A Vision for the Local Church That Treasures Christ Above All

What’s the most foundational question that every local church must answer? Here’s what I mean. Before we ask what our services should look like, plan our outreach calendars, wrestle over budgets, buildings, and brochures, there is one question that should come before every other one:

Why does the church exist at all?

The shortest, truest answer is this: the church exists for the glory of God. We exist because God is infinitely worthy of being known, loved, trusted, and enjoyed because He has graciously bound Himself to a people who would treasure His Son above every rival treasure on earth. The church is not first and foremost a service provider, a social club, or a community of like-minded people. The church is a blood-bought people gathered around a glorious Christ, learning to find Him more satisfying than anything this world can offer.

John Piper once wrote that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. That sentence has shaped a generation of Christians for a reason. It tells the truth about why we exist. We are not most useful to God when we grit our teeth and grind out a duty-bound Christianity. We are most useful to God (and most truthful about Him) when our hearts genuinely treasure His Son. A bored church bores the watching world. A church that has actually tasted that the Lord is good (1 Peter 2:3) cannot help but spill that goodness everywhere it goes.

So here is the thesis I want to commend to our church, though it is fitting for any local church:

We treasure Christ and worship in all of life by learning Christ, living for Christ, speaking the gospel of Christ to the lost and to each other, and sending ourselves into our community for the sake of Christ.

These four words—Learn, Live, Speak, Send—describe what happens in a church whose members have been captivated by the glory of God seen in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Let me walk through each one.

Learn

A church that treasures Christ is, first of all, a church that listens to Him.

The Christian life begins with a Word. God spoke, and the world was. God spoke, and Israel was called out of Egypt. God spoke His final and fullest Word in His Son (Hebrews 1:1–2). The church, from Pentecost onward, has been a community devoted to the apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42) because we cannot treasure a Christ we do not know.

This is why the local church gathers around an open Bible on Sunday morning, why our small groups open the Bible together during the week, why parents read Scripture to their children at the kitchen table, and why pastors study before they teach. While philosophers gather to swap opinions about God, we gather to hear God. We come as learners of Christ—disciples—expecting the living God to speak through His own Word and to shape us by it.

There is something glorious about listening to the Lord. To open the Bible expecting God to speak is to confess that He is real, that He is worth hearing, and that we are not the center of the universe. The posture of listening and learning is itself an act of worship. We ask simple questions of the Bible. “What does this show us about God? What does this show us about ourselves?” The answers are not always simple, but sitting at the feet of a Savior who is infinitely greater than us has a profound effect.

A church that learns Christ together is a church being patiently re-formed around the actual character of God rather than the character of God we would have invented for ourselves if we had not made the effort to listen to Him.

Live

A church that has truly learned Christ cannot stay still. Listening leads to obeying—in the case of this outline, living.

James warned the early church that a hearer who is not also a doer of the Word is like a person who looks at themselves in a mirror and immediately forgets what they look like (James 1:22–24). God did not disclose Himself in His Word so that we could fill our notebooks. He gave us His Word to remake our lives. When God speaks through Scripture, He calls us to repentance, faith, and concrete action in the ordinary places of our lives.

This is where the worship of Sunday morning meets the worship of Monday morning. Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:1 to present our bodies as a living, spiritual, and worshipful sacrifice refuses to let us split our lives into the sacred and the secular. The whole of life is the arena where Christ is treasured or where He is not. The Christian dad who patiently corrects his son with the gospel is worshiping by putting the patience of Christ on display in his own home. The Christian neighbor who keeps showing up with a casserole when the family next door is grieving is worshiping by extending the compassion of the Good Shepherd to sheep without one. The Christian employee who tells the truth at work when a lie would be more convenient is worshiping by fearing God more than men and confessing with his words that Christ is a better treasure than any promotion.

