Friday, November 14, 2014

The Church Of The Living God





















Jehovah is the living God, and the divine life is seen in each of the adorable persons of the Godhead. Our Lord Jesus Christ is not to us a dead Christ: we love and bless him because he once died upon the cross, but we adore him because he ever liveth to make intercession for us. We are bold to preach the gospel because of his living power, and we are earnest to observe his commands because we own his living government in the midst of the church. The living God proves his life among us by the Holy Spirit, by the conversion of sinners, by comforting and instructing saints, and by edifying the faithful into a building fitly framed together. Since, then, the church belongs to the living God, what is a dead church? Is that the church of the living God? How can it be? Only as you and I possess the Spirit of God quickening us to a life of godliness may we dare to think ourselves a part of the church of the living God.

If you have never been quickened by the Spirit of God, if you are dead in trespasses and sins, what have you to do with the church of the living God? O ye dead and corrupt, how can ye have communion with the living in Zion. Only when you live unto God may you be built up as living stones into the living temple of the living God. The thing most to be dreaded in any one church is the decay of life. We may soon fall into formalism, and even hold the truth in the cold grip of spiritual death; prayer may be neglected, and the other offices of spiritual life may be disregarded, and then all will languish. “Thou hast the name that thou livest and art dead” is the dreadful sentence which must be written across the brow of a merely nominal church.

Brethren, if we would be the church of the living God, we must be thoroughly alive unto God.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "What The Church Should Be," delivered September 29, 1878. Image by Philip Male on Flickr under Creative Commons License, without alteration.

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