GIVING ADVICE TO GOD

Have you ever wanted to help correct God’s errors? I know. I know. God doesn’t make mistakes. God is perfect, right? But aren’t we always criticizing God for at least two BIG MISTAKES? First of all, God didn’t create perfect people or a perfect universe. Then, second, when God was going to clean up the mess by sending Jesus to save us, Jesus made some bad mistakes. He didn’t seem to be a very good judge of characters and chose some very imperfect disciples. And then they went and founded a very imperfect church. Isn’t that what you have thought when you read about the disciples. And, I’ll wager that you have had some of those thoughts about our current church. So even if you didn’t say it, haven’t you at least wondered why God didn’t do a better job.

A PROBLEM WITH PERFECT CHURCHES

We can deal with God’s poor design for creation later, but let’s first look at the problem of perfect churches. First, who can become a member of a perfect church? None of us qualify, so all of humanity is left on the outside? That is hardly a good beginning if you want to save the world from sin. And second, even if you were able to join, what would you have to offer the larger world?

Frankly, I’ve been around both individuals and a few churches who thought they were close to perfect, and they weren’t very pleasant people to associate with. This is not an invitation to celebrate imperfection, but a recognition of the problems of imperfection for humanity. Perfect people remind you of your imperfection, but they provide more guilt than help with our struggles. The problem with churches that strive to be perfect is that they cut themselves off from the world in which we live.

HOPE IN IMPERFECT CHURCHES

Remember that Peter was called the rock on which the church was built just after he was also called Satan because he was thinking like a human. So if God did know what God was doing when God enabled imperfect churches with imperfect disciples to be formed, what was God’s intention? Was God building a community in which grace was powerfully effective in the midst of imperfect people? If so, then maybe there is hope for all of us. Maybe we are saved by grace and not by our ability to grow into perfection. 

If that is so, then the church offers hope rather than judgment to all of humanity. In the next blog, I will explore some of the ways that the imperfect church offers imperfect people the hope of salvation.

While you wait, perhaps you could consider your own answers to the question of how the church offers us salvation.