How should we speak about the Church?

Joel Beeke explains in this video that when you bring your children up in the nurture and fear of the Lord, they will be folded into a larger family that will never die. The Church is the blood-bought bride of Christ. Accordingly, we should be very wary of criticizing the Church, the bride that Christ gave everything for.

When you have a family, your goal of course is that you'll bring them up in the nurture and the fear and the admonition of the Lord, and the idea is that hopefully God will regenerate them under your tutelage and they will be folded into the larger family that will never die which is called the Living Church the invisible Church And so the goal post fall for a family is not to be a be all and end all in itself because our earthly families now because of sin will die. We'll see one another in heaven if we're saved and we'll worship the same Christ and we'll be able to recognize each other. That's wonderful. But then we belong to the the family that no man can number and so my passion with my children must be that they belong to that family that will never die. And so the church is very valuable.

It's the blood-bought bride of Christ. I can illustrate that with one example that happened to me. My brother was 19 and I was 16 when he got engaged and I thought he got engaged too early and so I was kind of murmuring a little bit like a younger brother might be prone to do to him and actually dared to present some kind of veiled criticism about his bride and whoa he stopped the car got off the side of the road turned off the engine took his finger three times and poked into my chest and said never never never do you criticize my bride You can criticize me but not my bride. She is very special. Well, I got the lesson.

I mean, I never did it again. But some people think they can just glibly criticize the church, the bride of Christ. And my brother didn't die for his woman, he didn't shed blood for her. Jesus gave everything, absolutely, to win his bride. So we gotta be careful how we speak about his bride.

Now, should we never bemoan the condition of the church? Of course, but if we criticize the church we need to do it like Jeremiah with the tears streaming down her face, saying, whoa, oh, would to God, would to God that the church would turn back to the scriptures. But we don't sit in our chairs and casually with dry eyes criticize ministers and the church and we somehow look better than them. That's not a biblical way. So I think we need to understand these things, that the Church and the family are both very important, but post-fall, the Church has this very exalted place in the minds of the Triune God.

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