Why go to church when church can come to me? | Asking for a Friend | Week 7

Why go to church when church can come to me?Asking for a Friend • February 19, 2023Teacher: Dave Brown--Dietrich Bonhoeffer"The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of the bourgeois respectability is at an end.  The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace.  The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.  I need no longer to try and follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship…has freed me from that."On Sundays, we go to a building for worship.  We don’t go to Church because we are the Church.What does it mean to be the Church?1 Thessalonians 1:1 NIVPaul, Silas and Timothy, to the church of Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.Ekklēsia - Called Out Ones, assembly1. Participate in God's Kingdom.We are to live under King Jesus.We are to be an alternative culture.We are to be an indwelling fellowship.We are to live like free people.Romans 6:11-14 NIVIn the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.We are a dwelling place for God.Revelation 21:3 NIVGod’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.  They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.We are to act out of love.TertullianBut it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death.