Secularism is the dominant idea
today that guides peoples’ lives. Unfortunately, many professing believers are
succumbing to a secular mindset in one very important way.
Exposing a secular mindset
First, you need to realize that secularism
means “this age”. To the secular worldview, what matters is the temporal world.
Any ideas about the eternal shouldn’t influence how we act as a society, and
religion gets in the way of modernization and human flourishing. In other
words, secularism isn’t concerned with cosmic ideas such as heaven and hell (expressed
in John Lennon’s song Imagine). It is
all about this age, and getting the most out of this life.
Exercising a secular mindset
This secular mindset is what
professing believers are adopting, even if unwittingly, when they treat church as
if their attendance or absence has no bearing on the life and health of the institution
that Jesus started and is expressed in local assemblies. Your absence is a testament
to your secular mindset. Your actions speak loudly, that church doesn’t matter
all that much. You’ve got your ticket to heaven and that’s all that matters for
the next life, so you can just go and live this life, you don’t need church. But
you do need the church, and the church needs you. It isn’t some secondary matter,
and to treat it as optional or occasional is to give into the secular mindset.
Your attendance matters
Jesus said that he will build the
church, and the local church is the visible expression of the Lord’s promise
being fulfilled. Do you want to the local church to die out? You can say “no”, but
when you don’t go, you are contributing to the death of the local church
expression. Church
is important to God. Corporate worship is important to God. Corporate worship
is important for you. Corporate worship is important for the life and health of
the local church. For Christians, corporate worship is our most important hour
of the week. Nothing else takes precedence over the worship of God. When you purposefully
miss church, you are missing the most important hour of the week. What could
possibly take priority over God’s ordained means? You need to make church a non-negotiable
habit, just like eating or sleeping, something you skip only in the rarest of
circumstances, and something you resume as soon as you possibly can.
Think about it
When you are absent, what are you
saying to the culture? What are you saying to new believers? What are you saying
to your brothers and sisters in Christ? What are you saying to Jesus? When you decide
not to go, are you contributing to the strength of the local church, or are you
contributing to the decline of the local church? Do you think Jesus cares? Which
matters more, what he thinks about it, or how you feel about it?
