Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why Church Matters | New Testament | Luke 6

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Church is messy. Sometimes it feels like church would be easier without all the people. But that's not how God designed it. Keith reads Luke 6 to understand the purpose of the church and why you should love it. 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. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Luke 6

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I've never really liked church. I didn't like church before I was a Christian. I didn't like church after I became a Christian in college. I didn't like church after being on staff with a campus ministry for five years. I didn't even like church when I was in seminary.

In fact, I told my wife that the only thing I didn't want to do when we graduated from school was to work in a church. Well, guess what? I've been a pastor for 22 years in the same church. Over time, my perspective changed. Yes, the church has flaws, some very serious flaws. And churches and Christians have done horrible things in the past and present, things that we should confess and lament. And yet, I learned to respect the church, to admire the church, even to love Jesus's church. One reason I love the church is because it's the only thing that Jesus promised to build. In Matthew 16, he said this, I will build my church. Think about all the empires that have come and gone.

The Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire. Think about all the companies that have gone out of business. Who's been to a blockbuster lately? And yet the church is still here because of who is behind it? Jesus. But it's not just here in America. It's all over the world. The church is growing in Shanghai and Moscow and Mexico City

in Nairobi, the local church is the hope of the world because we point people to Jesus, because we have the message of the gospel that turns hate to love, that can turn the selfish into those who sacrifice for others, who can turn the greedy into those who are generous with their resources. Another reason I love the church is because Jesus does. In the book of Acts, it says that Jesus bought the church with his own blood. There's an old joke among pastors that says church is great except for all the people. Sometimes we get confused and we think that the building is the church. But you have to understand that when Jesus says he loved and died for the church, he doesn't mean a building. He died for the people who make up the church. Jesus's body.

Those who trust in him are the church. Jesus loves them. He died for them. Even the odd ones, even the hypocritical ones, even the ones who voted for the other candidate. Third, I love the church because the church is Jesus. Before he met Jesus, the Apostle Paul was out trying to kill Christians. When Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus and said, Why do you persecute me? I'm sure Paul thought, what are you talking about? I'm not persecuting you, Jesus.

I'm persecuting all these people who follow you. And Jesus says, no, that's me. That's my body. Jesus identifies himself with the church. I love the church because the church is the bride of Christ. That's what it says in Revelation 21. The church is a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. So when I was mocking and criticizing and talking down about the church,

what I was really doing is mocking, criticizing, and talking down about Jesus's bride. I'm sure he wasn't pleased. Did you know that Jesus attended worship services? Yeah, that's another reason I love the church because Jesus was committed to it. In Luke chapter 4, it says he went to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. Jesus's custom was to meet with the people of God on a regular, consistent basis. So if the church is something that Jesus loves, shouldn't I love it also?

If the church is central to God's plan for the world, shouldn't it be central to my life? Luke chapter 6 shows us something really significant about Jesus building his church and it comes in an unlikely place. Let's pick it up in verse 12. One of those days, Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray and spend the night praying to God. Oh, yeah, let's just stop there for a second. When Jesus gets away to pray, that means he gets alone so that he can focus. He kind of unplugs himself.

He gets away from the crowds and focuses his heart on God. Now, if Jesus needed that, do you think you and I do? Verse 13, when morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose 12 of them, whom he also designated apostles. Why didn't Jesus choose 8 or 10 or 15? Well, it would have been obvious to every Israelite. There are 12 apostles because that is connected to the 12 tribes of Israel. What Jesus is doing when he calls these disciples is he is reconstituted.

his people. And then it just gives a list of names, Simon, whom he named Peter, his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew Thomas, James, son of Alpheus, Simon, who was called the zealot, Judas, son of James, and Judas Ascariot, he became a traitor. Some of these people we hear a lot about in the Gospels, but some we never hear about again in the entire New Testament. That's true of Bartholomew, James the son of Ophias, Thaddeus, and Simon the zealot. These unknown apostles are a good reminder to us, that there are a lot of people who do a lot of work in God's kingdom, who are unnoticed, unnoticed by us, not unnoticed by God. God knows exactly what they're doing.

And none of these disciples that Jesus called came from the upper echelon of society. They were just common people. and yet they turned the world upside down. After Judas betrayed Jesus, you would think that they might have erased his name, scratched it out, not told us about the traitor. But they don't do that. There's a lot we can learn from the fact that Judas was a part of the original 12.

One thing is that this is not an untarnished utopian society. Right? I mean, Judas reminds us that this group is very messy. the church as designed by Jesus is messy. That's not an accident. The messiness was planned by Jesus. And this group of 12 is a weird mix. Peter is loud and intense, while John is gentle and contemplative.

