On December 7 of the fourth year of King Darius’s reign, another message came to Zechariah from the LORD. The people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regemmelech, along with their attendants, to seek the LORD’s favor. They were to ask this question of the prophets and the priests at the Temple of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies: “Should we continue to mourn and fast each summer on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, as we have done for so many years?”
The LORD of Heaven’s Armies sent me this message in reply: “Say to all your people and your priests, ‘During these seventy years of exile, when you fasted and mourned in the summer and in early autumn, was it really for me that you were fasting? And even now in your holy festivals, aren’t you eating and drinking just to please yourselves? Zechariah 7:1-6
Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure. James 4:2b-3
A few weeks ago Selma Church Church was studying James on Wednesday nights. As I read the passage from Zachariah in my personal devotional time it hit me that these two scriptures went together. The people were morning and fasting for all the wrong reasons. They were doing it for selfish motives. The loss of the Temple was horrible but how they were responding was according to God only for selfish motives.
This reminded me that we can also be praying and fasting for good things but have impure motives. We might say we are doing it for a good reason but the real reason is selfish. It’s like the person who says that they are praying for people to start coming to church but then later confess that the church needs more money, teachers, and prestige, just to name a few.
Church growth is a good thing, right? Maybe, if it means more faithful servants of God, but if it means anything else then all we have is a club that gives people the illusion of spiritual security. What if what we end up with is what Jesus warned the Pharisees about when he said that their disciples became “twice the child of hell you yourselves are!” Matthew 23:15 Ouch.
Let’s admit here that if the ingredients in a recipe are poison the product will be poison. Yes, God can and does do miracles in churches that had wrong motives but a miracle is always an exception and not the rule.
So why do we really want church growth?
Are we willing to accept what that really means? More immature Christians in the church, More work not less, sharing power, disagreements, change…
On the flip side, if it’s godly growth, it means making a bigger impact for God in your community, seeing more people commit to God, encouraging testimonies…
At the end of the day, growth is God’s job, our job is to be faithful and to have the right motive.