REFLECTIONS

“TOO MUCH “AT HOME”

These all died in faith...and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. (Hebrews 11:13)

One of the most telling indictments against many of us who comprise our Christian churches is the almost complete acceptance of the contemporary scene as our permanent home!

We have been working and earning, getting and spending, and now we are enjoying the creature comforts known to human beings in this land. You may bristle a bit and ask: “Is there anything wrong with being comfortable?”

Let me answer in this way: If you are a Christian and you are comfortably “at home” in Chicago or Toronto, in Iowa or Alberta—or any other address on planet earth, the signs are evident that you are in spiritual trouble.

The spiritual equation reads like this: the greater your contentment with your daily circumstances in this world, the greater your defection from the ranks of God’s pilgrims enroute to a city whose architect and builder is God Himself!

If we can feel that we have put down our roots in this present world, then our Lord still has much to teach us about faith and attachment to our Savior!”

-A.W. Tozer American Pastor and Author 1897-1963

REFLECTIONS

Christ’s Eternal Love For His Church

“Mark the hypocrites that come into the Christian church and that mar her purity. Observe the formalists that crowd her courts, that sit as God’s people sit, and sing as God’s people sing, but have hearts full of rottenness and villainy. Observe even the true saints—how unbelieving, how carnally-minded often, how childish, how ready to murmur against God! How few of them are fathers in Israel! When they ought to be teachers, they have need to be instructed in the first elements of the faith. What heresies come into the church, and how many unstable minds are carried away with them. What divisions there are! How one saith, “I am of Paul,” and another, “I am of Apollos,” and a third, “I am of Christ” (1Co 1:12). What envyings there are, what backbitings of those that are eminent for usefulness. What suspicions against those who are a little more zealous than their fellows! My brethren, what a lack of affection we can see in the church of Christ; how little brotherly kindness, how little sympathy. On the other hand, how much of pride is discovered…How we find some claiming to be lords in God’s heritage and taking to themselves names and titles to which they have no right, seeing that “One is our Master,” and we are not to be called “Rabbi” among men. When I look at the church even with a blinded eye, having no power to see her as God’s omniscient eye must see, yet is she covered with spots. Well may she wear her veil and say, “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me” (Song 1:6). O church of God, how is it Jesus Christ could love thee, for even in thy church capacity and church-estate how much there is that could make Him say, “Thou art reprobate silver; thou shalt be cast into the fire” (see Jer. 6:30). Lo, how much there is that must make Him say of thee, “Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?...It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Luke 14:34; Mat 5:13).

And yet you see, dear friends, it is written that Christ loved His church, and gave Himself for it. I think I see it—a piece of ground untilled; neither hedged, nor walled, not covered with vines, nor redolent with the perfume of sweet flowers, but it is a spot in the wilderness, filled with the thorn, the thistle, and the brier; her hedges are broken down; the stones of her wall are scattered; the wild boar out of the wood wasteth her; all kinds of unclean creatures lurk among her weeds and brambles. Oh, how is it, Thou Lord of glory, that Thou couldst buy, at the price of Thy heart’s blood, such a waste piece of ground as that? What couldst Thou see in that garden that Thou shouldst determine to make it the fairest spot of all the earth, that should yield Thee the richest of all fruit?

Methinks, again, I see the church of God, not as a fair maid decorated for the marriage-day with jewels, and carrying herself right gloriously both in her person and her apparel; but I see her as a helpless child, neglected by her parents, cast out, unwashed, unclothed, left uncared for, and covered with her filth and blood. No eye pities her, no arm comes to bring her salvation. But the eye of the Lord Jesus looks upon that infant and straightway love beams forth from that eye, speaks from that lip, and acts through that hand. He says, “Live!” and the helpless infant is cared for: she is nurtured; she is decked with dainty apparel; she is fed, clothed, sustained, and made comely through the comeliness of Him Who chose her at the first. Thus it is that strong love moved the grace of God, and the church found that Christ gave Himself for it.”

-C.H. Spurgeon  British Preacher 1834-1892

REFLECTIONS

Christ’s Love For His Bride

“Now, observe what this church was by nature…The church that Christ loved was in her origin as sinful as the rest of the human race. Have the damned in hell fallen through Adam’s transgression? So had the saved in glory once. The sin that was imputed to lost spirits was equally and with as fatal consequences imputed to them; had it not been for the incoming of the covenant head, the second Adam, they had forever suffered with the rest. They, too, were alike depraved in nature. Is the heart deceitful above all things in the unregenerate? So it is in the elect before regeneration. Was the will perverse? Was the understanding darkened? Was the whole head sick and the whole heart faint in the case of those who continued in sin? It was just the same at first with those who have been by sovereign grace taken into the heart of Christ. “We were,” says the apostle, “by nature the children of wrath even as others.” Remember that between the brightest saint in heaven and the blackest sinner in hell, there is no difference except that which Christ has made. Had those glorified ones been left to continue in their natural state, they would have sinned as foully and as constantly as the worst of sinners have done. To begin with, there is no difference between the elect and the non-elect. They are all alike fallen: “They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Rom 3:12).

Nay, more—this church of Christ is made up of persons who are actually defiled by their own transgressions. Are you and I members of that church? Ah, then, we are compelled to confess that in us by nature dwelt all manner of [lust], vileness, and an evil heart of unbelief, ever prone to depart from the living God and to rebel against the Most High. And what since have we done? Or rather, what have we not done?

We did not all fall into the same vices, but still when the black catalogue of sin is read, we have to weep over it, and to say, “Such were some of us.” But why we should make a part of Christ’s church is a question that never can be answered except with this one reply: “Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight” (Mat 11:26). Do the wicked sink to hell with their sins like millstones about their necks? We should have sunk there too, and as rapidly and as fatally, unless eternal love had said, “Deliver him from going down into the pit, for I have found a ransom.” Look at Christ’s church as you see her visibly in the world, and I ask you, brethren, though she has much about her that is admirable, whether there is not much that might cause her Lord to cast her away. Even in her regenerate estate, she speaks truly when she says she is “black as the tents of Kedar” (Song 1:5).”

-C.H. Spurgeon  British Minister  1834-1892