We Need Churches of Restoration

We continue our meditation on the call to balance holiness and grace in the twenty-first century. We have to live in the tension between being churches devoted to holiness and being merciful churches as well. The process of sanctification is a long-term journey. We need churches willing to pay the price of reflecting the character of Jesus Christ.

Let me say something to those who read me, listen to me, or watch this program: if a pastor or Christian leadership decides to follow this path of balance that I see reflected in the person of Christ Jesus, they will face many attacks from both sides. Those on the side of extreme holiness and legalism will accuse them of being liberal, of not adhering to the Word of God, and of being permissive in spiritual matters because they are not constantly cutting people’s heads off whenever they fall into one sin or another, and because they are willing to allow people a little room as they grow toward the fullness of Christ’s character.

Or they will face accusations from the other side, from permissive, liberal people who do not believe in holiness and who are calling on the Church to cast off all restraints and allow homosexuality, cohabitation outside marriage, and the abuse of Christian freedom in other ways, because they believe this is simply a new era and that, after all, the Bible is a book written 2,000 years ago that reflects the primitive patterns of a culture that knew nothing of Freud, Darwin, or the discoveries of modern science.

So we are going to take cannon fire from both sides: from liberals who do not want to hear about the call to holiness that Scripture brings us, and from legalists who want to produce instant saints overnight while they themselves are wrestling with secret struggles they do not want to admit. It takes great spiritual courage on the part of biblical, mature Christians to maintain that balance between the two.

If we are effective in maintaining this balance in our ministries, what will happen is that people with wounds, needs, and bondages will flock to our church, because they will recognize our communities as places where they can find relief for their souls and solutions to the things that afflict them.

Churches that reflect mercy and holiness will be the churches that grow in this century and are effective in evangelism. But when these people come into the heart of the Church, they will need a great deal of parental care and a very complex, sophisticated approach capable of dealing with the situations they bring with them. A church that continually brings in people who are not believers will face serious demands and problems as well.

In our country there is a saying: “Whoever wants a hair bun must put up with the tugging.” It is a somewhat rough expression, but in the context of Christian life it means that if we want the privilege of having evangelistic churches, we will also have to deal with the complication of building balanced churches, because when people who are not believers, with their many bondages and needs, come into the heart of the Church, they will need time to get their lives in order.

Think of the many families that sometimes come to church with terrible problems: the husband and wife are not married, though they have lived together for many years; others come with a bondage to pornography or other kinds of bondage, homosexuality, lesbianism, and so on. These people will come, and we will have to receive them, talk with them, help them through the process of sanctification, hold personal counseling sessions, or assign them a discipler or a knowledgeable, mature person to work with them. Sometimes we will see them relapse, and so we must welcome them back.

That is why the apostle Paul says in Galatians 6: “If anyone is caught in a fault, that person must be restored.” We need churches of restoration. Evangelistic churches must also be churches of restoration. We have to take those who come from outside and restore them; and even after they are within the Church, some of them will fall as time goes on, and then we will have to lift them up again and restore them.

People come to church with drug addictions or alcoholism, for example. God sometimes sets people free immediately, but restoration often takes a long time, and in His sovereignty God sometimes chooses to lead people through a gradual, step-by-step process to sanctify them, because in that process they learn other things and develop other qualities. They are also prepared to be a blessing to others later on, having learned from their own process of restoration.

God is a very systematic God, and He too sometimes takes time to develop people whom He can later use for the purposes of His Kingdom. That is why we need churches that teach, mother churches, churches that are master teachers, where the pastoral process, the process of restoration and the healing of souls, can be modeled.

That is why we return to that passage when we find that people in our churches fall and have different kinds of problems. It can be anything; it does not have to be something sexual or immoral. It may simply involve restoring people from mistakes of character they make, from imperfections: gossip, murmuring, being excessively delicate and sensitive to the criticism of others, depression, anxiety. All these are also works of the flesh; they are sins. Getting out of these things and being restored from them takes a long time and requires merciful, generous pastoral care that gives people time to reach the more mature perspective toward which Christ wants to lead them.

And we see that balance reflected in the way Christ treats people in the Gospels. Let us be people of restoration. God bless you.