Bible Studies

You Cannot Love the Groom and Skip the Bride

by Rick McGrath
09/17/26
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The Sentence I Hear Everywhere

I preach and teach in a lot of rooms, and there is one sentence that follows me into nearly every one of them. It comes from the checkout line, the family reunion, the comment section, and the hospital waiting room. It is said with confidence, sometimes with a little defiance, and almost always with a smile:

"I don't need to go to church. I have a personal relationship with Jesus."

Then comes the list of reasons, and I have heard them all. The church is too institutional. The church is too political. The church wants my money. I was judged there. I was excluded there. I was hurt there by people who should have known better. I can read my Bible at home. I can worship in my car with the radio up. I can hear better preaching on a podcast than anything offered within thirty miles of my house. There is no good church near me. And the one I hear most often, the one that ends every conversation before it starts: God told me I don't need a church to follow Him.

I want to take those reasons seriously, because some of them describe real wounds. But I also want to say plainly what a preacher is obligated to say. The Word of God does not agree with the conclusion. Not one line of it.

Here is where I intend to land, so you can watch me build toward it. Scripture does not describe Christ and the believer as two individuals in a private arrangement. It describes a Groom and a Bride. You do not get to adore the one and disregard the other. You cannot love the Groom and skip the Bride.

A Phrase That Is Not in the Book

Start here, because everything else depends on it. The phrase "personal relationship with Jesus" does not appear in Scripture. Not in the Gospels, not in the letters, not in Revelation. It is not that the phrase is wicked. It is that it is imported. We borrowed it from a culture that puts the word "personal" in front of everything it wants to control.

We hire a personal trainer. We open a personal bank account. We guard personal property and personal information and a personal calendar. "Personal" in our language means mine, private, managed by me, on my terms, and nobody else's business. When we attach that word to the Son of God, we quietly hand ourselves the remote control.

And here is the danger. A Jesus who belongs only to me will eventually start to sound like me. He will share my politics, excuse my grudges, bless my spending, and frown at exactly the people I already frown at. A private Jesus is a mirror with a halo. That is why I say it without flinching: heaven forbid that I should have a merely personal relationship with Jesus. I know the man I would turn Him into.

God Has Always Been Making a People

Open the Old Testament and watch what God does when He saves. He does not collect individuals. He forms a people. He tells Abram, "I will make of you a great nation" (Genesis 12:2). He brings a nation, not a man, out of Egypt. He says at Sinai, "You shall be my treasured possession among all peoples" (Exodus 19:5). The covenant is cut with a congregation.

The New Testament does not reverse this. It fulfills it. Peter writes to scattered, suffering believers and calls them "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession," and then he drives the point home: "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people" (1 Peter 2:9, 10). Salvation moved you out of isolation and into a nation.

Even the word we translate "church" says it. Ekklesia means an assembly, a gathering, a people called out and called together. There is no such thing as an assembly of one. To say "I am the church all by myself" is like saying "I am a choir" or "I am a family." The noun will not bend that far.

You Were Baptized Into a Body, Not Into a Bubble

Paul says, "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:13). Notice the preposition. You were baptized into a body. Paul then spends the rest of that chapter refusing to let any Christian imagine himself as a freestanding believer. "If the foot should say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body" (1 Corinthians 12:15). And then the sentence that should end the argument: "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you'" (1 Corinthians 12:21).

Read that again slowly. "I have no need of you" is precisely what "I don't need the church" says out loud. Paul calls that impossible. A hand severed from the arm does not become independent. It becomes dead.

Romans says the same. "For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another" (Romans 12:4, 5). You are not merely a member of Christ. You are a member of everyone else who is a member of Christ. That is the deal.

So yes, your relationship with Jesus is with His person. But His person has a body, and that body is the church (Colossians 1:18). You cannot embrace the Head and elbow away the body He bled for. You cannot love the Groom and skip the Bride.

Even Your Prayers Are Not Private

The disciples asked for a lesson in prayer, and the Lord gave them one. He did not say "My Father." He said, "Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven" (Matthew 6:9). Our. Give us. Forgive us. Lead us. Deliver us. The model prayer of the Christian faith has no singular pronouns in it at all.

