Four Reasons You SHOULD Attend Church
By Pastor Josh Wamble
Last week we published a blog article called, “Four Reasons You Should NOT Attend Church.” Of course, we are not advocating for anyone not to attend church. Each of those four reasons were not really good reasons for not attending church. They were actually bad reasons for attending church.
There are many reasons believers should prioritize regularly meeting together for worship. In Acts, we see that the earliest believers routinely gathered to worship together on the first day of the week. In Hebrews 10:25, the author tells us not to neglect meeting together as some believers have been doing. This principle of the importance of God’s people regularly gathering together for corporate worship is seen in the Old Testament as well. There are many good reasons that we should prioritize regularly gathering together for worship, and we want to highlight a few of them below.
1. You Should Attend Church Because You Have Been Accepted by God—and Changed.
We don’t attend church to try to impress God or to be accepted by Him. There is only one reason that God accepts us and is pleased with our worship, and that is on the basis of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Gathering with God’s people is the result of God’s work in our lives not the cause of it!
If Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection has really had an impact on you, it will also transform you. Paul says that believers are new creations in Christ Jesus. He says that we’ve died to our past life dominated by sin and are now alive to a new life in Christ.
If this is true, then this new life we are living is characterized by new likes and loves—also new hatreds. The sin that we once loved we now hate. The things that once seemed so boring and tedious to us now fill us with joy. Those who are truly God’s people, those who have truly been transformed by His grace, love gathering with the rest of His people. That is one of the marks of a faithful believer—love for the brothers and sisters.
2. You Should Attend Church to Encourage Other People.
One of the reasons for regularly gathering with other believers is to encourage them. In Hebrews 10:24-25, we read, “24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” Earlier, in Hebrews 3:12-14, we read, “12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.”
The Christian life is a life of fighting. We fight against sin and temptation. We fight against evil and unrighteousness. We fight against all the plans and efforts of the devil and his followers. It is critically important for us to realize that we do not fight these battles alone. Trying to be a Lone Ranger Christian is not healthy. God created the church for a reason. He puts his people in local churches for a reason. We are to help one another and fight for and with one another.
We have a responsibility for each other. You need to be at church for the sake of your own soul, but you also need to be at church for the sake of other church members’ souls. We have covenanted together for this very purpose, and they are depending on you being there!
You can’t encourage your brothers and sisters if you are not regularly with them. You can’t help them to fight against sin and temptation; you can’t exhort them; you can’t labor to make sure they are not hardened by the deceitfulness of sin; you can’t fight alongside them to hold fast and not fall away if you are not regularly with them.
I hope that you consider these things as you are deciding whether or not to attend church gatherings each week. I hope that you are considering these things as you are gathering. Do you ever think about how your singing loudly and fully and with a full heart helps to stir up your brothers and sisters? Do you ever think about how you can steer your conversations to stir up your brothers and sisters? Do you ever think about how your praying and serving and visiting and card writing, and giving, and the way you live help your brothers and sisters to remain faithful to Christ? I hope that you do. We are in this together.
3. You Should Attend Church Because It Makes You More Faithful.
Everything we mentioned above about your responsibilities to your fellow church members works in reverse as well. Just as you have a responsibility to encourage and stir up the other members of our church and help them to remain faithful to the Lord, Jesus, they have those same responsibilities toward you. They will have an extremely difficult time fulfilling those responsibilities if you are not often around.
Regularly gathering with your church helps you to be more faithful in another way also. The whole chapter on John 17, is an extended prayer that Jesus is praying for His followers—His disciples and those who will believe what they will preach—people like you and me. In verse 17, He prays, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” Sanctification is the word the Bible uses to describe the process of growth in Christ—of progressively becoming more and more like Him. Jesus prays that God will perform this work of grace in us, and He prays that God will do it using the truth—His word.
Of course, we can (and should) read and study God’s word on our own. The Holy Spirit works in our hearts as individuals as we devote ourselves to His word, but He also works when we read and study the Bible together as a church. In fact, God has designed it this way. You need to be regularly hearing the word preached, and you need to be regularly involved in Bible study groups with other believers—Sunday School, men’s and women’s groups, other periodic studies that are offered at the church. Studying the Bible with other people not only helps you to know it and understand it better but also helps you to apply it to your life better. Often other people in these group Bible studies offer insights or ask questions that you may never have thought of on your own.
In addition to these things, you also need to gather regularly to pray with and for others and to give others the opportunity to pray with and for you. We’ve been thinking about responsibilities that church members have for one another, and regularly praying for each other is a big one. I hope that you make a habit of praying for other members of our church. I hope that you regularly pray through the requests on our prayer lists, but also for different families in our church and, of course, for our church leaders. The church directory can be a very helpful tool for this purpose. There is great benefit in praying for one another in our private lives, but there is also great encouragement from hearing someone pray for you or to others when they hear you pray for them or a card sent telling others that you have been praying and what you have been praying for. I hope that you make praying for the church and church members a priority in your life, and I hope that you make regularly gathering with your church to pray a priority as well.
4. You Should Attend Church for What You Can Put Into It.
We all show up to different church gatherings hoping to get something out of it, and that is right and good. However, you should also be thinking about what you can add to your church when we gather together. God has given all of his people gifts—some are talents that we were created with or have learned through our life experiences, and others are spiritual gifts that the Holy Spirit has given to each of His people. God has gathered each of us together in His church. He has gathered this specific group of people—including you—together in this particular church so that the gifts He has given to each of us can be used to make the rest of us and our church better—more like Jesus.
If we are going to follow Jesus faithfully, kill sin in our lives, resist temptation, and serve the world around us the way God would have us to, we need each other—including you and your specific gifts!
