Spirit blows. What bothers me is facts without power and notes with out music. Music is more than an assortment of notes. A love letter is more than a collection of nouns, verbs and adjectives. A sermon is more than 30 minutes’ worth of homiletic material. Reading some of our religious journals today causes me to want to go outside for a stroll to get the taste out of my mouth. The words and the tune must go to gether. It is one thing to have the notes in your head, but quite another to have the music in your heart. A Stradivarius in the hands of Fritz Kreisler would lift one out of this world. Let some ordinary fiddler play it, however, and it would be nothing more than horse hairs scraping on catgut. The church at Ephesus was busy with her works but they weren’t the first works of love. Only the love of God, shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, can add this third in gredient to make God’s statutes our song in the house of our pilgrimage. The other day in a meeting I looked over the congregation. The people seemed sleepy, listless, singing with out thinking of what they were say ing. I thought, “If we really believe what we say, knowing that we have both a here and hereafter in Jesus Christ, the church probably wouldn’t hold the crowd and the service wouldn’t end till after midnight.” It seems sometimes that churches are made up of a languid handful who have left their first love, if they ever had it. They are just playing church, faultily faultless and icily regular. We need to deal with divine electricity at church and something ought to happen. There should at least be a charge or a shock. How is it with your life? You will either be playing notes, without any real inspiration, or you will be singing from the depths of your heart the new song in Christ Jesus. I earnest ly pray that it may be the latter.
much about “relevance,” “dialogue” and “involvement.” There are panels and symposiums where we pool our ignorance, and seminars with intel lectuals high in the theological stra tosphere. My soul hungers like the Dutchman in Grand Rapids who said, “What is all this argument? I sure would like to get in another good old ‘Jesus’ meeting.” I’m weary with lectures on music. When Moody went to Scotland the first time, the people had experi enced a great many church splits w ith much theological dissension. Moody didn’t know anything about that. He wasn’t a theologian. He just preached the grace of God. Somebody observed, “He set to music a tune that had been haunting us for thousands of ages.” The church men had argued the notes but Moody had played the music. Something’s vitally missing now. This isn’t just the nostalgia of an older man. I am not harping on “The good old days.” To be sure, some of them weren’t so good after all. I find younger preachers today, who are likewise concerned and who yearn to find the warmth of the Scriptures in the hearts of men and women. Where is the radiance of the Christian faith? The Ephesian Christians left their first love and the church dis integrated. I remember preaching in a church years ago where they had a paid quartet. The four sang every night before I preached. Then they left, before I got started. One night they sang, “I’m a pilgrim and a stran ger. I can tarry but a night.” I thought that ought to be their theme song. It is like so much we see to day, a performance which means nothing. The preacher can be so polished that our eyes will blink with his brilliance. Yet there are no tears. Sometimes it can be our fault; the difficulty could be the receiver and not the transmitter. Yet, my heart still glows when the breath of the 6
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