No Wives Allowed

I love each and every one of you reading this blog right now. I would like to have a personal relationship with each of you. I would like to hang out with you and be BFFs. The issue is that I can’t stand your spouse. They are flawed. One has an attitude problem. One isn’t a good house keeper. One has really bad halitosis. We can hang out and do things together but they are not invited.

How good of a relationship do you think we will have if this is how I truly felt? I can tell you from personal experience that we won’t. I have destroyed some of the closest, dearest relationships in my life because I couldn’t accept my friend’s spouse. When you attack a person’s spouse you attack that person.

Yet, this is exactly what millions of Christians do to Jesus each and every day. One of the most used metaphors to describe Christ and his Church is that of the bride groom and bride. The Church founded by Jesus is his bride and he is her groom. The entire book of Revelation is about the wedding feast in heaven.

So many people today have turned their backs on the Church. The Church has no relevance in their lives. They don’t need the Church. All they need is a personal relationship with Jesus. They have Jesus and they have the bible. They have no need for the Church. The Church is flawed. The Church makes mistakes. The Church is human. Jesus is God. Jesus is perfect. Jesus loves me, the bible tells me so.

When we attack the Church we attack Jesus himself. When we cast the Church away we tell Jesus that we love him but want nothing to do with his bride. There are some who believe that Jesus is all sweet and gentle and full of love. They conveniently ignore the passages that talk about justice and wrath. That’s the Old Testament God. He has mellowed through the years. The First commandment tells us that God is a jealous God. He is a God of love, and although he loves all of creation, his bride holds a special place in his heart. So does his mother, but that is another blog entry.

So is just any church the bride of Christ? Is the Lutheran church? Is the Presbyterian church? How about the Jehovah Witness church? I have heard them all make claim to be that church. They are all part of the universal church and therefore it doesn’t matter which church you are part of. Even the people who only want a personal relationship with Jesus are a church. They are just a church with one member.

But scripture is pretty clear that Jesus is referring to the Church he created. That can’t be the Lutheran church. That church was created by Martin Luther in the year 1517. He created this church because he disagreed with the Church Jesus created. He felt that Church had fallen into error so the best thing to do was to cast her aside and begin again in a church of his making. Sorry Jesus, your bride is messed up so we are going with her second cousin.

It can’t be the Presbyterian church. John Knox started that church in Scotland in 1560 for much the same reason that Luther started his church. John didn’t like Christ’s bride either and replaced her with one more to his liking.

And then there is Charles Taze Russell, a Restorationist minister, who founded the Jehovah Witness church in 1931. He believed that the mainstream Protestant religions of the day had also fallen into error and that only he knew the way.

The buzz word of the day is Ecumenism. Ecumenism is recognizing that all Christians belong to the body of Christ and finds a way that we can pray and celebrate Jesus together. Ecumenism is everyone looking for a way to become more unified and grow closer together no matter how far we grow apart. In the end it really comes down to the great mercy of God towards those who have attacked and maligned his bride. I know how I would respond to someone who has attacked my bride in the vicious way the world has attacked Christ’s. But then again, I am a fallen, sinful human. His ways are so much greater than my ways.

If you love God and live your life the best you can trying to love, honor, and serve him we have some common ground to stand on. Faith is a personal journey we each have to walk on our own. We are all on different parts of this Road to Damascus but we all are trying to reach the same destination. This is where ecumenism starts.