Why You Can’t Be a Christian without the Church
Reconciled to God
A Christian is someone who, first and foremost, has been forgiven of his sin and been reconciled to God the Father through Jesus Christ. This happens when a person repents of his sins and puts his faith in the perfect life, substitutionary death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In other words, a Christian is someone who has reached the end of himself and his own moral resources. He has recognized that he, in defiance of God’s plainly revealed law, has given his life over to worshiping and loving things other than God—things like career, family, the stuff money can buy, the opinions of other people, the honor of his family and community, the favor of the so-called gods of other religions, the spirits of this world, or even the good things a person can do. He has also recognized that these “idols” are doubly damning masters. Their appetites are never satisfied in this life. And they provoke God’s just wrath over the next life, a death and a judgment the Christian has already tasted a bit of (mercifully) in this world’s miseries.
A Christian, therefore, knows that if he were to die tonight and stand before God, and if God were to say, “Why should I let you into my presence?” the Christian would say, “You shouldn’t let me in. I have sinned and owe you a debt that I cannot pay back.” But he wouldn’t stop there. He would continue, “Yet, because of your great promises and mercy, I depend on the blood of Jesus Christ shed as a substitute for me, paying my moral debt, satisfying your holy and righteous requirements, and removing your wrath against sin!”
Upon that plea to be declared righteous in Christ, the Christian is someone who has discovered the beginning of freedom from sin’s enslavement. Where the idols and other gods could never be satisfied, their stomachs never full, God’s satisfaction in the work of Christ means that the person purchased out of condemnation by Christ’s work is now free! For the first time ever, the Christian is free to turn his back on sin, not just to replace it slavishly with yet another sin but with the Holy Spirit–given desire for Jesus Christ himself and for Christ’s rule in his life. Where Adam tried to push God off the throne and make himself god, the Christian rejoices that Christ is upon the throne. He considers Jesus’ life of perfect submission to the will and words of the Father and seeks to be like his Savior.
So a Christian is someone who, first of all, has been reconciled to God in Christ. Christ has assuaged the wrath of God, and the Christian is now declared righteous before God, called to a life of righteousness, and lives in the hope of one day appearing before his majesty in heaven.
Reconciled to God’s People
Yet that’s not all! Second, a Christian is someone who, by virtue of his reconciliation with God, has been reconciled to God’s people. Do you remember the first story in the Bible after Adam and Eve’s fall and banishment from the garden? It’s the story of one human being murdering another—Cain killing Abel. If the act of trying to shove God off the throne is, by its very nature, an act of trying to place ourselves upon it, we’re not about to let some other human being take it from us. Not a chance. Adam’s act of breaking fellowship with God resulted in an immediate break in fellowship among all human beings. It’s every man for himself.
It should be no surprise, then, that Jesus said that “all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments”: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself (see Matt. 22:34–40). The two commandments go together. The first produces the second, and the second proves the first.
Through Christ, then, being reconciled to God means being reconciled to everyone else who is reconciled to God. After describing in the first half of Ephesians 2 the great salvation that God has given us in Christ Jesus, Paul turns, in the second half of Ephesians 2, to describing what this means for the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and, by extension, between all those who are in Christ. He writes:
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. . . . His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. (Eph. 2:14–16)
Now, all those who belong to God are “fellow citizens” and “members of God’s household” (v. 19). We are “joined together” with Christ into one “holy temple” (v. 21)—so many rich analogies to choose from!
Perhaps meditating on the analogy of a household will help us see that being reconciled to God also means being reconciled to his people. If you’re an orphan, you don’t adopt parents; they adopt you. If your adoptive parents are named Smith, you now attend the Smith family dinners with the parents and all the children. You share a bedroom at night with the Smith siblings. When the teacher at school calls out attendance and says, “Smith?” you raise your hand like your older brother did before you and your younger sister will do after you. And you do this not because you decided to play the role of “Smith,” but because someone went to the orphanage and said, “You will be a Smith.” On that day, you became the child of someone and the sibling of others.
Only your name’s not Smith. It’s Christian, named after the one through whom you were adopted, Christ (Eph. 1:5). Now you’re part of the whole family of God. “The one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family” (Heb. 2:11).