You may pray alone in a locked room at two in the morning, and you should. But you never pray by yourself. You pray in the Son, by the Spirit, to the Father, with a countless company of saints whose voices are rising with yours in every language on earth. There is no such thing as a me-and-Jesus prayer. There are only us-and-Jesus prayers.

What the Assembly Actually Gives You

Hebrews is not subtle. "And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near" (Hebrews 10:24, 25). The writer knew people would quit gathering. He named it as a habit some had already formed. And he called it neglect.

Look at what the text says gathering is for. It is not primarily so you can get something. It is so you can stir up somebody else. Your absence is not a private decision. It is a subtraction from people who needed you there.

Look at what the first believers did with their freedom: "And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42). Four things, and not one of them can be done alone.

Consider what Christ gave the church and why. "And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood" (Ephesians 4:11, 12, 13). Maturity is a group project. Paul says the body "grows so that it builds itself up in love" only when "each part is working properly" (Ephesians 4:16). Your part is missing.

Consider the Table. "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:16, 17). You cannot take communion with yourself. The meal is a plural verb.

Consider the ordinary commands you physically cannot obey alone. Love one another (John 13:34). Bear one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2). Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed (James 5:16). Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5:21). Teach and admonish one another (Colossians 3:16). Show hospitality to one another without grumbling (1 Peter 4:9). Call for the elders of the church when you are sick (James 5:14). Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls (Hebrews 13:17). A Christianity with no "one another" in it is not a private Christianity. It is a disobedient one.

Let Me Answer the Reasons

"The church is corrupt and institutional." Some congregations are. Read the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 and you will find a cold church, a compromised church, a tolerant church, a dead church, and a lukewarm church that made the Lord sick. Here is what He did about it. He did not tell the faithful to stay home. He called the churches to repent and He kept dealing with them. If Christ did not abandon a body that bad, on what authority do we?

"I was hurt there." I believe you, and I am sorry. Some of you were wounded by leaders who will answer for it, because "the Lord is a God of justice" (Isaiah 30:18) and shepherds who scatter the flock are judged by name (Jeremiah 23:1, 2). That pain is real and I will not tell you it isn't.

But here is what has to be said next. Every congregation is a room full of sinners, which means every congregation will eventually hurt you and every congregation will eventually need your forgiveness in return. That is not an excuse for the wrong done to you. It is simply what "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) looks like when it walks into a sanctuary. If one wound is grounds for permanent withdrawal, then no believer could ever stay anywhere, including the church of the New Testament itself, which had a Judas in the twelve and a Diotrephes putting fellow believers out of the church for spite (3 John 9, 10).

So watch what actually happens when the wound becomes the reason to stay away for good. With thousands of congregations and denominations across this country alone, the claim that you have nowhere left to go rarely survives an honest search. What is really happening is that a real hurt has become a permanent alibi, and the enemy is glad to let you keep it. He does not need to destroy your faith to neutralize it. He only needs to convince you that isolation is wisdom. Every day you stay outside the body is a day you are not being sharpened by anyone, and a day someone else is not being blessed by you. "Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment" (Proverbs 18:1). Forgive as you have been forgiven (Ephesians 4:32), find a healthy congregation, take your time, and heal inside the fellowship rather than outside of it. The wound is not the problem. The permanent exile you built around it is.

"I can study the Bible on my own." Please do. But notice that Philip asked the Ethiopian, "Do you understand what you are reading?" and the man answered, "How can I, unless someone guides me?" (Acts 8:30, 31). Notice that Peter admits some of Paul's writing is hard to understand, and that untaught, unstable people twist it to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16). Nobody is immune to that, least of all a reader with no one to correct him.

"I get better preaching from a podcast." A recording can teach you. It cannot baptize you, serve you the Lord's Supper, visit you in the hospital, rebuke you when you are wrong, hold you accountable, or sit with your family at your funeral. A preacher you cannot ask a question is not your pastor. He is a resource. God gave you shepherds who keep watch over your souls and must give an account for you (Hebrews 13:17), and a man who does not know your name cannot give an account for you.

"I can worship on my own." You should worship on your own, every day. But the Psalms keep calling worship a public act. "I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you" (Psalm 22:22). "I was glad when they said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the LORD'" (Psalm 122:1). "Praise the LORD! Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of the godly" (Psalm 149:1).

