Here is a powerful quotation from an
early sermon of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones about the importance of having
church life centred around a powerful personal experience of Jesus. The sermon was preached on Heb.13:14.
“Our Christianity has the appearance of
being an adjunct or an appendix to the rest of our lives instead of
being the main theme and the moving force in our existence….We seem to
have a real horror of being different. Hence all our attempts and
endeavours to popularise the church and make it appeal to people. We
seem to be trying to tell people that their joining a church will not
make them so very different after all. ‘We are no longer Puritans,’ we
say, ‘we believe that they over-did things and made Christianity too
difficult for people. They frightened people with their strictness and
their unnecessarily high standards. We are not so foolish as to do
that,’ we say, and indeed we do not do so. Instead, however, we provide
so called ‘sporting parsons’, men of whom the world can say that they
are ‘good sports’ – whatever that may mean. And what it does so often mean is that they are men who believe that you can get men to come to
chapel and church by playing football and other games with them. ‘I’ll
fraternise with these men,’ says such a minister. ‘I’ll get them to like
me and to see that I’m not so different from them after all, and then
they’ll come to listen to my sermons.’ And he tries it, but thank God,
he almost invariably fails, as he richly deserves. The man who only
comes to church or chapel because he likes the minister as a man is of
no value at all, and the minister who attempts to get men there by means
of that subterfuge is for the time being guilty of lowering the
standard of the truth which he claims to believe. For this gospel is the
gospel of salvation propounded by the Son of God himself. We must not
hawk it about in the world, or offer special inducements and
attractions, as if we were shopkeepers announcing an exceptional bargain
sale….
‘The world expects the Christian to be
different and looks to him for something different, and therein it often
shows an insight into life that regular church-goers often lack. The
churches organise whist-drives, fetes, dramas, bazaars, and things of
that sort, so as to attract people. We are becoming almost as wily as
the devil himself, but we are really bad at it; all our attempts are
hopeless failures and the world laughs at us….And the world today is
laughing at the church, laughing at her attempts to be nice and to make
people feel at home. My friends, if you feel at home in any church
without believing in Christ as your personal Savior, then that church is
no church at all, but a place of entertainment or a social club. For
the truth of Christianity and the preaching of the gospel should make a
church intolerable and uncomfortable to all except those who believe,
and even then they should go away feeling chastened and humble.”
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