And this is no dysfunctional family, with family members estranged from one another. It’s a fellowship. When God “called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:9), he also called you into “fellowship” with the whole family (1 Cor. 5:2).
And this is no polite and formal fellowship. It’s a body, bound together by our individual decisions but also bound together by far more than human decision—the person and work of Christ. You would be as foolish to say, “I’m not a part of the family,” as you would be to cut off your own hand or nose. As Paul said to the Corinthians, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor. 12:21).
In short, it’s impossible to answer the question what is a Christian? without ending up in a conversation about the church; at least, in the Bible it is. Not only that, it’s hard to stick with just one metaphor for the church because the New Testament uses so many of them: a family and a fellowship, a body and a bride, a people and a temple, a lady and her children. And never does the New Testament conceive of the Christian existing on a prolonged basis outside the fellowship of the church. The church is not really a place. It’s a people— God’s people in Christ.
The Church as an Expression of Christ
When a person becomes a Christian, he doesn’t just join a local church because it’s a good habit for growing in spiritual maturity. He joins a local church because it’s the expression of what Christ has made him—a member of the body of Christ. Being united to Christ means being united to every Christian. But that universal union must be given a living, breathing existence in a local church.
Sometimes theologians refer to a distinction between the universal church (all Christians everywhere throughout history) and the local church (those people who meet down the street from you to hear the Word preached and to practice baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Other than a few references to the universal church (such as Matt. 16:18 and the bulk of Ephesians), most references to the church in the New Testament are to local churches, as when Paul writes, “To the church of God in Corinth” or “To the churches in Galatia.”
Together we can display the gospel of Jesus Christ in a way we just can’t by ourselves.
Now what follows is a little intense, but it’s important. The relationship between our membership in the universal church and our membership in the local church is a lot like the relationship between the righteousness God gives us through faith and the actual practice of righteousness in our daily lives. When we become Christians by faith, God declares us righteous. Yet we are still called to actively be righteous. A person who happily goes on living in unrighteousness calls into question whether he ever possessed Christ’s righteousness in the first place (see Rom. 6:1–18; 8:5–14; James 2:14–15). So, too, it is with those who refuse to commit themselves to a local church. Committing to a local body is the natural outcome—it confirms what Christ has done. If you have no interest in actually committing yourself to an actual group of gospel-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, you might question whether you belong to the body of Christ at all! Listen to the author of Hebrews carefully:
Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. (Heb. 10:23–27)
Our state before God, if authentic, will translate into our daily decisions, even if the process is slow and full of missteps. God really does change his people. Isn’t that good news? So please, friend, don’t grow complacent through some vague idea that you possess the righteousness of Christ if you’re not pursuing a life of righteousness. Likewise, please do not be deceived by a vague conception of the universal church to which you belong if you’re not pursuing that life together with an actual church.
Except for the rarest of circumstances, a true Christian builds his life into the lives of other believers through the concrete fellowship of a local church. He knows he has not yet “arrived.” He’s still fallen and needs the accountability and instruction of that local body of people called the church. And they need him.
As we gather to worship God and exercise love and good deeds toward one another, we demonstrate in real life, you might say, the fact that God has reconciled us to himself and to one another. We demonstrate to the world that we have been changed, not primarily because we memorize Bible verses, pray before meals, tithe a portion of our income, and listen to Christian radio stations, but because we increasingly show a willingness to put up with, to forgive, and even to love a bunch of fellow sinners.
You and I cannot demonstrate love or joy or peace or patience or kindness sitting all by ourselves on an island. No, we demonstrate it when the people we have committed to loving give us good reasons not to love them, but we do anyway.
Do you see it? It’s right there—right in the midst of a group of sinners who have committed to loving one another—that the gospel is displayed. The church gives a visual presentation of the gospel when we forgive one another as Christ has forgiven us, when we commit to one another as Christ has committed to us, and when we lay down our lives for one another as Christ laid down his life for us. Together we can display the gospel of Jesus Christ in a way we just can’t by ourselves.
This article is adapted from What Is a Healthy Church? by Mark Dever.
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