The Importance Of Church Attendance Series

The Importance of Church Attendance!

If You Want to Kill the Church

Never go to your church or meetings held there, if you do go, be late, it’s no one’s affair.

If the weather is bad, either too hot or snowing, just stay home and rest, for there’ll be others going.

But should you attend, be sure and remember to find fault with the work, each official and member.

Be sure to hold back on your offerings and tithes, the bills will be paid by the rest of the guys.

And never take office if offered the post, but eagerly criticize work of the host.

If not on a committee you’re placed, be sore!

If you find that you are, don’t attend any more.

When asked your opinion on this thing or that, have nothing to say, just turn ’em down flat.

Then after the meeting, shine out like the sun by telling the folks how it should have been done.

Don’t do any more than you possibly can, leave the work for some other woman or man.

And when you see faithful ones work themselves sick, then stand up and holler, "It’s run by a clique!"

This funny thing called Commitment is what we are currently studying. We looked at Romans 12:1 and we saw that commitment requires our entire body. We are supposed to sacrifice ourselves to be committed to Christ. Then we looked at Romans 12:2 and we saw that if we are to be committed whole-heartedly to God first, then we can’t conform to the world. We are told not to conform and so we need to choose where our commitments will lie. They will either be with God or they will be with the world. And now we come to a place where we need to ask ourselves a deeper question. Now that we understand commitment, what it is, now let’s look at what things we are supposed to be committed to. And there are a few things that Christians are supposed to be committed to, but let’s look at something that we may sometimes overlook. We as Christians, if we are totally committed to Christ, then we are to be committed to the church. More specifically, we are to be committed to church attendance.

I know, sometimes it is hard to see how important church really is. Many times we feel like we have so many other important things to do, but where does church sit on God’s importance level? Why do so many people have many reasons to not come to church?

Football in the fall. Basketball in the winter. Baseball in the spring and summer. A certain minister had been an avid sports fan all his life. But he had had it! He quit this sports business once and for all. You can’t get him near one of those places again. Want to know why...

Every time he went, they asked him for money.

The people with whom he had to sit didn’t seem very friendly.

The seats were too hard and not at all comfortable.

He went to many games, but the coach never came to call on him.

The referee made a decision with which he could not agree.

he suspected that he was sitting with some hypocrites -- they came to see their friends and what others were wearing rather than to see the game.

Some games went into overtime, and he was late getting home.

The band played some numbers that he had never heard before.

It seems that the games are scheduled when he wanted to do other things.

He was taken to too many games by my parents when he was growing up.

He didn’t want to take his children to any games, because he wanted them to choose for themselves what sport they like best.

Author Unknown, At Calvary, Covington, KY.

So what does the Bible say about the church? Are we really supposed to be committed in our church attendance? Let’s find out. Let’s open our study in the book of Hebrews 10:23. Let’s read 10:23-26. “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near. For if we go on sinning willfully…” This passage is going to show us at what level of importance God puts church. And He is very serious about it as well as this passage tells us. So let’s look at the…

1. Importance of Church Attendance!

Notice v. 25 where it says, “Not forsaking our own assembling together as is the habit of some.” What does that mean? What are we talking about? Well since the early church didn’t have an actual church building, I guess that wouldn’t fit. But it is talking about the weekly worship assembly that the early Christians had. Hebrews is a book written to Jewish Christians to warn them not to go back to Judaism. Christ is a much better sacrifice than those that the Jewish priests could offer, but still some Jewish Christians in Jerusalem were thinking about going back. As a result, they were starting to not show up at church. The reasons that they may have stopped coming to the assembly are numerous. Persecution, asleep spiritually, thought they were too good for church, etc. Yet the writer tells us to not make a habit of skipping church.