any preacher have to beseech such people to love and serve the Lord? Would such people sit silent in prayer meetings and hurry home to watch some TV clown? If they had what they profess, if they be lieved the hymns they sing, the Scriptures they recite, could they be content to enjoy such riches in a world of beggars ? Could they feast at the King’s table and throw a few scraps now and then to a world that has never heard the Good News? It has been said that no real revival will come untl Mr. Amen and Mr. Wet-eyes are in the con gregation. These two brethren have been absent from our con gregations for too long. Is not this sad state our lot today be cause we have left our first love and lost the joy of our salvation? The early church started with a little band of happy Christians eating their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. Nobody had to put on a drive to lure them to worship. They “ packed the pews” voluntarily. They wouldn’t have missed it for anything. They were a little colony o f heaven in a pagan world. The world could not understand such a fellowship. Ev ery time a revival breaks out, every time there is an outbreak of primitive Christianity, it fol lows that pattern. Later, the fire dies, the experience becomes a performance, the force becomes a farce. What is the secret of it? Not human enthusiasm, not organiza tion or mere loyalty to a party. Only the Holy Spirit can produce such Christians, such churches, such meetings. When we worship IN THE SPIRIT, when we sing IN THE SPIRIT, when men preach IN THE SPIRIT, when people have ears to hear what THE SPIRIT says, when we do not grieve nor quench THE SPIRIT, there the Acts of the Apostles comes alive again and first-century Christianity breaks out anew even in times like these. Some of us sure would like to find another “ good old Jesus meeting.”
primarily interested in filling out cards and tabulating statistics. Their creed is sound but there is enough meat on the skeleton that you see more than the bones. They are happy in the Lord, they love each other, they are pilgrims and strangers bound for a better country and they want others to join the band. They are not only right; they are radiant. They have not come to church to be amused but to stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Naza- rene. The Word of God is precious to them and they need no whirl ing dervish with a songbook beg ging them to whoop it up for the Lord. Such a meeting becomes in creasingly rare in the Laodicean Christianity of America, rich, in creased with goods and needing nothing. One may still find it in smaller sects or in little churches across the railroad tracks. It can be found on mission fields or be hind the Iron Curtain, where it still means something to be a Christian. When it doesn’t cost much it doesn’t mean much. Once in a while some great church man ages by the grace o f God to pre serve it and all who love either the frolic or the funeral type of meeting go somewhere else. What appalls me is that most people do not seem to know the difference between the perform ance and the experience, the sha dow and the substance, the unreal and the real. Too many have the idea that going to church, sing ing hymns, hearing the minister and going home is all there is to it. Spiritual truths are no more real than fairy tales and Santa Claus. How many have actually known the burden of sin’s guilt and the joy of deliverance? How many really know that they are children of God, bom again to live forever? How many have been so transformed that the old life is to the new as night to day? Could any company of people really have all that and sit as life lessly as we do in church on Sun day? Would any song leader have to beg such people to sing? Would
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CLIP AND M AIL COU PON TO D A Y
11
OCTOBER, 1966
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