4 Important Reasons You Should Commit to Church Each Week

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Chris Russell

Chris Russell

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Pastor, Veritas Church

Not long ago, I was reminiscing with a pastor friend of mine about the previous couple decades of our
ministries. We both noted how commitment to the church seems to be at an all time low.

As we discussed this, we both agreed that a decade or so ago, the core leaders of our churches normally
seemed to attend church about five out of every six Sundays or so. Less-committed church goers would
attend with less regularity, perhaps about half the time. Sadly, it seems that the core leaders today only
tend to attend church about half the time (about 2 Sundays per month), and the less-committed attend
even less than that.

This is a tragic shift, and nationwide figures seem to be showing the exact same trend. People just don’t
seem to be all that “into” God anymore.

People are clearly busier than ever, and that does not help the situation. Others have been hurt or
disillusioned by churches or “religious” people, so they use that as a “reason” for why they do not
attend church often. However, most people just seem to be looking for something better to do on
Sunday mornings than go to a church to worship and learn about God and His ways. Golfing, sleeping,
sports, and many other things turn out to be that “better option” for them than church.

I would like to suggest to you four reasons why church is a big deal – a REALLY big deal! Let me give you
some reasons why you should plan to be in church every single possible moment you can.

Why You Should Make a Huge Commitment to Being in Church Whenever the Doors Are Open . . .

1) The local church is a central part of God’s strategic plan for your spiritual growth.
I have often heard the statement, “Well, I don’t need to go to church to be a Christian.” On a slight
technicality, that may be true, but it is certainly far-removed from God’s true plan.

Jesus said, “On this rock [Peter’s statement that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God] I will build my
church, and the gates of Hell shall not be able to stand against it” (Matthew 16:18). You see, the church
is Jesus’ idea, not man’s idea. It seems like we should pay attention to His plan since it came directly
from Him.

When a person says they don’t need the church, that is a departure from God’s plan. I would advise
against that.

2) You are basically a composite of the five people with whom you spend the most time.

When I was a youth pastor, I could easily see how friends could influence young people for either good
or for bad. Now that I am a pastor to “big people,” I can see that tendency is true for them as well! Even
adults are influenced by their friends and the people with whom they spend time.

I have come to believe that we are basically a composite of the five people with whom we spend the
most time. It is important, therefore, that we choose those people well. That is why it is so valuable for
us to be in church every time the doors are open. We need to expose ourselves as much as possible to
other followers of Christ who will draw us nearer to God.

Paul said it like this: “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you
may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.” (Hebrews 3:13 NIV) We need the support of other believers if
we are truly going to grow in Christ.

3) You need the voice of the church to counteract all of the deception that is crammed into your mind all
throughout the week.

Paul warns believers in Colossians 2:8, “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty
deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not
according to Christ.” (NKJV)
The word for “cheat” in this passage refers to kidnapping another person. We need to be careful that we
are not “kidnapped” by false ideologies, by wrong thinking.

The term “traditions” refers to teachings. Do you realize how many ungodly teachers are speaking into
your life every week? Internet. News media. Hollywood. Music. Co-workers. Friends and family. The list
seems never ending. With so many messages streaming into your life every week that can “kidnap” you
and take you away from God, it is extremely critical that you spend as much time in church as possible
to fill your mind with godly wisdom and discernment. Soak in all you can whenever you can!

4) Weekly ministry in a local church helps to build up your spiritual muscles.

In Ephesians 4, Paul says that we all are gifted in different ways. When we use our own particular gifts to
serve within a church, it is a like a body with many body parts that all work together for a common goal.

As Paul discusses serving in this chapter, I find it interesting that he threw in the comment in Ephesians
4:14 in which he says, “... that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with
every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting….” In other
words, when we use our spiritual gifts by serving within the local church community, we somehow
become better-grounded theologically. It will be more difficult for us to be deceived into thinking things
that are not true according to God’s Word. Isn’t that amazing? Serving makes us more theologically
astute. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but I do know that I have observed it to be true in my own
life as well as in the lives of so many I have watched to grow in their journey with the Lord.

Commitment ain’t what it used to be. But I hope for you, you will go all out in your commitment to
Christ and His church.

Begin this Sunday!

