Tag Archives: Church
The Church Is a Hospital
The Church of Christ is a very hospital of backsliding Christians, who meant honestly, in the joy of their first love, to live wholly for God, and who gradually sank down into a life of formality and feebleness. There is nothing the Church needs more than the preaching of daily diligence and perseverance as the indispensable condition of growth and strength.
The Perfect Church Service
The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.
Whom Am I?
By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters. It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity. If the church is the body of Christ, then we should not live as disembodied Christians.
Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 41
Unnecessary Divisions in Christianity
The devil scatters the flock of Christ, and sets them one against another, and that with great heat of spirit, under a notion of zeal for God; and religion, by degrees, degenerates into vain jangling; and during the strife, Satan leads both parties far out of the right way, driving each to great extremes, one on the right hand and the other on the left, according as he finds they are most inclined, or most easily moved and swayed, till the right path in the middle is almost wholly neglected.
Brokenness Drives the Church
Brokenness is … the jewel of worship that is intended to drive the church…. In order to truly worship God you need to have a broken and contrite heart.
Fred A. Hartley III in K. Neill Foster & Douglas B. Wicks, eds., Voices on the Cross, pp. 57-58
Why Is the Church’s Passion for Missions So Weak?
Where passion for God is weak, zeal for missions will be weak.
John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad, p. 18
People Will Always Disappoint
You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand.
The Pastor and Missions
If the pastor knows little about missions, his church will know less. And the less a church does for missions the less life and power it will have.
John C. Thiessen, Pastoring the Smaller Church, p. 52
The Word and the Music
Our churches … must recover the centrality of the Word in our worship. Music is a biblically require response to God’s Word, but the music God gave us was not given to build our churches upon. A church built on music — of whatever style — is a church built on shifting sands.
Mark Dever, What Is a Healthy Church?, p. 67
Life Is Worship 