In his book "Life Together," Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out that we must in the church keep our eyes on what Christ has called us to do in the church. He tells us that we usually come to the church with our wish dreams about the church. We come to the church looking for what we want, not what Christ wants. This is usually the source of our disappointment with our churches.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture and we're going to be talking about church life and God's design for the church and people's often growing dissatisfaction with what happens in a church. And we're going to draw from a book that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote called Life Together, and he points out that we must keep our eyes on what Christ has called us to be and to do in the church. And he tells us that we often come to the church with what he calls our own wish dream, our wish dream for the church. What he means is that we come looking for what we want.

We have our agenda, we have our laundry list. And then we get very disappointed if our wish dream is not fulfilled. Let me read to you what he says. One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience, which he has not found elsewhere.

He is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood. What do you think about that? Sounds like Dietrich Bonhoeffer is preaching the sufficiency of Scripture here. He's really hitting the nail on the head, meaning he's talking about a rejection of the sufficiency of Scripture and bringing your own thoughts to what Christian community ought to be rather than let your thoughts be shaped by the New Testament. And he wrote this a long time ago, and this still happens today.

There's nothing new under the sun. There's nothing new under the sun. He says that having your own wish dream threatens the church, And so he explains that like this. He says, just at this point, Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship, confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood. And he identifies that this can be a common malady for new zealous Christians.

So people who are taking their faith very seriously, but they're new, they haven't been around the block in local churches for a period of time, and so they're really trying to impose their preconceptions about what the Christian community would be like. Listen to what he says here. The serious Christian set down for the first time in a Christian community is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realize it. So he's new, he's excited, or she's new and she's excited, and she has this idea of a utopian Christian community, and then sort of tries to conform everything around him or her to these preconceptions of what it'll be like, and it is a life of perfection in Jesus, and it doesn't materialize. He says that it's poisoned at the root, which means, and we know this, you have people that show up at church and they are poisoned at the root with some wish dream, as he calls it.

Pastors just need to understand that and try to know how to shepherd people through it. Hey, maybe we should print this out, you know, put it at the front of the church. You know, You have people, they come with a very specific thing that they want, mostly because they didn't have it before. It might be a level of fellowship. They may have been in a place for the level of fellowship in the church, know true connection with people was was maybe even non-existent and they come and they are locked down to find a place where we're going to do life together.

I want to be in a place where we do life together. And that's always scary because the truth is only God can do that. Only God can open those doors. We do want our churches to be places where people are involved in one another's lives. But when somebody says, do life together, it scares me because I don't know what they mean by that.

Right. Do you mean we're going to meaningfully be involved in each other's lives, or do you mean you have sort of a communal, a commune vision of what Christian community is supposed to be like where we do everything together all the time and that's just that that's nobody's life. That's that wouldn't even be healthy or good. Yeah, how do you raise your own children if you're over at somebody's house every day? So anyway, he's saying that that you know people are poisoned through, but the truth is there are probably a lot of poisoned roots.

And that's, of course, that's what Christian discipleship is. That's what preaching is for, is to begin to deal with some of those roots. We shouldn't despise it, but we need to understand what's going on. I was tasked with leading the time of bringing someone into membership a couple of weeks ago. So we always, we read the church covenant and then they agree, you know, that they want to live together in that way.

So I was in the preparation for that time, I was counting the number of different scripture passages that are referenced. So you have a paragraph, you say this, but then it's founded on these scripture references, and there are 59 scripture references. Most of them are New Testament. And really the idea is we want to be bound together by the life that the New Testament sets forth for believers. And so we really want our local church life to be shaped, not by our wish stream of our thought of what a Christian utopia would be like, but how the New Testament actually says we ought to live together.

Boy, you make me wanna preach through our church covenant. We have the same church...we use the same church covenant, pretty much 59 verses. I'm doing a series on the church right now, and that wouldn't be a bad idea. It wouldn't be a bad start. To go through the 59 verses that explain all these things.

