“The end to which all church order, on the Puritan view, was a means, and for which everything superstitious, misleading, and Spirit-quenching must be rooted out, was the glory of God in and through the salvation of sinners and the building up of lively congregations in which people met God.”

I have read sentences I can’t escape—and I don’t want to escape them. They have helped me in deep and lasting ways. I thank the Lord.

For example, in What Is an Evangelical?, Martyn Lloyd-Jones says, “Every institution tends to produce its opposite” (4). Decades later, that sentence still arrests my attention.

What is an institution? An institution is a social mechanism for making a desirable experience easily repeatable. Our church services are an institution. And it’s a good thing. What if we had to reinvent the ministry from scratch every Sunday? But a life-giving institution can drift into life-depleting institutionalization. That happens when the institutional delivery system itself becomes the goal, the end, the idol. Then undesirable experiences become absolutized and perpetuated.

And that horrible betrayal is not a distant hypothetical possibility. Every institution tends to produce its opposite. Haven’t we all seen evidence of this tendency in a church?

Let’s keep our finger on the pulse of our churches, and keep realigning with reformation and revival. And for those of us who are pastors—who gave us the right to preside over dead and deadening religious institutionalization? Authentic Christianity is a revival movement. As long as the book of Acts remains in the Bible, which we ourselves call our final authority, we have every right in Christ to keep reaching for renewal in our churches.

His Work in His Way

Another sentence that is never far from my mind came from Francis Schaeffer in No Little People: “We must do the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way” (74). I believe this is the defining issue in our generation, and in every generation.

If we serve the Lord out of our own strengths, out of our own cool, even out of our own postmodern ironic self-mockery, we are not serving the Lord. We are insulting the Lord, while we flatter ourselves that we are serving the Lord. But if we will turn and humble ourselves, doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way, and in his way only, then the Lord himself will enter into our work with his glorious power.

It is wonderful when the Lord blesses the work of our hands. But it is altogether more wonderful when the Lord takes up the work in his own hands. The difference is publicly obvious. The glory of Christ will compel the attention of our world.

Read More