Why We Invite All People to Church

The prophet Isaiah saw something that has not yet fully arrived, a mountain lifted above every other mountain, with people from every nation streaming toward it. Not driven. Drawn. Saying to one another, come, let us go up to the house of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us His ways.

Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established on the top of the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD … He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths.”

Isaiah 2:2-3 (NKJV)

This is why we invite all people to the house of God. It is the one place where anyone can come to meet God, and in meeting Him, finally end the exhausting search we are all on. Because when we lost God, we lost something we have been trying to get back ever since.

The search for weight

When man sinned, he lost his glory. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The Hebrew word for glory is kavod, and it literally means weight, heaviness, to matter. So when we lost our glory, we lost our sense of weight, our sense that we matter. And almost everything fallen human beings do is an attempt to get that weight back.

That is why Paul warns believers, “Let us not become desirous of vain glory” (Galatians 5:26). The word he uses is kenodoxos, which means empty of glory. Do not live your life out of that emptiness, always trying to matter, always trying to feel heavy, always hunting significance. Once you see it, you notice this hunger everywhere.

Think of the old Rocky film, the night before the fight. Rocky tells Adrian he cannot beat Apollo Creed, that he is not even in the man's league. And then he says the thing underneath it all. It does not matter if he loses, it does not matter if Creed opens his head, if he can just go the distance and still be standing when the bell rings, then for the first time in his life he will know he was not just another bum from the neighborhood. That is a man ready to have his skull cracked open, just to prove he is not a nobody.

That is kenodoxos, living empty of glory. And it drives more of our lives than we admit. Some of us are chasing the PhD, the master's, the promotion for exactly that reason. Some of us work day and night for the money, the house, the car, the building back home, so that no one can treat us as a nobody. In the Bible, Leah kept having children hoping Jacob would finally stop treating her like a second-class woman.

It gets darker. Some people stay with someone who abuses them because they would rather be mistreated than be alone and seen as unwanted. I once heard a woman explain why she never turned in the abusive man she lived with. She said, “Look at me. Look at me. Which other man could have me?” That is the search for weight, gone desperate. Some hunt for it through their age or rank, some through their talent, some through the color of their skin, their background, the group that finally let them in.

You matter already

Into all of that, Isaiah says: invite the people to the house of God. Bring them to the place where they can meet God, because only in meeting Him does the endless, fruitless search for glory finally end, as they receive the glory of God Himself in their lives.

Here is what the glory of God says to you: you matter already. You matter enough that I would die for you. You do not have to let Apollo Creed crack your head open to matter to Me. You do not need a PhD, you do not need to string a perfect sentence together, for you to matter to Me. You are already heavy enough for Me to come after.

This is why we invite all people to church, so they can meet a God who will not judge them by the color of their skin, and not even by the content of their character, but by His love for them. We cannot be a church for the goody-two-shoes only. We cannot be a place where if you are good you are accepted and if you are bad you are rejected.

Because think about what it would mean if we were. It would mean we ourselves are still hunting glory, in our own moral record or in the respectability of the people around us. We would be quietly saying, if we can just be good enough, or fill our church with good enough people, then we will finally know we are something. That is the very search Jesus came to end.

Accepted because of Jesus

In this house, God does not accept you or reject you based on whether you are holy, good, or morally upright. God accepts you because of Jesus. And the proof that you actually believe that is simple: you can invite anyone at all to come and meet Him here. This has to be the one place a person never walks into hoping to earn glory through good behavior.

So this must be the one place you can come to receive glory from God alone, even after years of searching for it in a boyfriend or girlfriend, a husband or wife who never tires of cutting you down and making you feel like nothing. Come here and stop looking for significance in that relationship. Come meet the God who gives you His glory, who shows you how much you already matter to Him, to the point of dying for you.

And it must be the one place where the young man or woman who has been chasing glory in money, in the next promotion, in fame, in drugs and alcohol, always chasing and never catching, can finally come and meet a God who honors you like the best thing that ever existed, even though you have nothing to show, no money, no beauty, no degree, no fame.

What we have to get right

So what do we, who are already here, have to do to make this place truly the house of God that Isaiah saw? First, we ourselves must fully take hold of the gospel of grace, because we cannot give away what we do not have. Here is the whole message in two lines.

Because of the sin of one man, all men became rejected by God, no matter how good they were. But because of the righteousness of one man, all men became accepted by God, no matter how bad they were. It is not what you do that separates you from God; it is what Adam did. And it is not what you do that draws you to God; it is what Jesus did.

So when people walk into this house, we must represent our God to them accurately. That means we do not fixate on what they are doing or have done, because God does not. We focus on what God has done for them. Your first job is to love them, exactly as God loves them. You do not judge them for their behavior, because God does not judge people by their behavior. He looks at who is operative in their life, Adam or Jesus, and works patiently to bring them from the one into the other.

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior … he has now reconciled.

Colossians 1:21 (NIV)

If God does not condemn a person for what they do, who are we to condemn them? We have no right to call unclean what God has called clean. God is not present in a church that condemns people for their behavior, no matter how many miracles happen there or how beautiful the music is.

There is no other mountain out there where a person's search for glory can actually end, because everywhere else you earn it, you fight for it, you get your head cracked open for it. Not in academics, not in business, not in entertainment, not in politics. Only here can you be glorious, not because of anything you did, but because of what was done for you. So invite everyone. And if today you are tired of searching everywhere else, you can end the search right where you are. Come and meet the God who already decided you matter.