Chapter 1:

The Scriptural Meaning of Commitment

How do we inherit eternal life? How can we come to know God, the living God? We shall see that in
Biblical teaching, the answers to these questions are inseparably linked to our commitment to God.

Commitment is an action on our part in response to God. There is no point talking about commitment
unless we have at least the intention to commit. Our purpose, then, is to call forth a specific active
response to God, and not just to increase our head knowledge. I will base this book on the Bible, the
word of God, and not on human ideas or opinions. Our goal is a breakthrough in our relat-ionship with
God. As for those of you who have already made some kind of commitment to God, my hope is that any
hindrance that may still stand between you and God will be removed.

Partial Commitment is no Commitment

Many Christians drag on in the Christian life year after year in partial commitment to God. But in the
Bible, partial commitment is no commitment at all. The Lord Jesus says, “I wish that you were cold or
hot” (Rev.3:15, HCSB). “Cold” means turning away from God all together. Yet in the mind of the Lord,
that is not quite as bad as being lukewarm—neither here nor there. You may be 80 percent for God and
20 percent for the world, but the truth is that not even 95 percent is good enough for God. He requires
of you nothing less than total commitment.

Many Christians are crippled in their Christian lives because of half-hearted commitment. They don’t
exper­ience the joy and peace of the Christian life. They can’t communicate with God, and God doesn’t
listen to their prayers. The problem is that their commitment has not been settled: they are not totally
committed to God.

The Christian Life does not Work without Total Commitment

On the basis of God’s word, there is simply no way to live the Christian life without total commitment.
That is the fact of the matter. It is not a matter of theory but a matter of reality and experience. You will
discover for yourself that the Christian life simply won’t work if you don’t commit totally to God. Does
God answer your prayers? If He doesn’t, then something needs to be sorted out about your
commitment. There are even people in full-time ministry who have commitment problems, but they
realize this only after entering the ministry. This is a miserable situation to be in. You may have given up
everything to serve the Lord, only to find out that you have no spiritual power, no joy, and no fellowship
with God. Holding back a little some-thing for yourself will undermine your commitment.

All in all, commitment has to do with the most important subject of all: our relationship with God.
Commitment in the Church Today?

The subject of commitment runs through the whole Bible. If we take it out of the Bible, we won’t have
any Bible left to read, for commitment lies at the heart of our relationship with God.

When I was a young Christian, no one told me about commitment. I did, however, have the advantage
of know-ing God in China at a time when it was dangerous to be a Christian and when our pastors were
being sent to labor camps. We knew very well that without commitment, we would not survive as
Christians. So commitment to God was not something that the church had to spell out explicitly.

When I finally arrived in Hong Kong, I said to myself, “It’s so wonderful to be in this free society where I
can worship God in church or buy a Bible at a bookstore.” But when I started visiting the churches there,
I soon realized just how dead the Christians were. My heart sank. I said to myself, “This is freedom?
These Christians have no life in them!” I simply couldn’t fellowship with them about the Lord. I couldn’t
talk to them about the deep things of God, or for that matter the elementary things.

When I shared with them about what God had done in my life, they couldn’t understand what I was
talking about. They gave me a puzzled stare as though I had come from outer space. After hearing about
my experiences of God, they would say to me, “These things took place in the book of Acts but not
anymore. Did you come straight out of the first century?”

I said to myself, “What’s happening here? I can’t even fellowship with my fellow Christians.”

As I listened to the church sermons, I soon discerned a lack of emphasis on the deep matter of our
relationship with God. When I conversed with some of the pastors, I felt that I was talking with some
businessmen. They seemed less interested in a relationship with God than in church income or church
property. They were constantly thinking about expanding this facility or that facility, or doing outreach
in order to expand the organiz-ation, much like a business trying to expand its market. I felt sick in my
heart, and wondered what exactly was the problem.

For a long time I couldn’t pinpoint the problem. But as I waited on the Lord for an answer, and examined
what the Bible may have to say about it, I began to see that the root problem was a lack of commitment.
People in our so-called free society are not interested in committing to God. The church’s failure to
teach commitment has resulted in the dead churches all around us. Whenever I raised the subject of
commitment, many would say to me, “If you talk about commitment, no one will go to church or
become a Christian. The cost is too high!” To this I would answer, “But commitment is taught
everywhere in the Scriptures.”

