I think it would be perfectly safe to say that the church of Christ was never in all its history so fully, so skillfully, so thoroughly, and so perfectly organized as it is today. Our machinery is wonderful; it is just perfect, but it is machinery without power. When things do not go right, instead of going to the real source of our failure, our neglect to depend on God and look to God for power, we look around to see if there is not some new organization we can get up, some new wheel that we can add to our machinery. We have altogether too many wheels already. What we need is not so much some new organization, some new wheel, but “the Spirit of the living creature in the wheels” we already possess.
I believe that the devil stands and looks at the church today and laughs in his sleeve as he sees how its members depend on their own scheming and powers of organization and skillfully devised machinery. “Ha, ha,” he laughs, “you may have your Boy Scouts, your costly church edifices, your multi-thousand-dollar church organs, your brilliant university-bred preachers, your high-priced choirs, your gifted sopranos and altos and tenors and bases, your wonderful quartets, your immense men's Bible classes, yes, and your Bible conferences, and your Bible institutes, and your special evangelistic services, all you please of them; it does not in the least trouble me, if you will only leave out of them the power of the Lord God Almighty sought and obtained by the earnest, persistent, believing prayer that will not take no for an answer.” But when the devil sees a man or woman who really believes in prayer, who knows how to pray, and who really does pray, and, above all, when he sees a whole church on its face before God in prayer, “he trembles” as much as he ever did, for he knows that his day in that church or community is at an end.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Brian J AbrahamI am on the leadership team with OSU Chi Alpha...we are not a frat. Check us out on Facebook or on our site. Archives
July 2018
Categories |