“The accent in the Church today,” says Leonard Ravenhill, the English evangelist, “is not on devotion, but on commotion.”

“Religious extroversion has been carried to such an extreme in evangelical circles that hardly anyone has the desire, to say nothing of the courage, to question the soundness of it. Externalism has taken over. God now speaks by the wind and the earthquake only; the still small voice can be heard no more. The whole religious machine has become a noisemaker. The adolescent taste which loves the loud horn and the thundering exhaust has gotten into the activities of modern Christians. The old question, “What is the chief end of man?” is now answered, “To dash about the world and add to the din thereof.”…

We must begin the needed reform by challenging the spiritual validity of externalism. What a man is must be shown to be more important than what he does. While the moral quality of any act is imparted by the condition of the heart, there may be a world of religious activity which arises not from within but from without and which would seem to have little or no moral content. Such religious conduct is imitative or reflex. It stems from the current cult of commotion and possesses no sound inner life.

“Til I come, give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine.” – 1 Timothy 4:13

In an effort to get the work of the Lord done we often lose contact with the Lord of the work and quite literally wear our people out as well. I have heard more than one pastor boast that his church was a “live” one, pointing to the printed calendar as a proof – something on every night and several meetings during the day. Of course this proves nothing except that the pastor and the church are being guided by a bad spiritual philosophy. A great many of these time-consuming activities are useless and others plain ridiculous. “But,” say the eager beavers who run the religious squirrel cages, “they provide fellowship and they hold our people together.”

To this I reply that what they provide is not fellowship at all, and if that is the best thing the church has to offer to hold the people together it is not a Christian church in the New Testament meaning of that word. The center of attraction in a true church is the Lord Jesus Christ…

If the many activities engaged in by the average church led to the salvation of sinners or the perfecting of believers they would justify themselves easily and triumphantly; but they do not. My observations have led me to the belief that many, perhaps most, of the activities engaged in by the average church do not contribute in any way to the accomplishing of the true work of Christ on earth. I hope I am wrong, but I am afraid I am right.”  – A.W. Tozer

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I guess this man of God – Tozer was wrong, unkind, judgmental and unduly critical when he said those words back in the 1950’s. What does today look like? I believe that if the Church was to be placed back into the Old Testament era she also would despise the prophets…mock Jeremiah and brand him as a killjoy, a false prophet, critical and unloving – turning a deaf ear to him… and even kill the prophets! Jeremiah’s pronouncement of Israel and Judah behaving as a whore – forsaking God for other ‘lovers’ bears the same implications to modern day Chrisitanity.

Christ knocks on the door of His Church…
while many think He is with them on the inside!

If this offends us, wounds our pride (what we call our ‘self esteem’) and we fight back insisting we are right and the ones that speak the truth (even in love) are grossly wrong – then it only shows us how really blind we are and that we are no different from the children of Israel in the wilderness who hardened their hearts in rebellion when God spoke.