Already, But Not Just Yet
May 2, 2021
I was talking to a man this week, who said he grew up in the Catholic Church, and was thankful for his upbringing, but isn’t part of the church anymore. He was lucky, sheltered from much of the corruption that is so publicized today, and even went into the mission field for a while. He loved the mission work (which I think was primarily caring for the poor), because the church there “was skin and bone.” They knew the work they had to do, and they went about doing it without any fuss. The church there was busy, vibrant, strong.
And then he came home, and was struck by how “fat” the church was, how opulent, how lax. He still has a passion for helping the poor, for serving God. He just can’t put up with the church.
How many people like him have there been? How many people have known God, looked at God’s people, and seen a giant chasm between the two? Far too many (dating back to before the time of Jesus, for the record).
It’s easy to blame them, to say they should be patient with and faithful to the church, that they should just stick with it and change the church from the inside. After all, the truth of Jesus is shown by Christians loving other Christians, a love that cannot be shown by standing apart from Christians and saying, “I love our God, but cannot stand the way you serve him.”
As true as that is, we should be more eager to have the more important conversation—why is it so common that people look at us and don’t see God?
Here’s the truth, the truth I have been trying to preach and teach diligently—we are new creation (2 Cor. 5.17). We are in Christ. We are already participating in eternal life.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have room to grow. In that same letter Paul writes “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3.18) We are being transformed, in the present, as we go about our lives. We are not wholly transformed—that comes later.
We're already new creation, but not just yet. It’s the status we have, but also a reality we should be striving towards. We are God’s image, even as we are being transformed into a more complete image of God. Failure to recognize our brokenness paired with our holiness results in us being complacent with the way the church looks right now. It’s that complacency that results in the church becoming “fat,” opulent, and lax. “We’ve already made it, we just need to maintain it.” May we recognize, confess, and repent of our brokenness, that we may become more the church God calls us to be.
—John Coffey
