If you grew up in a church, something you most likely began to believe was that going to church was something God wanted you to do. After all, church was where you learned about God, discovered how He wanted you to live and the place where you confessed your sins.
While I do love seeing large gatherings of people worshipping God, this question has to be asked.
Does going to church make you a good person in the eyes of God?
If your parents were like mine, you would be made to feel guilty about not attending a church service. I know people who would go to church Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night (if they were super spiritual). Sometimes we did this as well. I’m not bitter about that at all, but from a young age it trained me to believe that I was not living the life God had for me if I missed church on Sunday. I would always feel the need to ask God for forgiveness because I missed His church service. To this day, an absence on Sunday morning is still somewhat associated with a lack of devotion to God in my mind, and maybe yours too. That mindset has to change because it’s dangerous.
The danger is that if we associate Sunday morning church attendance with God’s view of people, they will begin to think the more they go to church, the more loved and accepted they are by God.
This example might help you understand what I’m talking about.
An acquaintance of mine recently asked me if my church still met in the same location. I assured her that we did and that she was welcome to come visit. She followed by letting me know that she had “been bad” this summer and not been to her church in a couple of months. But she assured me that she would “be good this fall and start going to church again”.
To be clear, she was not being facetious. Everything about the way she expressed this to me was sincere and it was clear that she felt guilty. But my problem with what she said was not that she had missed church for several months. The real issue was that somewhere along the way she bought into the lie that going to church on Sunday made her a good person.
To be fair, I realize most semi-religious people legitimately think this way. I know that we try to balance out God’s giant scale, believing that He will use it to send us to heaven or hell with church attendance and good deeds. In fact, one of the first things people usually say when they find out I am on staff at a church is “oh yeah, I really need to start going to church again”, or something along those lines.
Whether they are sincere about those statements or not, they don’t realize what they are communicating to me. Essentially they are letting me know they think that I think they are bad people because they haven’t been going to church regularly.
While I do think being involved in a local church is a wonderful thing, and would highly encourage it, I do not believe it has anything to do with you being a good person. As soon as we begin to measure our spiritual growth based on our church attendance, we have turned a good thing into the ultimate thing. We’ve substituted a Sunday service for the one true Savior.
Please don’t get me wrong. I love my church. I want all of my friends and family members to be part of what God is doing in and through His people there. However, getting people to church should not be my goal. Especially if it just gives them a false assurance of their right standing with God.
The important part of a church service is not just getting there, but receiving and putting into practice the biblical message presented. The hope is that that we will be pointed to Jesus and the price he paid with his blood to free them from hope in themselves to keep all of God’s rules. You can’t, nor can I. We will always fall short. That’s why we need a Savior. Our sin has separated us from having fellowship with God. We needed a solution, so God provided one.
In the book of Galatians, one biblical writer explains the idea that if people could be saved by their good works, Jesus would have died for no reason. After all, why would we need Him to die for us if we could fix the sin problem ourselves?
That same author expresses in the book of Ephesians that God’s view of us is not determined by our good works, because then we would have a reason to brag about how we saved ourselves. This is not God’s desire at all. Rather, He has designed a way for us to be declared “good” in His sight by putting our faith in the only truly good person who has ever walked the earth, Jesus Christ.
You see, it’s not your good works that are able to make you right with God. No amount of prayers, no amount of hours spent reading the Bible, nor years feeding the poor will tilt God’s scale in your favor. Your church attendance could be perfect and it would never affect the way God sees you. In a very real way, our church attendance can just be another box on our “holy list” that gets checked off each week to make us feel better about ourselves. If our goal is to get people into the church doors, we will merely give them a false sense of security in their religious activity. That’s a tragedy.
Going to church is great, but it is not the goal. The goal is for each of us to surrender our lives to God and his plans. The mission of every church should be to point people to Jesus and make disciples who live and love like Him.
The church is most certainly where we want people to end up. Not just going to, but becoming part of a local body of Christ followers. When we receive Christ, we go from attending church to becoming the church. We transition from the mindset of going to church to be accepted by God, to going to church because we are accepted by Him. There’s a huge difference there!
Our church attendance becomes a result of God’s love, rather than a means to attain God’s love. We should come ready to worship God on Sunday’s because He has made a way for us to become the good people we once thought we could become on our own. The goal is not to get good, but to get God.
