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Can You Love Jesus but Not the Church?
Jesus’s Bride and Body
One of the metaphors or pictures that we have for the church in the New Testament is that the church is Jesus’s bride. And we see in that picture and in the expression of it, especially in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in chapter five, where Paul says to Christian husbands, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” So, if we want to be followers of Jesus, if we want to be imitating him, if we want to be doing the kinds of things that Jesus does, at the center of that is loving the church.
Now, Jesus is under no illusions about the sinlessness of the church. In fact, Jesus died for the members of the church because we were so sinful that we needed the Son of God to die for us. The fact that we look at our local church—or at the church writ large—and see a lot of sinful behavior and undesirable people (for one reason or another) isn't that we have a clear-eyed view of the church and Jesus has this sort of starry-eyed vision that doesn’t really see that.
How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life
Rebecca McLaughlin
Rebecca McLaughlin presents scientific evidence that weekly church attendance guards against depression, increases mental and physical well-being, and extends life expectancy. Most importantly, it gives people the chance to meet the Great Physician, who alone offers eternal life.
No, Jesus knows the sin of your local church better than you do. He also knows the sin of our hearts better than we do. And the radical message of the gospel is that the same person who is the one human being who knows the absolute worst of my heart and mind also loves me literally to the point of death.
And so in order for me to say, I love Jesus and I want to follow Jesus, but I don’t love the church and I don’t want to follow and be part of Jesus’s people, is sort of a radical contradiction in terms. Instead, if we are followers of Jesus, we will love the church like Jesus loves the church, which is in all her imperfection. Not because we rejoice in sin—ourselves or other peoples—but because we see Jesus’s extraordinary, radical commitment to the church and his one one-flesh union with the church.
And another metaphor that the New Testament uses for the church is that we are Jesus’s body here. If somebody said to me, I love you, but I hate your body and I don’t mind beating up your body, but I’m still going to say that I love you, it just doesn’t make any sense. We know that if you love somebody, you must also love their body and treat their body well. So if we are not loving the church and treating Jesus’s body well, how can we say that we, in fact, love Jesus?
Rebecca McLaughlin is the author of How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life.
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