That is why we will look into the Bible to see what it says about commitment. Don’t accept what I say
out of my own opinion—see for yourself what the Bible teaches about it.

The Bible teaches not just commitment but total commitment, both in the Old Testament and the New
Testament. Total commitment is the foundation of our relationship with God. Commitment is
sometimes stated explicitly, other times implicitly. In the latter case, the statement would make sense
only in relation to commit-ment. If you remove the element of commitment from it, the sentence would
lose its meaning.

Commitment means to Love God with our Whole Being

Let us look at a couple of explicit statements. Let us start with something familiar from the Old
Testament, in Deuteronomy 6:5-7:

Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words
that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when
you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.
(HCSB)

Whether you are asleep or awake, or outside the house or inside, you must love the Lord your God with
all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. That is total commitment, plain and simple.
That the Israelites are to love God with their entire being is repeated in Deuteronomy 11:13:

So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the LORD your God and to serve
him with all your heart and with all your soul ... (NIV)

This principle is reaffirmed in the New Testament, in the very teaching of Jesus Christ:

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with
all your mind.” (Mt.22:37, ESV)
Therefore, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, total commitment finds expression in
loving the Lord our God with our whole being.

The Word “Commitment” in the Bible

Does the word “commitment” (or the verb “commit”) occur in the Bible or are we merely fabricating it?

That a word is absent in the Bible does not necessarily mean that it is scripturally untrue. Some biblical
concepts are accurately expressed by words that are not found in the Bible. An example is “sacrament,”
an important word that refers to baptism and the communion, yet is not found in the Bible.

Another example is “atonement,” an important word used by the church to refer to what was
accomplished by Christ’s death: he died to atone for—to pay for—our sins in order to reconcile us to
God. In the King James or Author­ized Version of the Bible, “atonement” occurs only once in the New
Testament, in Romans 5:11. Modern Bibles are far more likely to use the word “reconciliation” in this
verse. The word “atonement” may or may not be in your version of the Bible, yet it expresses the
eternal truth of what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

As for the word commit, is it found in the Bible? Psalm 31:5 says, “Into your hands I commit my spirit;
redeem me, O LORD, the God of truth” (NIV). When Jesus was dying on the cross, he said, “Father, into
your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46, NIV). Committing oneself or one’s spirit to God means to
entrust oneself entirely to Him.

Psalm 37:5 says, “Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act” (ESV). Again the basic idea
is to entrust. To entrust means to put something into somebody else’s care. To commit one’s spirit to
God is to put one’s own life, one’s own spirit, into God’s care.

Proverbs 16:3 says, “Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established”. Entrust all your
work and activities to God so that He may cause them to bear fruit according to His will.

Clearly the word “commit” doesn’t belong to the category of theological words such as sacrament or
atone-ment in terms of its presence or absence in the Bible. The fact is that “commit” is used frequently
in the various English translations of the Bible. An example from the New Testament is found in 1 Peter
4:19:
Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as
to a faithful Creator. (NKJV)

Here the Greek word translated “soul” means life. To save your soul is to save your life. To lose your soul
is to lose your life. To commit your soul to God, as in this verse, is to commit your life to God. This, in
fact, is the scriptural principle of faith in God. By faith we entrust ourselves to God; it is not just a matter
of believing in certain doctrines.

Believing with all your heart that an elevator can take you up is fundamentally different from your
actually stepping into it. If you don’t step into the elevator, you won’t go up even if you believe with all
your heart that it can take you up. You have to walk into the elevator and entrust yourself to it. To
entrust means to “trust into”. In entrusting yourself to the elevator, you don’t just believe that it can
take you up, you actually let it carry you up.

Likewise, you are not saved merely by believing that God can save you. The devil also believes that God
has a plan of salvation, but that won’t save him. The demons believe that God is one, yet they tremble
(James 2:19). To be saved, you have to believe in God in such a way as to commit yourself to Him. In
many Bible translations (e.g., ESV and NASB), “entrust” is the word found in 1 Peter 4:19 and in other
verses such as 1 Timothy 1:18 and 2 Timothy 1:12 and 2:2.

The Lord Jesus committed himself to God his Father, entrusting his spirit to Him, when he suffered and
died for us:

When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats.
Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. (1Peter 2:23, NIV)