This one goes out to the doctrine lovers. The ones with opinions about church.
There’s a temptation you and I are susceptible to: we can love our vision of what a church should be more than we love the people who comprise it. We can be like the unmarried man who loves the idea of a wife, but who marries a real woman and finds it harder to love her than the idea of her.
I remember overhearing a church elder complain about a family who let their unbaptised children receive the Lord’s Supper. What struck me was the elder’s tone. It was contemptuous, as in: ‘The fools’! It felt as if this elder loved his vision of the biblical church more than he loved those individuals. But these people were untaught sheep. Of course they don’t know better. And God had given them this elder, not to complain about them, but to love them toward a better understanding. How easy it is to respond like this elder.
