Sunday, January 15, 2006
The Truth
GospelDrivenLife looked at fixing the church.
Related Tags: Christianity, church, gospel, Jesus
I have lived long enough and read sufficiently to know that every generation looks on the problems of the Christian life and the church and dreams up a "solution" to those problems. The problems are always the same: hypocrisy, institutionalism, rebellious teenagers, broken marriages, lack of passion in worship, division and destroyed unity, etc, etc, etc.Of course, as bloggers we can , and we have, argued about what precisely is the "gospel." But the fact remains undeniable -- only Jesus can fix things. 2000 years of church history has proven that.
We diagnose the problem as lack of pre-marriage counseling or wrong church government or the evils of the world, or the need to disciple our own children and get them out of the public schools, or the need to restore biblical law to the government, or lack of prayer in the schools, or the lack of church discipline, or the rigid ways of tradition....
...The solution is the Gospel - the glorious person and work of Jesus the Messiah. It takes the power of the Spirit applying the blood of Christ to our hearts to change us. And when there is real progress in sanctification, many things change.
But we are not yet fully enjoying the fruit of his work -- we are "righteous and sinners" at the same time and as long as we are there is a constant reminder that sin is a greater foe than any of us can manage. Look at the churches of the NT era -- full of problems and full of grace.
Related Tags: Christianity, church, gospel, Jesus
