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Family, Parenting and Religion
Why Church Matters to Your Kids—Part 4: Reason #3 is…

Why Church Matters to Your Kids—Part 4: Reason #3 is…

Last updated on: May 8, 2015 at 12:44 pm by Tim Wright

Why Church Matters to Your Kids—Part 4: Reason #3 is… 2015-05-08T12:44:49+00:00 Tim Wright

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If Jesus matters to us, then what matters to Jesus will matter to us.

If it matters to us that Jesus matters to our kids, then what matters to Jesus will matter to our kids.

The Church matters to Jesus because:

Reason #1: It is his Body—the Church is intimately tied to him and he to the Church. He gave his life for the Church. For Jesus, the Church is a matter of life and death and life.
Reason #2: Your kids matter to Jesus. Jesus wants your children to live in his unconditional grace. The Church—his Body—is the place where kids experience, learn about, see, touch, feel, and live out that grace through a variety of opportunities.

Reason #3: The Church Matters to Jesus because the World Matters to Jesus

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son…God became a human being and went to the cross in order to win back his lost children—his lost world. The world matters to God. It’s a matter of life and death for him. And he has chosen the Church to be the vehicle through which his love in Christ is communicated and demonstrated to the world.

Some will argue that you can know God in nature. True. But what do you know about him? Is he the God of creative, inspiring awesomeness seen in the sunrise and sunset, in the grandeur of the mountains and the power of the oceans? Or is he the God of devastating, life-destroying tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis? Creation doesn’t tell the whole story about God—or, depending on how you see things, tells a conflicting story about God.

Some will say that you can hear a sermon on TV or the internet? True. But you can’t receive the sacraments—God’s gifts of life—through the TV set or computer. Nor can the TV/internet pastor counsel you or grieve with you or marry you.

The Church is the place where God fully communicates himself to the world—through the proclamation of what God has done for us in Jesus. The Church is the only place where God breaks into our lives with grace through the sacraments of baptism and communion.

The Reformer Martin Luther says that the Church is to be for the world…that the work of the Church is to be the bearer of the Gospel.

God’s passion is for the world. And that passion is spread out into the world through the Church—the Body of Christ. To be a Christian, then, is to be connected to a Church—a local expression of the Body of Christ—and to participate in the mission of the Church to bring God’s grace to a hurting, broken world.

A Quote from Sacred Roots–Why the Church Still Matters:

If an entertainment-driven, individualistic view of Church is defined as “experts putting on exciting events to meet personal expectations,” then the primal call of Jesus reminds us the Church is more daring, subversive, transformative, and provocative than we have been numbed to believe—that we are not destined to be spectators but active agents of grace and redemption in the middle of the brokenness of our world.

If Jesus matters to us, then what matters to Jesus will matter to us.

If it matters to us that Jesus matters to our kids, then what matters to Jesus will matter to our kids.

The Church matters to Jesus. He’s staked his death and resurrection on it. And his invitation to us is to raise our kids to follow Jesus—through his Church—on the bold, reckless adventure of bringing grace to the world.

Searching for Tom Sawyer

the world

Tim Wright

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May 1, 2015

Why Church Matters to Your Kids--Part 3: Reason #2 is...

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