I heard part of a sermon on a podcast today where the preacher changed all the words “we” in the Bible passage to the word “you”. He said he was doing this to make it more “immediate” to those listening.
I’m sure he had good intentions, but I think this is really bad. Here in our comfortable consumer “Western” world we are so obsessed by our individual rights, needs and desires that we almost worship ourselves. In the church this has crept into our worship songs as we seek our own individual “experience” of God in worship, all about our personal relationship with Him. A number of worship leaders around the Western world have started writing about this, calling for a return to real corporate worship.
The verse in the podcast was Ephesians 2:10:
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (NIV)
The preacher was making the point that each of us has our own destiny, which is different to anyone else’s, and we need to seek out what that destiny is for us.
But is that passage in Ephesians aimed at individuals or at the church?
From verse 11 to the end of the chapter, Paul is talking about the remarkable way in which Jesus has brought together Jew and Gentile so that they are part of the same church, with no difference in how they are treated. This is amazingly counter-cultural, and taken with other passages builds up a picture of great unity in diversity when all the very different individuals come together to make one body, the church.
Verses 19–22:
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Should we be deconstructing this “joined building”, pulling apart the “dwelling in which God lives”? Is this not what we are doing when we are so focused on our individual desires and “destiny” that we forget we are part of an amazing destiny of God’s people joined together supernaturally in spite of, and even through, our differences?