So, You Don't Feel Like Going to Church...

Going to church is a chore, especially when better things are always presenting themselves to the imagination when you’re sitting, yet again, through another sermon that is stretching dangerously beyond the fifteen-minute threshold of your attention span. At home there’s Netflix. There’s yardwork to be done. You can unplug and not be stressed by being around other people, especially people as judgmental and hypocritical church goers. Why spend your precious free time on the weekend bogged down with formulaic sayings and archaic music that don’t move you to feel anything anymore?

Thinking such thoughts, as many of us do, consider David who might as well have been from another planet when he says, “I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord!”” (Psalm 122).

The devil, flesh, and world are powerful adversaries when they team up against our faith. And make no mistake, they are in league with each other. As Martin Luther says in his catechism, they “do not want us to hallow God’s name or let his kingdom come” (3rd Petition of the Lord’s Prayer). When they’re given free reign to argue, entice, and entertain us, they can make spending even a minute in the divine service as unbearable as being at the dentist, only the dentist gives you painkillers, so he have that going for him.

A powerful argument that combines the above three attacks sets the self and its demand for satisfaction, what I think the New Testament means by “sensuality” (Mark 7:22; Romans 13:13, etc.), above anything that might be taught in an old-fashioned Lutheran Church on Sunday morning. It justifies a missed Sunday, or three Sundays, or a whole six months because the church doesn’t immediately give what you think you need.

It’s true that we all have longings. We’re all looking for that thing that will give lasting contentment and satisfaction. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can trust our own desires anymore. Our wants and cravings have been conditioned by the ceaseless bombardment of images and voices telling us what is desirable and how to find fulfilment through purchases and consumption. A great example would be when you finish a show on your streaming service. The funk you feel when you realize you’re out of episodes and another to season to binge is truly amazing. Does it really matter that you can’t spend another solid twelve hours in front of your tv? And yet the desperation to find another show pulls us into scrolling through the next recommendations on our cue. We seek fulfillment not by rationally examining our behavior and asking if this is healthy. We seek it by spending hours looking for the next show that will entertain us.

A large segment of American Protestantism has tried to reach our warped souls by adapting the message to meet what we think we want. But if our souls are desperately disordered, changing the message and the presentation of the Gospel to fit what it thinks it wants will distort the Gospel as well. The problem, I suggest, isn’t the Gospel that has grown woefully out of date. It’s our own souls that have lost the capacity to feel the prick of conscience when seeing the obscene and grotesque. It’s our desires that have been conditioned to seek satisfaction in the endorphin hits we get from a screen. It’s our minds that have been told to think that the divine service, the singing of hymns, and the hearing of sermons can’t possibly satisfy what we really need.

The three enemies that array themselves against us are incapable of delivering on their promises. They keep promising the next great product is on the horizon, but when it arrives it doesn’t leave you sated. It leaves you craving something better and more. That’s not the definition of finding your happiness. That’s the definition of hell.

There is a better, more humane way of finding satisfaction and contentment, but realize that it requires some serious reordering of the soul. It demands not only self-denial, in the manner of detoxing yourself before going back to the same bad habits you had before. It demands dying to oneself. It demands the denial of carnal desire and its old ways of trying and failing to find fulfillment.

This isn’t anything the church hasn’t heard about or dealt with before. St. Paul told the Ephesians, “Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:22-23).

As any addict can tell you, it is very possible that the self-denial you think this passage is demanding is not within your power. But the Scriptures teach that it doesn’t depend on our power. The power of God is made known among us by his Word. His authority over the darkness distorting our souls comes among us through his means of grace, his preaching, his Baptism, and the living body and blood of Christ for us to eat and drink.

As St. Paul explained to the Ephesians earlier in his letter, “According to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith – that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:16-18).

God gives the strength. He takes the disordered and dead soul into his own keeping and gives it new life (Titus 3:5). He not only gives a new birth, but he also continually renews your soul day by day by bringing it back to himself and the promises by which we are being saved (Romans 6:1-11). Remember that this is the same St. Paul who daily struggles with the weakness of his flesh warring against his new spirit (Romans 7:23). Remember that the work begun in Baptism isn’t complete until the day of our Lord’s coming (Philippians 1:6). Modern American Protestantism makes the mistake of thinking the Gospel and God’s grace mean permanent life change on this earth. It fails to account of the spiritual warfare that’s everywhere mentioned in the Scriptures. What God gives us through his Word is a new Spirit that recognizes the flesh for what it is. He gives us desires to resist the state in which the devil wants to hold us and to seek help from where God alone can give it.

God gives his help at church. The fact that our flesh, the world, and the devil hate the divine service is telling. They know this is where they go to die. They know that their work ends where Jesus’ works, especially his cross, prevail. So, no, it may not feel like the greatest thing ever to pull yourself out of bed on Sunday. It may not be the most exciting idea to cancel your plans on Wednesday nights during Lent to go to church. But you can, because of the Spirit’s renewal of your mind, know that you must go to receive the help and salvation you so desperately need in your daily war against the weakness of your flesh.

An amazing thing happens when you make a habit of going to church. You might not believe me. I don’t think you have to. But from my experience and from the experience of those who have faithfully attended services for decades, they come to like it. It turns out that a cleansed palate has much more discerning taste. Instead of going after sugar that overwhelms the tastebuds with sensation, it seeks after the true pleasures that have breadth and depth cotton candy can never reach. So it is with those who tasted and seen that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8).

You don’t go to church because you feel like it. You go because you know that this is where Jesus is. This is where he forgives sins. This is where he gives eternal life. You should expect that your flesh won’t like it. You know the world will scorn you for it. You know the devil is going to have arguments ready against it. But you don’t belong to their voices and arguments anymore. You belong to God. “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”