NOW we must review our army.
What can individual men do in a great crusade? We are associated with all the people of the Lord. We need for comrades the members of our churches; these must go out and win souls for Christ. We need the cooperation of the entire brotherhood and sisterhood. What is to be accomplished unless the saved ones go forth, all of them, for the salvation of others? But the question now is mooted. Is there to be a church at all? Is there to be a distinct army of saints, or are we to include atheists? You have heard of “the church of the future” that we are to have instead3 of the church of Jesus Christ. It will be anything else you like, but not a church. When the soldiers of Christ shall have included in their ranks all the banditti of the adversary, will there be any army for Christ at all? Is it not distinctly a capitulation at the very beginning of the war? So I take it to be.
We must not only believe in the church of God, but also recognize it very distinctly. Some denominations recognize anything and everything more than the church. Such a thing as a meeting of the church is unknown. In some “the church” signifies the ministers or clergy; but in truth it should signify the whole body of the faithful, and there should be an opportunity for these to meet together to act as a church. It is, I judge, for the church of God to carry on the work of God in the land. The final power and direction is with our Lord Jesus, and under Him it should lie, not with some few who are chosen by delegation or by patronage, but with the whole body of believers. We must more and more acknowledge the church that God has committed to our charge; and in so doing, we shall evoke a strength that else lies dormant. If the church is recognized by Christ Jesus, it is worthy to be recognized by us, for we are the servants of the church.
Yes, we believe that there ought to be a church. But churches are very disappointing things. Every pastor of a large church will own this in his own soul. I do not know that the churches of today are any worse than they used to be in Paul’s time, or any better. The churches at Corinth and Laodicea and other cities exhibited grave faults, and if there are faults in ours, let us not be amazed, but let us grieve over such things and labor after a higher standard. Albeit that the members of our church are not all they ought to be, neither are we ourselves. Yet if I went anywhere for choice company, I should certainly resort to the members of my church.
These are the company I keep:
These are the choicest friends I know.
O Jerusalem, with all your faults, I love you still! The people of God are still the aristocracy of the race. God bless them! Yes, we mean to have a church.
Now, is that church to be real or statistical? That depends very much upon you, dear brethren. I would urge upon you the resolve to have no church unless it be a real one. The fact is that too frequently religious statistics are shockingly false. Cooking of such accounts is not an unknown art in certain quarters, as we know. I heard of one case the other day where an increase of four was reported, but had the roll been amended in the least, there must have been a decrease of twenty-five. Is it not falsehood when numbers are manipulated? There is a way of making figures figure as they should not figure. Never do this. Let us not keep names on our books when they are only names. Certain of the good old people like to keep them there and cannot bear to have them removed. But when you do not know where individuals are or what they are, how can you count them? They are gone to America or to Australia or to heaven, but as far as your roll is concerned, they are with you still. Is this a right thing? It may not be possible to be absolutely accurate, but let us aim at it. We ought to look upon this in a very serious light and purge ourselves of the vice of false reporting, for God Himself will not bless mere names. It is not His way to work with those who play a false part. If there is not a real person for each name, amend your list. Keep your church real and effective, or make no report. A merely nominal church is a lie. Let it be what it professes to be. We may not glory in statistics, but we ought to know the facts.
But is this church to increase, or is it to die out? It will do either the one or the other. We shall see our friends going to heaven, and if there are no young men and young women converted and brought in and added to us, the church on earth will have emigrated to the church triumphant above; and what is to be done for the cause and the kingdom of the Master here below? We should be crying, praying, and pleading that the church may continually grow. We must preach, visit, pray, and labor for this end. May the Lord add unto us daily such as are saved! If there be no harvest, can the seed be the true seed? Are we preaching apostolic doctrine if we never see apostolic results? Oh, my brethren, our hearts should be ready to break if there be no increase in the flocks we tend. O Lord, we beseech You, send now prosperity!
If a church is to be what it ought to be for the purposes of God, we must train it in the holy art of prayer. Churches without prayer meetings are grievously common. Even if there were only one such, it would be one to weep over. In many churches the prayer meeting is only the skeleton of a gathering; the form is kept up, but the people do not come. There is no interest, no power, in connection with the meeting. Oh, my brothers, let it not be so with you! Do train the people to continually meet together for prayer. Rouse them to incessant supplication. There is a holy art in it. Study to show yourselves approved by the prayerfulness of your people. If you pray yourself, you will want them to pray with you; and when they begin to pray with you and for you and for the work of the Lord, they will want more prayer themselves, and the appetite will grow. Believe me, if a church does not pray, it is dead. Instead of putting united prayer last, put it first. Everything will hinge upon the power of prayer in the church.
O Jerusalem, with all your faults, I love you still! The people of God are still the aristocracy of the race. God bless them!
