Life's Ironies.

Why is it that some of the worst rascals in the world have never been in trouble with the law?  How do the most vicious criminals the world knows have no police record?  Strange, but true.

Then some of the best people in the world have gained for themselves a police record, often through no fault of their own.

But in whose company would you rather be - the former or the latter?  And which of them would you want to rule in the church? 

Well, give me the latter any day.  Why?  Because knowing some of the worst rascals around to be utterly destructive of spiritual priorities and holding office within their local churches and denominations, they are very bad company who corrupt everything good.

The churches know that these people have no spiritual life in them that comes from Christ, given their utter opposition to the Gospel.  Yet they protect and retain them in office.  These people have mouths like cesspools, which express hearts like dunghills.  They hate Christ with a passion as measured by the blasphemous way they speak of Him.  They have rejected the Gospel continually and still do.  They are highly involved in their churches, even where an evangelical minister preaches.

But one must ask how it is that unregenerate officer-bearers within local churches can sit under preaching that makes no inroads to their souls?  Do ministers not carry out a spiritual audit of fellow-elders to ascertain their true spiritual standing?  A man may be a Christian and yet unfit to be an elder; but an unconverted man is clearly unfit to be an elder because he does not even satisfy the most basic qualification for eldership - being a Christian.  Therefore he is not fit to be a church member.

Here, a distinction must be made between a man being a church member and his being a Christain.  Church laws only require a man to be a church member, regardless of whether or not he is a Christain.  This view is held in defiance of the New Testament teaching.

For the church to be reformed, ministers must take spiritual issues much more seriously than they do.  It is way beyond time for a radical spiritual audit to be carried out into the spiritual standing of every member and office-bearer, including ministers, within the church.