A church that lives what it learns measures maturity by how the Word is producing visible fruit in real-world obedience. The Christian life is not most fundamentally a set of opinions; it is a way of walking (1 John 2:6). When the people of God walk in obedience together, the watching world sees a community of imperfect people whose lives are slowly being conformed to the image of a glorious Christ. Our world doesn’t have a category for that, so it stops them in their tracks.

Speak

A church that learns Christ and lives for Christ will, sooner or later, find that it cannot stop talking about Him.

This is one of the most natural yet most neglected implications of treasuring Christ. We talk about what we love. We tell friends about the restaurant we discovered, the album we cannot stop listening to, and the team that finally won. If you talk to me for half an hour, you’ll probably find out that Aldi is my favorite grocery store. Jesus put it plainly: out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45). If the gospel really is good news—if Christ really has died for sinners, risen from the grave, and is right now reigning over heaven and earth—then silence is the strangest response a Christian can offer.

Speaking the gospel happens in two directions in a healthy church. First, we speak it to each other. The “one anothers” of the New Testament are a description of how the Word of Christ dwells richly in a community (Colossians 3:16). We encourage one another with the promises of God. We correct one another when sin is winning. We remind one another of the cross when guilt feels heavier than grace. The local church is the place where the gospel gets preached to believers all week long, not just from the pulpit on Sunday.

Second, we speak it to the lost. Gospel conversations belong in ordinary moments like on the front porch, around the dinner table, in the school pickup line, and on the lunch break, not just at evangelistic events. Most people will not be saved at a crusade; they will be saved through a thousand small conversations with a Christian neighbor, coworker, family member, or friend who could not stop talking about Jesus. A church that speaks the gospel as a normal part of life is a church that takes its own message seriously.

Send

At this last point, the vision gathers into mission. A church that treasures Christ gathers to be sent.

The very last words of Jesus to His disciples in Matthew’s Gospel are a sending: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19). The church is not a holy huddle protected from the world, but an outpost of the kingdom of God planted in the world for the sake of the world. We are gathered on Sunday so that we can be scattered on Monday. We come together so that God might send us out.

This is true on the global scale, too. The church of Jesus Christ exists for the nations, and we will gladly send our best and brightest to the ends of the earth. The same is also true on the local scale. God has placed each of us in a neighborhood, a workplace, an extended family, and a community for a reason. The people next to you at the grocery store, the family two houses down, the coworker in the next cubicle are not random. God has placed them on your mission field. To live a sent life is to recognize that your daily routine is not in the way of the Great Commission; it is the Great Commission for you.

A church that lives outward-facing, sent lives together, doesn’t have to manufacture mission as a special program. Instead, mission becomes the ordinary climate of the church’s life. We expect God to use simple, faithful obedience in real neighborhoods with real people to multiply disciples and grow His kingdom.

The Doxological Heart of It All

I’d be remiss not to mention what holds these four words together. Learn, Live, Speak, and Send are not four distinct church programs. These ideas are four facets of a single jewel. They are what it looks like, in practice, for a people to treasure Christ above all.

When we learn Christ, we are saying with our posture that He is worth knowing. When we live for Christ, we are saying with our bodies that He is worth obeying. When we speak of Christ, we are saying with our mouths that He is worth proclaiming. When we send ourselves for Christ, we are saying with our calendars and our zip codes that He is worth our lives.

This is worship in all of life. It’s so much more than worship confined to a song service or a sanctuary; it’s worship that spills out of an open Bible, into an obedient life, through a speaking mouth, and toward a watching community. This is what it means to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

In case you’re wondering, this is why the local church matters so much. The local church is the visible, tangible, breathing community where this kind of life becomes possible. None of us learns Christ well in isolation. None of us obeys Christ well in isolation. None of us speaks the gospel well in isolation. None of us is sent well in isolation. We need a community. God has given us that community, and He calls them the church.

I pray that we would grow to be that kind of church together. May we open the Word and expect God to speak. May we live what we learn. May we talk about Jesus as the most natural thing in the world, because to us He is. And may we go into our streets, neighborhoods, county, and beyond for the sake of the name that is above every name.

To Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen!