Day 13

 The Church is God’s Instrument

The Church is that body to which has been entrusted the bearing of the Gospel to all men, the conversion of the world.  Never forget that the Church is God’s instrument existing for the sake of the wide world around us.  When the Church is truly itself, it is filled with a passion for souls; and it is restless and filled with longing when it sees sheep without a shepherd.  It is an army with banners marching out of the past into the future.  It is the Body of Christ in which His Spirit live and through which he carries on the salvation of men.  Missions are not an appendage, a hobby.  The Church is a mission, and if it is not a mission, it is not the Church.  If Christ was the divine beachhead, the Church is the army of Christ that extends the beachhead.  We lose the finest souls if there is a preoccupation with the past, and miss the great opportunity of teaching a hopeful task to a world without hope.

A true Church is an ambassador; it is meant to get out, to gear its entire life in missionary endeavor.  If its life is exhausted in self-serving, it smacks of death.  Sickness comes because the decisive thing has been forgotten … that the Church’s whole life is to be an instrument of God in the proclamation of the Gospel.  In all honesty serious people sometimes gather the impression that what we do is not real, the impression that a whole congregation is playing at Church.  “We have”, says Stephen Neil, “the given and living Word.  If it is effective in ourselves, there is nothing to prevent its becoming effective through us in the lives of others, except for our timidity and lack of faith.”  Not to preach the great task of the Church for which all talents are needed means that we start looking at each other.  That is where the trouble begins.  We are meant to look at the Lord and then roll up or sleeves in service.

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