Church attendance is not magic

"Don’t be fooled into thinking that you will never suffer because the Temple is here. It’s a lie! Do you really think you can steal, murder, commit adultery, lie, and burn incense to Baal and all those other new gods of yours, and then come here and stand before me in my Temple and chant, ‘We are safe!’ — only to go right back to all those evils again? Don’t you yourselves admit that this Temple, which bears my name, has become a den of thieves? Surely I see all the evil going on there. I, the Lord, have spoken!" (Jeremiah 7:8-11)

We get the idea somehow of church being a safe zone, a cleansing zone. And it is to a point. But church is not magic.

We go do whatever we want during the week, living out lives as foolishly as we can and then on Sunday morning we go to church, sing some songs, listen to some guy holler, maybe take some communion and then we are good to go for the rest of the week. We can go out again and rack up the foolishness, then next week again, we will go and get spiritually hosed down ready for another week.

It doesn’t work that way. Going to church doesn’t make your weekly life fine.

Jeremiah told his people the same thing. They would go and do all kinds of things (I really hope their list of sins was worse than those of the church here) then they would run to the temple and use it as a kind of King’s X, a safe place. They would leave the temple with the happy exclamation, “What a great worship service this week!” and then go back to what they were doing.

Church became an interlude in their week, designed (at least in their minds) as a spiritual car wash to get rid of all the grime accumulated during the week.

But God never intended it to be such. God never intended worship services to be anything but that: worship services. There is no power in the attending that forgives wrong. What forgives wrong is the God of heaven who we worship. Church in and of itself does nothing. It is just church.

I saw a sign in a store when I was young that said: “We serve you six days, but we serve God on Sundays.” What the man meant was that he was closed on Sundays, but what it sounded like was that he had a partitioned life. He did what he wanted six days a week, and was holy for one. That wasn’t what he meant, but I remember that as being such a philosophy of Christians throughout my ministry life.

By doing this, though, the people Jeremiah was writing to cheapened the whole worship process. They made it into something it was never meant to be: a magic ceremony like confession: do what you want, then come be holy for a while and you will be fine.

How it must grieve the Lord to see his people be like this. Live your lives for him all the time, not just one day a week. Otherwise, worship time does no good either to you or the Lord.