And yet they become inseparable brothers through their shared faith in Christ. But it's more than just different personalities. Simon the zealot was devoted to a political party, that's the zealots, who were set on overthrowing the Roman government. government and maybe even willing to use violence to do it. And then there's Matthew who worked for the Roman government. He was a Jew who worked for the Romans and therefore he was considered a traitor by many other Jews. At one point in his life, Simon the zealot probably would have gladly killed Matthew.

But in the end, they became brothers in Christ, working side by side, worshiping the same Lord. So Jesus intentionally chose Simon, who's an anti-government zealot and Matthew, a government-employed tax collector. And what he says to them is, look, guys, I am going to take you two who are natural enemies, and I'm going to transform you into friends. There's a lot we can learn from that. The church is not made up of people who would naturally get along in this world. What binds us together to other people in Jesus' church is not that we have, you know, the same race or the same income or the same politics or the same nationality or the same kind of jobs or root for the same sports teams. No, you know what binds us together is Jesus. What binds us together is that we all need a savior.

What binds us together is that we have given our faith, our allegiance to King Jesus. So Christians come together not because they have common interests, not because they agree on everything. They come together because they agree on the most important thing and that they are sinners who have rescued by Jesus and they want to follow him with their whole life. The church is a band of natural enemies who love each other for Jesus' sake. This is such an important message in our society right now, isn't it? I mean, our society has grown more and more polarized. Where else other than the church do poor and wealthy, sick and healthy, the beautiful and the common looking, the Republicans and the Democrats and independents, old people and young people, married people and single people, black people and white people and Asian people, and Latino people, not just coexist, but thrive. Nowhere, the church is the only place that you can find that in today's world.

Now maybe you look at all that diversity and think, wow, what a beautiful picture. But you know what? It really makes church life complicated and messy. Because church requires us to love people different than ourselves. Going to a diverse church means that I have to extend grace to people different than me. Going to a diverse church means I have to listen and learn from people who parent differently, who make different choices about where their kids go to school, private or public or homeschool. or some other alternative.

It means that I have to be patient with music that I don't prefer because I know that someone else really likes that and really connects with God through it. It means that I have to serve week after week when other people don't or can't right now in this season of life. See, going to a church with people different than me is part of the process that God uses to grow all of us to be more like Jesus. It's inside a diverse church. It's inside of the conflict that comes out of a diverse church where we learn to forgive and be patient and love the unlovely and sacrifice on behalf of others, even when they don't appreciate it.

It's weird because we think the church should be reaching all kinds of people and we think the church should be diverse, but then we complain when the all kinds of people and the diverse church don't like the same things we do. Don't believe the same things we do. we want diverse people who think like us and like the same things we do. I mean, I guess God could have put all of us in churches where everyone likes the same things that we do, are passionate about the same things that we do, who share the exact same beliefs that we have, who like the same kind of preaching and the same kind of music. But he didn't. So being a Christian means moving toward people in love that we are tempted to avoid.

It means loving others, not just when they're at their best, but even at their worst. It means loving people who have different politics. I mean, think of Matthew and Simon the zealot. Their politics divided them. Politics easily divide the church. I mean, it divides the whole society, right? I mean, people just flock to the news outlets that they want to hear. We all become partisan and unwilling to examine our own position.

Instead, we just try to point out the flaws in the, other party, and then we bring all that inside the church. And we expect everybody that we worship with to vote like us. If our politics lead us to believe that people made in the image of God, but who vote differently than we do, if our politics convince us that those people are the enemy, then we have put our emphasis on the wrong thing. We've put our emphasis in the wrong place. Matthew the tax collector and Simon the zealot, they got a long in Christ. It doesn't mean they agree on everything. I'm sure they didn't.

I'm sure they had long arguments around the campfire trying to persuade each other. It means, though, that they loved each other and learned from each other because they had something in common more important than politics, and that is Jesus. Here's something else to think about. If I feel more solidarity with those people who share my politics, but not more, my faith, then I feel with those who share my faith, but not my politics. What does that say about me? Jesus loves his church. He has a diverse church.

He says in Revelation that it will be made up of every tongue, tribe, and nation. There are going to be people in heaven who look different than us, who speak different languages, who vote for different political parties, who make different parenting decisions. But what we all have in common is that we have seen. our need for Jesus to rescue us from our sin and we have put our faith in him and followed him. If we're going to love the church in heaven, let's start loving it now on earth. I hope you are committed to your local church. If you aren't, find one, get plugged in, serve, pray for it.

Try to make it a church that pleases God. Amen. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage, and a lot, lot more.

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