Learning to Love Christ's Church

“Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world... except for a nice MLT. Mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomatoes are ripe. That’s so perky, I love that.” —Miracle Max

Paul tells us in Ephesians that marriage is a living, breathing parable of Christ’s love for his church. Mysterious as this parable can seem, let’s do what Proverbs 20:5 tells us and, guided by the Scriptures, plumb the depths of our hearts and experiences to learn something of what it means to be in Christ’s church. What does it mean to love Christ’s church?

If I said to a friend “I love you, I just can’t stand your wife,” it is safe to say it would not be the beginning of a new high in the friendship. Thankfully, our friendship with Christ is as strong as his everlasting sacrificial love, and yet he endures this attitude from us all too often. How often has our relationship with the church been one of mere tolerance, frustration, and endurance—or even angry brooding or rejection? Too often we justify our dismissal (or hatred) of Christ’s bride by our righteous love of Christ. Wait! How can it be that he loves the church, and we despise it? Perhaps we are not as righteous as we think when we try to use our love for Christ to justify a hateful attitude toward the church that he loves. There are times when the Scriptures call us to recognize when a church has become a “synagogue of Satan” or a “whitewashed sepulcher;” there are times when we must decide to find a healthier branch to worship and serve in rather than keep laboring for reformation. Sadly, there are times when we must recognize that you cannot split rotten wood.

This place of “departure-or-reformation” is not customary. Rather, our main work as servants and members of Christ’s church is to love his bride. We must avoid the attitude that we will love the church if she does what we want or if she reforms sufficiently to our liking. We must never make the mistake of thinking that the bride of Christ is something outside of us. If we have any part in Christ it is in union with his body. If we are loved by Christ it is because we are his bride. If we are not loved as his bride we are strangers and thieves. Christ loves his body and we who are his body must love it, and seek to feed and nourish it.

But marriage teaches us that love is hard. In its sinless form it is other-oriented and requires living for others at great cost. It calls us to despise the shame and lay down our lives. The reality of marriage marred by our sin and the sin of others teaches us that love is very difficult indeed; it takes patience and kindness; it requires dying to self and rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn; it requires humility, purity, allowing the desires of others to take precedence over our own; it requires that we be joyful and forgiving. It requires that we mourn sin and rejoice in truth. We must endure and bear hard things, hope for and expect the best, impute and assume the best intensions by others—all of which our sinful hearts fight against and do not naturally do.

If our marriages fall into a stagnant state of endurance, mild annoyance, and passive aggressive interactions, we have not attained the glory of God. We are called to rejoice in the wife of our youth. We are to be intoxicated with her. We are to be zealous for good deeds. We are to provoke each other to love and good works. Marriage does not reflect to our children or our community the glory of Christ’s great love when we aim to merely endure. We must recognize in our marriages the need to pursue the Christ-like love that serves and sacrifices and delights. Christ assures us that he is in our midst as a mighty warrior who saves us, rejoices over us with gladness, quiets us in his love, and exults over us with singing.

For example, in South Sudan, many young men still receive a bull at their birth, the color of the bull becoming part of their name. The men sing songs and dance as they describe to the other men in the cattle camp the beauty and amazing feats of their bulls. The love and honor for their bulls is public. Yet the marriages of the Dinka are described in the book Loveless Marriages, written about a decade ago. I tell men they need to be like their Savior and sing songs about their wives instead. To this I get nothing but laughing. But could our relationship with Christ’s bride be called a loveless marriage? Why? Here I have three particular topics of consideration:

Changing our Focus

Part of our problem is when we walk into church and we forget that we are there to worship. Our focus is not on the living God, on sitting at his feet to learn, sing, and pray. When we make our focus worshiping, we honor God, and we appreciate the body of Christ. How often in marriage is our focus rather on evaluation and correction instead of appreciation and delight? The church, like our marriages, will never reach a point this side of heaven when there are no problems, no shortcomings, no matters of sin and need of repentance. But we can surely obey the Lord by resisting the intoxicating drink of criticism and focusing on our own sin, while delighting in Christ’s bride.

Rejoicing in What the Church is Becoming

Love does not make perpetual prophetic prognostications of doom and destruction. Love always hopes. And we know that the church is the bride of Christ who is washing her with his Word so that she will be presented to him glorious and spotless. We can serve and worship and pray and take great delight in what the church is, but even more, in what she is becoming, even as we ask the Lord for wisdom for how we work for her reformation.

Making Love and Joy the Reason for Our Work of Reformation

It is easy enough to criticize a church in our own culture when we understand much of what is going on. In our home culture, we understand what is happening and why, we are culturally comfortable with the styles and forms, and we understand the language. Sadly, it’s easier still to criticize her when we are working in a culture and language we do not understand. So much is uncomfortable, unappreciated, and not understandable. The inevitable result is critique and criticism, and in my honest assessment, the critique is often accurate. But, too often, that critique alone becomes the reason for our work of reformation.

So, both at home and in strange, new cultures, while we pray for reformation and seek to labor toward that end, we must remember to love and delight in the bride of Christ. We must trust the Holy Spirit with his work and take up our main charge of loving Christ’s bride. We need to check our hearts, evaluating them in the light of 1 Corinthians 13. What are the intensions and driving forces behind our prayers and efforts of reformation? Can we honor the Lord in delighting in his bride before we criticize her? Can we love her and allow that love to lead us in our prayers for reformation?