The Devil and the Church # 5

The Devil and the Church # 5

The Church is distinctly, preeminently and absolutely a spiritual institution - that is, an institution created, vitalized, possessed and directed by the Spirit of God. Her machinery, rites, forms, services and officers have no loveliness, no pertinency, no power - except as they are channels of the Holy Spirit. It is His indwelling and inspiration, which make its divine being and secure its divine end. If the devil can by any methods shut the Holy Spirit out from the Church - he has effectually barred the church from being God's Church on earth. He accomplishes this by retiring from the Church, the agencies or agents which the Holy Spirit uses - and displaces them by the natural, which are rarely if ever the media of His energy. Christ announced the universal and invariable law when He said, "That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit."

The Church may have a holy preacher, a man of great prayerfulness, of great grace, filled with the Spirit. But if satan can by any method retire him, and put a man of no prayerfulness, plausible, eloquent and popular - the Church may seem to have gained, but it has gained by the substitution of natural for spiritual forces, a gain which has all unconsciously revolutionized the Church.

Imagine, a church with the leadership of holy men, not highly cultured, but well-versed in the deep things of God, and strong in devotion to Christ and His cause, not wealthy, nor of high social position. Now change these officers and put in men who are every way decent in morality, but not given or noted for prayer and piety, men of high social position and fine financiers, and the Church scarcely realized the change - except marked improvement in finances. But an invisible and mighty change has taken place in the Church, which is radical. It has changed from a spiritual Church to a worldly one. The change from noonday to midnight, is not more extreme than that. At this point satan is doing his deadliest and most damning work - the more deadly and damning because it is unnoticed, unseen, producing no shock and exciting no alarm.

It is not by overt, conspicuous evil that satan perverts the Church - but by quiet displacement and by unnoticed substitution. The spiritual gives place to the social - and the divine is eliminated, because it is made secondary.

The perversion and subversion of the Church is secured by satan when the spiritual forces are retired or made subordinate to the natural; and social entertainment, and not edification becomes the end. This process involves not only the aims and end of entertainment, but it is intended to soften and modify the distinctly spiritual aim and to widen from what is deemed the rigid exclusiveness of spiritual narrowness. But in the end it eliminates all that is distinctly spiritual, and that which is in any sense deeply religious will not survive the death of the spiritual. Edification as the end of God's Church is wholly lost sight of - and entertainment, that which is pleasing and pleasant, comes to the forefront! The social forces not only retire the spiritual forces, but effectually destroy them.

A modern church which its kitchen and dining room, with its club and gymnasium, and with its ministries to the flesh and to the world - is both appealing and alarming. How suggestive in the contrast it presents between the agencies which the primitive Church originated and fostered, as the conserver of its principles and the expression of its life, and those which the modern and progressive Church presents as its allies or substitutes.

The original institutions were wholly spiritual, calculated to strengthen and cultivate all the elements which combine to make a deep and clear experience of God. They were training schools for the spiritual life, as the chief end. They never lingered in the regions of the aesthetic and the worldly. They fostered no taste nor inclination which was not spiritual, and which did not minister to the soul's advance in divine things.

They took it for granted that all who came to them, really desired to flee from the wrath to come, and were sincerely desiring after Christlikeness, and that their obligation to furnish to these the best aids, were of the most sacred and exacting kind. It never occurred to them that sports or social events were channels through which God's grace would flow and could be laid under tribute for spiritual uses. These social and fleshly events are regarded in many quarters as the perfection of spiritual things. These agencies are arrayed as the mature fruit of spiritual piety, flavored and perfected by its culture and progress, and ordained henceforth as the handmaids of the prayer and preaching meeting. We object most seriously to the union. What have they in common? "How indeed can two walk together, unless they are agreed?"

~E. M. Bounds~

(continued with # 6)