We ought to have our churches all busy for God. What is the use of a church that simply assembles to hear sermons, even as a family gathers to eat its meals? What, I say, is the profit, if it does no work? Are not many professors sadly indolent in the Lord’s work though diligent enough in their own? Because of Christian idleness, we hear of the necessity for amusements and all sorts of nonsense. If they were at work for the Lord Jesus, we should not hear of this.
A good woman said to a housewife, “Mrs. So-and-So, how do you manage to amuse yourself?”
“Why,” she replied, “my dear, you see there are so many children that there is much work to be done in my house.”
“Yes,” said the other, “I see it. I see that there is much work to be done in your house, but as it never is done, I was wondering how you amused yourself.”
Much needs to be done by a Christian church within its own bounds and for the neighborhood, for the poor and the fallen, for the heathen world, and so forth; and if it is well attended to, minds and hearts and hands and tongues will be occupied, and diversions will not be asked for. Let idleness come in, and that spirit that rules lazy people, and there will arise a desire to be amused. What amusements they are, too! If religion is not a farce with some congregations, at any rate they turn out better to see a farce than to unite in prayer. I cannot understand it. The man who is all aglow with love to Jesus finds little need for amusement. He has no time for trifling. He is in dead earnest to save souls, establish the truth, and enlarge the kingdom of his Lord. There has always been some pressing claim for the cause of God upon me; and that settled, there has been another and another and another, and the scramble has been to find opportunity to do the work that must be done. Hence I have not had the time for gadding abroad after frivolities. Oh, to get a working church!
The German churches, when our dear friend Mr. Oncken was alive, always carried out the rule of asking every member, “What are you going to do for Christ?” and they put the answer down in a book. The one thing that was required of every member was that he should continue doing something for the Savior. If he ceased to do anything, it was a matter for church discipline, for he was an idle professor and could not be allowed to remain in the church like a drone in a hive of working bees. He must do or go. Oh, for a vineyard without a barren fig tree to cumber the ground! At present most of our sacred warfare is carried on by a small body of intensely living, earnest people, and the rest are either in hospital or are mere camp followers. We are thankful for that consecrated few, but we pine to see the altar fire consuming all that is professedly laid upon the altar.
Brethren, we want churches that produce saints, men of mighty faith and prevalent prayer, men of holy living and consecrated giving, men filled with the Holy Spirit. We must have these saints as rich clusters, or surely we are not branches of the True Vine. I would desire to see in every church a Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet, a Martha serving Jesus, a Peter, and a John; but the best name for a church is All Saints. All believers should be saints, and all may be saints. We have no connection with the Latter-day Saints, but we love everyday saints. Oh, for more of them! If God shall so help us that the whole company of the faithful shall, each one of them individually, come to the fullness of the stature of a man in Christ Jesus, then we shall see greater things than these. Glorious times will come when believers have glorious characters.
We want also churches that know the truth and are well taught in the things of God. What do some Christian people know? They come and hear, and in the plenitude of your wisdom, you instruct them; but how little they receive to lay by in store for edification! Brethren, the fault lies partly with us and partly with themselves. If we taught better, they would learn better. See how little many professors know: not enough to give them discernment between living truth and deadly error. Old-fashioned believers could give you chapter and verse for what they believed, but how few of such remain! Our venerable grandsires were at home when conversing upon “the covenants.” I love men who love the covenant of grace and base their divinity upon it: The doctrine of the covenants is the key of theology. They that feared the Lord spoke often one to another. They used to speak of everlasting life and all that comes of it. They had a good argument for this belief and an excellent reason for that other doctrine; and to try to shake them was by no means a hopeful task. You might as well have hoped to shake the pillars of the universe, for they were steadfast and could not be carried about with every wind of doctrine. They knew what they knew, and they held fast that which they had learned. What is to become of our country, with the present deluge of Romanism pouring upon us through the ritualistic party, unless our churches abound in firm believers who can discern between the regeneration of the Holy Spirit and its ceremonial substitute? What is to become of our churches in this day of skepticism when every fixed truth is pointed at with the finger of doubt, unless our people have the truths of the gospel written in their hearts? Oh, for a church of out-and-out believers, impervious to the soul-destroying doubt that pours upon us in showers!
Yet all this would not reach our ideal. We want a church of a missionary character, which will go forth to gather out a people unto God from all parts of the world. A church is a soul-saving company, or it is nothing. If the salt exercises no preserving influence on that which surrounds it, what is the use of it? Yet some shrink from effort in their immediate neighborhood because of the poverty and vice of the people.
I remember a minister who is now deceased, a very good man he was, too, in many respects; but he utterly amazed me by a reply that he made to a question of mine.
I remarked that he had an awful neighborhood round his chapel. I said, “Are you able to do much for them?”
He answered, “No, I feel almost glad that we keep clear of them; for you see, if any of them were converted, it would be a fearful burden upon us.”
