The Prayer of Jesus

Someone asked me a few weeks ago what the point of going to church was.

If we pray on our own, listen to podcasts, and have regular intellectual spiritual conversations with other believers: what's the reason to go to church?

Since hearing her question and thinking her thoughts, I started wondering too: why go to church? If you can be spiritually fed individually and within your own community, why bother with church? And my mind started rolling and my thoughts started going and I reached a place where I wasn't so sure what I was doing.

I think there are a lot of reasons for church to exist. For community. We need a place to belong, a place to gather and worship with other believers. To be active: to be moving and doing and loving and changing: to be a statement to the world. A place to bring our sin: a place to humbly bow down at the Cross. A place to praise the Gospel.

But what happens when the imperfections of humanity seem to shine above the work of God? What happens if that community becomes judgmental or if you don't hear the Gospel on Sunday or if you don't feel like anyone, yourself included, is actively loving like Christ? And then you think about the Crusades and indulgences and the sins of church run deep.

Because church is messy. It's imperfect. It's full of people of the world: trying and stumbling to live like Christ: people like you and me. It's hard to catch glimpses of God sometimes in church. Like Werewolf Jesus says, we're imperfect people who take our instructions from a book written thousands of years ago: it's inevitable we'll mess up. Church is hard.

And in the midst of these thoughts, a friend told me about John 17.

John 17 is Jesus' final prayer before He is arrested. He starts by praying for Himself and His earthly mission, then prays for the disciples, and finally He prays for US, his future believers.

He prays for His glory to be revealed through us and that we may reflect and imitate Him through our lives, that we may know that the same love the Father has for His son He has for us, and for future believers to be unified through His love.

Jesus loves us. Jesus loves church.

He loves believers thousands of years to come and the common bond they would all have: Him.

He prayed for us to know His love and to make His name great. To remember why we go: why we serve alongside each other: why we worship His name together. He prayed for us to be one: and we are one in church. Right before His betrayal, His arrest, His trials, and His death, He remembers to pray for me and for you and for the Body and for the struggle we would all face within that Body. He tells us what we need to do and how we do that together.

We honor Him by going to church.

And I think that's the best reason to go.

Makes you want to go everyday, doesn't it?

We honor the prayer of Jesus by becoming the fragrance of Christ to others.

Thanks, my friend.