Submission to church authority (Luther's 95)

7. God never remits guilt to anyone without, at the same time, making him humbly submissive to the priest, His representative.


While I may not go so far as Luther did here in point #7, there is something to what he's saying.  After all, Luther didn't submit to his superiors when commanded to repent of his writings did he?  So what did he mean?


When one is reborn, he is filled with the Holy Spirit.  Calvin called this irresistible grace.  When God quickens our spirit from the dead, we see Him as He is and we come to understand our own wretchedness and His goodness and grace.  At this point we come to repentance and faith.  This comes with it a heart of contrition, we come to God humbly and broken.  This manifests itself in finding the local church and submitting to the authority of the church, provided the church is in fact a biblical church and is lead by biblical leaders.  Once one is found (church), then the reborn person comes under the spiritual authority of the elders of the church, for their benefit.  


I am reminded of our radical individualism in our society today.  When the church doesn't do what we want them to do (whether biblical or not), we have a tendency to just leave.  We can call it 'church shopping'.  When we find a church that seems to be where God is leading us, we join, tithe, give our time and efforts; that is until the church sees things different than we do.  I once had a gentleman from our church body tell me that if the new pastor didn't allow him to do some outreach activity on Halloween that he wanted to do, he would leave the church.  I was floored.  How can someone think so little of their Elder that they would leave over such nonsense?  There are times where you must break away from a church body (biblically), but all too often the reasons for people leaving their church body are for very selfish reasons and have nothing to do with reasons spelled out in scripture.  They simply refuse to come under the authority of the elder(s) of the church, no matter how biblical they may be.

I have some consternation about an elder (priest, pastor, etc) being labelled God's representative.  Maybe it's accurate, but I'm not in favour of the label.  I'm far too fallen a man to be given that kind of title.  Men are put in positions of leadership, an undershepherd of the flock if you will, but not His representative.  People that are reborn must come under the authority of elders, and to not submit to any authority here on earth is to stand firm in their own authority which is against everything a 'reborn' person would or should do.  There is nothing humbling about 'church shopping'.