I knew him to be the soul of caution and prudence, but this took me aback, and I sought an explanation.
“Well,” he said, “we should have to keep them. They are mostly thieves and harlots, and if converted they would have no means of livelihood, and we are a poor people and could not support them!”
He was a devout man, and one with whom it was to one’s profit to converse, yet that was how he had gradually come to look at the case. His people with difficulty sustained the expenses of worship, and thus chill penury repressed a gracious zeal and froze the genial current of his soul. There was a great deal of common sense in what he said, yet it was an awful thing to be able to say it. We want a people who will not forever sing:
We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot enclosed by grace,
Out of the world’s wild wilderness.
It is good verse for occasional singing, but not when it comes to mean, “We are very few, and we wish to be.” No, no, brethren! We are a little detachment of the King’s soldiers detained in a foreign country upon garrison duty, yet we mean not only to hold the fort, but also to add territory to our Lord’s dominion. We are not to be driven out. On the contrary, we are going to drive out the Canaanites, for this land belongs to us. It is given to us of the Lord, and we will subdue it. May we be fired with the spirit of discoverers and conquerors, and never rest while there yet remains a class to be rescued, a region to be evangelized!
We are rowing like lifeboat men upon a stormy sea, and we are hurrying to yonder wreck, where men are perishing. If we may not draw that old wreck to shore, we will at least, by the power of God, rescue the perishing, save life, and bear the redeemed to the shores of salvation. Our mission, like our Lord’s, is to gather out the chosen of God from among men that they may live to the glory of God. Every saved man should be, under God, a savior; and the church is not in a right state until she has reached that conception of herself. The elect church is saved that she may save, cleansed that she may cleanse, blessed that she may bless. All of the world is the field, and all the members of the church should work therein for the Great Husbandman. Wastelands are to be reclaimed and forests broken up by the plow till the solitary place begins to blossom as the rose. We must not be content with holding our own; we must invade the territories of the prince of darkness.
My brethren, what is our relation to this church? What is our position in it? We are servants. May we always know our place and keep it! The highest place in the church will always come to the man who willingly chooses the lowest, while he who aspires to be great among his brethren will sink to be least of all. Certain men might have been something if they had not thought themselves so. A consciously great man is an evidently little one. A lord over God’s heritage is a base usurper. He who in his heart and soul is always ready to serve the very least of the family, who expects to be put upon, and willingly sacrifices reputation and friendship for Christ’s sake shall fulfill a heaven-sent ministry. We are to be ministered unto, but to minister, as well. Let us sing unto our Well Beloved:
There’s not a lamb in all Your flock,
I would disdain to feed.
There’s not a foe before whose face
I’d fear Your cause to plead.
We must also be examples to the flock. He who cannot be safely imitated ought not to be tolerated in a pulpit. Did I hear of a minister who was always disputing for preeminence? Or of another who was mean and covetous? Or of a third whose conversation was not always chaste? Or of a fourth who did not rise, as a rule, till eleven o’clock in the morning? I would hope that this last rumor was altogether false. An idle minister—what will become of him? A pastor who neglects his office? Does he expect to go to heaven? I was about to say, “If he does go there at all, may it be soon.” A lazy minister is a creature despised of men and abhorred of God.
“You give your minister only fifty pounds a year!” I said to a farmer. “Why, the poor man cannot live on it.”
The answer was, “Look here, sir! I tell you what: We give him a good deal more than he earns.”
It is a sad pity when that can be said; it is an injury to all those who follow our sacred calling. We are to be examples to our flock in all things. In all diligence, in all gentleness, in all humility, and in all holiness we are to excel. When Caesar went on his wars, one thing always helped his soldiers to bear hardships: They knew that Caesar fared as they fared. He marched if they marched, he thirsted if they thirsted, and he was always in the heart of the battle if they were fighting. We must do more than others if we are officers in Christ’s army. We must not cry, “Go on,” but “Come on.” Our people may justly expect of us, at the very least, that we should be among the most self-denying, the most laborious, and the most earnest in the church, and somewhat more. We cannot expect to see holy churches if we who are bound to be their examples are unsanctified. If there be, in any of our brethren, consecration and sanctification evident to all men, God has blessed them, and God will bless them more and more. If these be lacking in us, we need not search far to find the cause of our nonsuccess.
I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now, because the time is long and you are weary. I desire, however, if you can gather up your patience and your strength, to dwell for a little upon the most important part of my triple theme. Here suffer me to pray for His help, whose name and person I would magnify. Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly dove, and rest upon us now!
What three ways does 1 Corinthians 1:2 describe the people in the church of God?
According to Ephesians 4:14, what commonly happens to immature believers?
Acts 20:17–38 records Paul’s last visit to the elders of the church in Ephesus. In verse 32, he commends them to two things. What are these?