What right does the Church have to tell me what to believe and what to do?

 

The Bible is a good place to start in finding an answer. Read, in order, these Scriptures: John 17:20–23; 1 Timothy 3:15; 2 Corinthians 5:17; John 21:15–17; Luke 22:31–32; Matthew 16:18; John 14:9–12, 15–17, 23–24.

If the Church is only an organization of human beings, then it has no right to tell you what to believe or what to do. But if the Church is the teacher Jesus left on earth to tell us his words and his will and to continue his work on earth, then the Church has its right from Jesus, her founder. Further, Jesus has this right from his Father, for he is the Son of God. He is just as divine as his Father, just as you are just as human as your human father.

God has the right to tell us what to do because he created us and designed us (Gen 1:26–27; Rom 5:14–18). He gave us our very existence, as an author gives his character's existence. Doesn’t an author have the right to tell his characters what to do?

The analogy fails here, for we have free will, as characters in a piece of fiction do not. We can choose to love and obey our Author or to rebel against him. Even when we rebel against God, God keeps loving us (Heb 12:5–11). His love is another thing that gives him the right to tell us what to do. It’s for our good and out of his love that he directs us (Heb 12:9–11). He made the world and he knows what roads through life make us happy and bring us home to him, and which do not. His directions for our lives are his all-knowing and all-loving travel plan through the earth to Heaven.

When the Church teaches something we find hard or don’t feel like doing, for example, in the area of sexual ethics, we have to choose: Do we set ourselves up as God and judge God’s ideas by our own ideas, or do we judge our ideas by God’s ideas? He designed the machine; he has the right to write the operator’s manual.

Kreeft, P. J.