"One person esteems one day as far better than another, while another esteems all days alike.The one who observes a day, does so to honour God. Each should be convinced in their own mind of what is good... Why, then, do you pass judgement on another, or despise? Each will be called to give an account of what he is before God". Romans 14:5, 6, 10, 12.
"Freedom truly begins when one person decides to put aside the pretence that everyone else is buying, even at the price of rejection. If you are a 'professional' leader, you are usually the one who needs to start...
When we become moralists, we entirely miss what the good news of imputed righteousness is really all about, because 'being good' then becomes 'real christianity' - in other words, we buy into religion's sole purpose, not God's... that's why many don't come to church - it's a place for 'good' people, who do what's expected of them, hence it becomes the place for those who are 'nice'.
The other snare here is that church is then often exposed to be the complete opposite - 'external' morality covers a place of heinous evil, intentionally hidden from view. Instead of being viewed well, then, the faith is viewed as a realm of hypocrisy and malignant evil.
Neither of these is healthy. Christianity should be defined as a place of forthright freedom and truth, especially in respect to our lives together as sinners saved entirely by God's astounding grace".
Steve Brown - A Scandalous Freedom (slightly paraphrased).
Another Sunday, so services, or it's mid-week, so house study group, or the end of another month, so church meeting - and the list goes on. "Church" usually equates to the continuation and/or multiplication of such activities because, it is supposed, that these 'huddles' achieve a couple of goals - they help us to be defined, socially, as believers and they allow us to encourage some measure of "goodness" amongst those who do so. The process, then, is presumed to engender a common piety amongst participants - to 'stir up' their fervour in respect to their particular duties or prescribed (church defined) callings of service to other like-minded associates.
The writer of Hebrews sees 'church' a little differently.
Addressing those 'scattered' for their faith, he seeks to show how the continual necessity to come to a place of perpetual sacrifice for sin has been abolished forever (by the 'once and for all sacrifice of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ), so therefore, Christians now assemble to revel in the astonishing perfection of this deliverance. Their aim is to encourage one another's faith in this truth - to enliven a testimony (by word and deed) to the absolute surety of God's work in the world. Such people are defined by the writer as those who overcame the emptiness of a life excluded from such reality to blaze a trial in respect to the excellence of faith (Hebrews 11 & 12). This is the manner of faith employed by God Himself in the very act of creation (- calling those things that were not as though they were), evidenced in the life of the faithful by word and testimony amidst hardship in what causes them to 'look up' (outside of themselves) to the very certainty and surety of that which endures. This is the true well of aid and refreshment in our continual times of need.
It is, then, to this manner of assembly that God's children are called and told not to forsake, for, as the writer has shown, it is entirely possible to arrange all manner of 'religious' gatherings upon grounds which, not only nullify such a benefit, but actually encourage those called to better things to wallow in a miss-placed devotion to menial pursuits and thereby miss the genuine riches of their calling.
As this writer soberly reminds us, an entire generation, made free from slavery by God's direct action, perished because their 'congregation' proved riddled with all manner of religiousness and apostasy that never allowed them to detach from Egypt - so bad was this weight that not even Moses entered Canaan due to disobedience.
Faith that counts refuses to be so clustered with those who appear conferenced. Actual faith takes us further than our immediate demands and needs to truly engage with what is unfolding around us - to soberly and earnestly meet these matters well with a delivery 'salted' by grace and truth amidst the disquiet.
This should gives us pause. If the very requirements once decreed from heaven to facilitate holiness have now gone (Hebrews 9:11), the Incarnation showing them to be mere shadows of the true substance of Gods work, what are we to say of 'rulings' imposed by mere men which have directly sought to impede the true purpose of our assembly, which is to join with that which is eternal? What is to be said, never mind done, in respect to "provisions", for example, that, outwardly at least, are said to be about 'safeguarding health' which tread underfoot the very irrevocable principles of God in respect to our sharing of the gift of life - placing something unchanging beneath the consequences of such "requirements"?
Faith cannot operate in such emptied spaces of unbelief - such conformity murders what grace provides (Jude), so we must leave such evil and stand faithful and free.
If church is merely about our 'good', our comfortable, introverted and exclusive clustering to our cleek, then we have abandoned the vision of God, and the redemptive purposes of God for something far less than even fallen life provides. We have, in effect, become a party that has forsaken the value of the faith.
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