But we're bound together by the texts that tell us how we ought to live together, not by my dream of what I think Christian community would be like or yours. And you know what he says, he says, the sooner you get over this, the better. He says, the sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. In other words, he's saying, it's good when the disillusionment comes, because then you got something to work with. And he says, a community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community.

Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish-dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. So, and he actually says that God will shatter it. God will come and shatter your wish-dream of Christian utopia community, and then what? You will either adjust to God's wish-dream for His people, Or you'll be disillusioned with your brothers and sisters because they didn't conform to your idea of what it should all be like, and so you'll end up blaming them.

Here's a quote, he says, the man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the Brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands Adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if the creator of the Christian community, as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure.

When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself." So I think he's right about the progression here, and think of what a death spiral that is. If a person goes down that death spiral, I mean, this is the type of thing that will cause someone to lead the faith altogether because they'll think, these other Christians, they failed me, God failed me, I've failed myself, I'm gonna do something else. I'm done with the church. Yeah, I don't need this.

Yeah. You know, he says, he who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes the destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. So we can have genuine, honest, seemingly pure desires, but they actually work to destroy the community. I had What you just read, I had that outlined as a quote to be read too because of how powerful it is. The very next sentence is, God hates visionary dreaming.

God hates visionary dreaming. Why is that? Well, it's because we end up looking to the dream to provide for us the things that God has designed us to depend on Him for. So, I have my wish stream of Christian community, and it's going to provide for me these things. And God is saying, no, I provide for you those things.

I'm not gonna give it to you in any temporal thing. These things are... We're made to depend on God and to look to God for the most fundamental things, not to Christian community. And people who depend on the things that God designed us to depend on Him for, and they transfer that to the Christian community, do end up disillusioned. This can happen in marriage too.

You look to your marriage partner for the things that God ought to be providing for you, and they never measure up to that. You know, John Knox said that all inventions from the brain of man in the worship of God are idolatry. More God-hating, visionary dreaming. Yeah, visionary dreaming. And you know, visionary dreaming is what always gets the church in trouble.

That's why we're advocates of the regulator principle, only God can regulate church life. And we should just do the things that God has ordained for us to do. And it will be pleasing to some, not to others, but to keep people focused on God's design and not trying to recreate the church with every creative brain that enters into the church, just to be satisfied with that, to bring everybody, to unify everybody around that. Thankfully, he gives us the antidote. So the venom that will kill you is your wish dream of what you think the Christian community, well, what's the antidote?

The antidote is thankfulness, actually looking to God and being grateful for the things that He has given you in your brethren, not the things that you're pining away for that you think He should have given you. He asks, are your complaints the result of your wish dream? Yeah, and the answer to that is almost always yes. You're pining away for something he hasn't told you to even expect. Yeah.

Let's close with Ephesians 4. Ephesians 4.1. It's really a call to walk in the church. How do you walk in the church? I therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called and this is the heart of it.

With all lowliness and gentleness, with long suffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all." But you are giving sort of the way to walk in the church with lowliness and gentleness and long-suffering." He concludes with a plea to the reader. So here's the plea. Release people to be regulated by God. You stop trying to regulate them into the form and shape of your wish dream and let God make disciples at the pace that He makes His followers into the likeness of His Son.

Different paces for different people in different categories. He does it with perfect wisdom. You trying to squeeze them into the mold of your wish dream is only making everything toxic. Beautiful. Yeah.

Beautiful. Yeah, thank you, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yeah, yeah, fantastic stuff. So, it would be better just to let the waste dreams die and let the work of God by the Spirit of God, being patient with one another in all these things, and setting our hearts toward the things that God has ordained for the church to do and just do them. That's where the sweetness is.

And then God takes care of the rest, usually not in our timing, not in the way that we want it. But God calls us to patience in the church. So thank you, thank you for joining us in the Church and Family Life podcast, and Jason, thank you. Pleasure. Yeah, and we'll see you next time, next Monday.

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