"There is no good church near me." Sometimes that is a real hardship, and God knows the difference between a believer in a hard place and a believer with a low tolerance for imperfect people. Ask yourself honestly which one you are. If it is genuinely the first, then pray for a congregation, drive further than is convenient, or ask God to plant one. What you are looking for is a place where the Word is preached truthfully, Christ is exalted, the ordinances are kept, and the saints love each other. You are not looking for a place with no flaws, because that place has no members either.

"God told me I don't need a church." This is the one I will not soften. God does not contradict His own Word. "Do not neglect to meet together" is not a suggestion He whispers His way around. Test every impression: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God" (1 John 4:1). A voice that excuses you from obedience and leaves you accountable to no one is not the voice of the Good Shepherd. It is your own preference wearing His accent.

The Bride Is Not a Crowd of Individuals

Here is what settles it for me. Scripture calls the church the Bride of Christ. "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her" (Ephesians 5:25, 26). Paul tells the Ephesian elders to care for "the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood" (Acts 20:28). And John hears the shout at the end of all things: "Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready" (Revelation 19:7).

Christ did not die for a scattered collection of private admirers. He purchased a Bride. And no man who loves the Groom despises His Bride.

There is one more thing to notice about that wedding. When the Lord finally gathers His own, the gathering is the point. "After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb" (Revelation 7:9). Heaven is an assembly. If you cannot stand ninety minutes a week with the people of God now, I would ask what you expect to do forever.

Why This Matters More As the Day Draws Near

I have said the church is not optional. Let me now say why the hour makes that non-negotiable.

Jesus did not warn us about the last days in vague terms. He warned us specifically about deception, and He said it would come dressed as the real thing. "For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect" (Matthew 24:24). Read that warning slowly. He is not describing an obvious counterfeit that only fools the untaught. He is describing deception so convincing that even the elect, the very people God has chosen and is keeping, could be led astray if such a thing were possible. Paul says the same about the days before Christ's return, that people will be "carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes" (Ephesians 4:14), and that "the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith, devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons" (1 Timothy 4:1).

Now ask the obvious question. Who is best positioned to be swept along by a deception that convincing? A believer alone with a screen, a private interpretation, and no one to say "that is not what the text says." Deception does not usually announce itself. It arrives sounding reasonable, quoting Scripture, wearing the language of the faith. The believer with no elders to test the teaching, no brothers to say "something is off here," and no gathered body holding the line together with him is the easiest target in the field. Isolation is not neutral in a season like this. It is exposure.

This is exactly why the writer of Hebrews ties the command to gather to the nearness of the Day. "Not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near" (Hebrews 10:24, 25). Notice the logic. The closer we get to the end, the more urgent the gathering becomes, not the less. He is not telling a comfortable, stable church to keep a pleasant habit. He is telling a church heading into deception and difficulty that the assembly is one of the ways God keeps His people from being carried off. Iron sharpens iron in a way a screen cannot (Proverbs 27:17). Elders keep watch over souls in a way a podcast host who does not know your name cannot (Hebrews 13:17). The saints test the spirits together in a way no one tests them well alone (1 John 4:1).

So this is not merely about fellowship, as precious as that is. In days like these it is about survival. The one who withdraws into private religion in the name of a personal relationship with Jesus removes himself from the very safeguard Christ built into the body to keep him from being deceived. If false christs can nearly deceive the elect, an isolated believer with no one to answer to and no one testing what he hears has stripped away his own defense at the worst possible time to do it.

The Charge

So, I will say it one last time, and I mean every word.

Heaven forbid that I should have only a personal relationship with Jesus. If He were mine alone, I would remodel Him into my own likeness, and I would call the renovation devotion. Instead He has placed me in a body, under preaching I did not choose, beside people I did not pick, sanded down by the very fellowship I sometimes want to escape. That is not a detour around discipleship. That is the road.

If you have been away, come back. Not to a perfect church, because there isn’t one, and if there were, your arrival would end its record. Come back because Christ is there in the middle of His gathered people (Matthew 18:20), because the household of God is "the pillar and buttress of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15), because you are a member that the rest of the body is doing without, and because the days ahead will not get easier to face alone.

The Head has never said to you, "I have no need of you." Do not say it to His body.