment against false witnesses. You're not supposed to lie. Well, again, gossip is almost always based on negative assumptions. It's based on half truths or at least half information. You've borne false witness. I could keep going and probably get through at least six of ten commandments that get broken by gossip. And I think that's why gossip ends up really high on these lists of sins that we need to be really careful not to commit. Well, like I said earlier in the book of Philippians,

Paul is addressing two leaders in the church, two women, Yodia and Senectody, and he's encouraging them to reconcile with one another. And their conflict was serious enough that we know that there needed to be a third party brought in, because Paul talks about that at the beginning of Philippians 4, that he's looking for someone else to step in and try to heal this relationship. And I think that kind of conflict resolution is important in all churches, that we need to be able to talk with one another, listen to one another, respect one another, think through what hills are worth dying on, what's a matter of preference, what is sin and what's just not doing it the way I want to do it? Do I really know the whole story behind this? Do I trust the people in my church who are making

these decisions? I think conflict resolution causes us to wrestle with things like loving people who see things differently than I do, being patient with people's sins, being humble enough to know that I don't have all the answers or know all the information. I think that the conflict resolution isn't something that pulls us away from Christ, or I think conflict resolution is something that makes us more like Jesus. Jesus takes this thing called conflict within the church and uses it to grow us closer to him. Yeah, you're going to feel really holy if you don't have many friends. If you sit in your house all day, you're going to think, wow, I am the nicest, kindest, most generous person I have ever met. But the minute you smack people in a group full of others, everybody's going to start

doing sinful things. And that means that we have to do conflict resolution. And both people have to come not saying, hey, it's someone else's job. I mean, Keith and I both have to do marital counseling. And one of the things that you know, when you sit down with a couple and one of the people in that group says to the other one, you're the problem. Hey, pastor, I need you to fix this person. I know that we're not going to get anywhere. Nothing's going to happen. Well, are you due Merrill counseling with just one of the spouses and they talk about the other spouse? And you think, well, the person with the problem is not even in the room. Evidently, the person who needs help isn't even here. But of course, that's not true. Of course, you've got to help the person who's coming to talk to you see that

they're part of the problem, at least part of it. And if you're listening and all you get, is their side of the story, that other person starts to sound like a demon. The more they talk, the more you think, oh my gosh, you have married Satan incarnate. I cannot believe it. How did you make such a terrible life choice? It turns out no one comes in and does Merrill counseling and says, hey, pastor, I'm the problem here. It turns out that it's like my kids. The other person is always the problem. Yeah, Proverbs 1817 says the one who states his case first seems right until the other comes and examines him. And that's the case in almost all conflicts. When you get both people in the room, And what becomes evident is that they're sin on both sides.

And of course, maybe one person's more sinful than the other, but that's usually not the job of conflict resolution to dole out. You get 60%, you get 40%. The goal is to restore relationship. Why does God care so much about people not being gossips, people not causing division, people not being judgmental about preferences of others, people actually working through conflict resolution? Why does this matter?

Well, it matters because our communal life together is a reflection to the world of who Jesus is. In the ancient world, they believe that a true king, a good king, was able to bring harmony and peace among his people. So if people come into our churches and they see people who are divided and they're frustrated and they're gossipy, what are they seeing? Well, they're not seeing the true king. They're seeing something entirely different. We are going to reflect Jesus far more faithfully to the world if we work through our conflicts, we resolve them, we fight against gossip, we fight against judgmentalism, and we have harmony in our communities. Well, I love that image because it reminds us of how closely connected Jesus and the church really are, that the church is Jesus's

body. For Paul to persecute the church was to persecute Jesus. To criticize the church is to criticize Jesus. To divide the church is to divide the body of Jesus. And remember how far Jesus went to reconcile humanity to God, to make a right relationship, to do the conflict resolution between our Heavenly Father and all of us. He went so far as to lay down his life. That's how seriously he takes us. And he wants us in our community, by being people who are humble and generous when we disagree,

he wants us to be a reflection to the world of that exact same love. And we're not saying churches don't blow it. Of course they do. Because we're full of sinners, remember? But if every time that I blew it, my wife threatened to leave, well, we would have been divorced a long time ago of being married 30 years now because we learn to be patient with one another. We learn to love one another in the messiness of life. We learn to forgive. And we learn that there are certain things

that the other person is never really going to change. And they're probably not that big of a deal, that we've got our own issues, that we don't come into this marriage or this church person relationship perfectly. We have our own baggage. And we just kind of learn to love each other in the middle of it. And I think that that process is part of God's plan for our lives. Our calling and vocation, what we're trying to get out here, is to be peace bringers to show, again, humility and generosity towards others. If you want to go out and gossip and cause factionalism to judge others, to create division, to leave conflict unresolved, Satan's hiring. He's got a job for you. Wow, you went nuclear there, didn't you? I did. But in all seriousness,

I cannot express how unworthy I am about COVID-19 overthrowing the church. It's not going to happen. I have 0.000-0% chance of that ever happening. Do you know what I think will threaten the church? It's the things we're talking about right now. Jesus warns us about wolves coming in sheep's clothing. That wolves come from both outside and inside the church, he tells the elders of Ephesus in Acts chapter 20. And he tells us that we have to be on guard and alert because they come looking one way,

but in reality they are something different. They seek to attack, destroy, divide, slander. And I'm not even sure that every wolf and sheep clothing quite knows they're a wolf. And I also think that at different times we can act like a wolf. In other words, in our worst moments, we can do things. that are similar to what a wolf does, like we've said, slandering, gossip, attacking, accusing, those kinds of things. So I think we all need to heed this warning.

Is there ever a time in which I'm playing into Satan's plan? Satan is called the accuser of the brethren. When I accuse other people, am I joining his team? I don't know. I mean, these are questions that I wrestle with, and I think probably questions that every Christian should wrestle with. We just got to remember, Jesus loves his church. Jesus is working through this imperfect, messy, sinful church.

It always has, and I think we'll always will. So what's our attitude toward the church? How are we talking about the bride of Christ? Closing thought here. If you have ever gotten into a fight with a spouse or a friend, you know that if you give some space afterwards, one of two things is going to happen. Thing number one, you replay the argument and you win the argument 10 times, and you become more frustrated and more angry at the other person.

Thing number two, you reflect upon yourself, you cool down, and you realize I didn't have this down as perfectly as I thought I did. I made some mistakes here that I probably need to own up to. Right now, a lot of us are getting a kind of break from the church, a break from small groups, a break from gathering together, a break from serving, and we can allow that break to entrench us in some bitterness, gossip, frustration, conflicts that are old. or we can use it and turn the mirror on ourselves and reflect. What are the things that I need to resolve right now?

Where are the areas that I need to own some of my shortcomings? And the reason why I want to do that is because Jesus loves the church. And I want to be on team Jesus loving the church too. Because Jesus wants to work through the church and he wants a church to reflect him to the world. And that's what I want to do too. And so when I deal with these problems in my heart and my life, I am helping my church body to be a more faithful reflection of Jesus' love. Jesus could have made a perfect church.

He could have made a pure church. He could have made it so that when we become Christians, we no longer sinned, or when we got involved in church that somehow we got healed of all of our sin. But that's not what he did. Jesus said he's going to work through this broken, messy, sinful thing. And I guess he does that so that he is glorified, so that he gets the credit. It's his power, his love, his wisdom, directing these foolish people, sinful people, to a greater glory. And that is found only in him.

It's not the church I would have established, but then I'm not Jesus. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.