CHAPTER TWELVE
The Prodigal Church in a
Prodigal World

To take an over-all view of the Church today leaves one wondering how much longer a holy God can refrain from implementing His threat to spue this Laodicean thing out of His mouth. For if there is one thing preachers are agreed upon, it is that this is the Laodicean age in the Church.

Yet while over our heads hangs the Damoclean sword of rejection, we believers are lean, lazy, luxury-loving, loveless, and lacking. Though our merciful God will pardon our sins, purge our iniquity, and pity our ignorance, our lukewarm hearts are an abomination in His sight. We must be hot or cold, flaming or freezing, burning out or cast out. Lack of heat and lack of love God hates.

Christ is now ‘‘wounded in the house of His friends.’’ The Holy Book of the living God suffers more from its exponents today than from its opponents!

We are loose in the use of scriptural phrases, lopsided in interpreting them, and lazy to the point of impotence in appropriating their measureless wealth. Mr. Preacher will wax eloquent in speech and fervent in spirit, serving the Lord with vigor and perspiration to defend the Bible’s inspiration. Yet that same dear man a few breaths later with deadly calmness will be heard rationalizing that same inspired Word by outdating its miracles and by firmly declaring: ‘‘This text is not for today.’’ Thus the new believer’s warm faith is doused with the ice water of the preacher’s unbelief.

The Church alone can ‘‘limit the Holy One of Israel,’’ and today she has consummate skill in doing it. If there are degrees in death, then the deadest I know of is to preach about the Holy Ghost without the anointing of the Holy Ghost.

In praying, we assume the unpardonable arrogance of crying for the blessed Spirit to come with His grace—but not with His gifts!

This is the day of a restricted and relegated Holy Ghost, even in fundamentalist circles. We need and say that we want Joel 2 to be fulfilled. We cry, ‘‘Pour out Thy Spirit upon all flesh!’’ yet add the unspoken caution, ‘‘but don’t let our daughters prophesy, or our young men see visions!’’

‘‘Oh, my God! if in our cultivated unbelief and our theological twilight and our spiritual powerlessness we have grieved and are continuing to grieve Thy Holy Spirit, then in mercy spue us out of Thy mouth! If Thou canst not do something with us and through us, then please, God, do something without us! Bypass us and take up a people who now know Thee not! Save, sanctify, and endue them with the Holy Ghost for a ministry of the miraculous! Send them out ‘fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners’ to revive a sick Church and shake a sin-soddened world!’’

Ponder this: God has nothing more to give to this world. He gave His only begotten Son for sinners; He gave the Bible for all men; He gave the Holy Ghost to convict the world, and equip the Church. But what good is a checkbook if the checks be unsigned? What good is a meeting, even if it be fundamental, if the living Lord is absent?

We must rightly divide the Word of truth. The text ‘‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’’ (Rev. 3:20), has nothing to do with sinners and a waiting Saviour. No! Here is the tragic picture of our Lord at the door of His own Laodi-cean Church trying to get in. Imagine it! Again, in the majority of prayer meetings, what text is more used than ‘‘Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst’’? But too often He is not in the midst; He is at the door! We sing His praise, but shun His person!

With a stack of books beside us and marginal notes in Bibles for props, we have almost immunized ourselves from the scorching truth of the changeless Word of God!

I do not marvel so much at the patience of the Lord with the stonyhearted sinners of the day. After all, would we not be patient with a man both blind and deaf? And such are the sinners. But I do marvel at the Lord’s patience with the sleepy, sluggish, selfish Church! A prodigal Church in a prodigal world, is God’s real problem.

Oh, we bankrupt, blind, boasting believers! We are naked and don’t know it. We are rich (never had we more equipment), but we are poor (never had we less enduement)! We have need of nothing (and yet we lack almost everything the Apostolic Church had). Can He stand ‘‘in the midst’’ while we sport unashamedly in our spiritual nakedness?

Oh, we need the fire! Where is the power of the Holy Ghost that slays sinners and fills our altars? Today we seem much more interested in having churches air-conditioned than prayer-conditioned. ‘‘Our God is a consuming fire.’’ God and fire are inseparable; so are men and fire. Every single one of us is now treading a path of fire—hell-fire for the sinner, judgment-fire for the believer! Because the Church has lost Holy Ghost fire, millions go to hell-fire.

The prophet Moses was called by fire. Elijah called down fire. Elisha made a fire. Micah prophesied fire. John the Baptist cried, ‘‘He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.’’ Jesus said, ‘‘I am come to send fire on the earth.’’ If we were as scared to miss fire baptism as we are to miss water baptism, we would have a flaming Church and another Pentecost. The ‘‘old nature’’ may dodge the water baptism, but it is destroyed in the fire baptism, for He shall ‘‘burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’’ Until they were fire-purged, the miracle-working disciples who beheld His resurrection glory, were held back from ministering the Cross.

By what authority do men minister these days at home or overseas without an ‘‘upper room’’ experience? We have no lack of preachers of prophecy, but we are pitiably short of prophetic preachers. We make no plea for spiritual predictors and sensational prognosticators. There is now little scope left to foretell, for we have the Book and the unveiling of the Lord’s mind in it. But we do need men to forthtell. No man can monopolize the Holy Ghost, but the Holy Ghost can monopolize men. Such are the prophets. They are never expected, never announced, never introduced—they just arrive. They are sent, and sealed, and sensational. John the Baptist ‘‘did no miracles’’—that is, no rivers of derelict humanity swept down on him for his healing touch. But he raised a spiritually dead nation!

One marvels at our unblushing evangelists who announce that they have just had a wonderful revival with thousands thronging the altars, and then add, to soothe the staid fundamentalists, ‘‘but there was nothing sensational and no dis- order.’’ But can there be an earthquake without sensation? Or a tornado without disorder? Did Wesley’s scorching ministry cause no upheaval? The Church in England slammed every door in the face of ‘‘a man sent from God whose name was John’’—Wesley. But these ‘‘religious Canutes’’ did not keep back the tide of Holy Ghost revival.

This blessed man, Wesley, went away from Oxford University, having ‘‘failed completely,’’ conspicuously is his own word (even with the brain of a scholar, the fire of a zealot, and the tongue of an orator), to lead others to the Lamb. Then came May the 24th, 1738, when John Wesley at an Aldersgate Street prayer meeting, was born of the Spirit; later he was filled with the Spirit. In thirteen years this fire-baptized man shook three kingdoms. And Savonarola shook Florence in central Italy until the face of ‘‘the mad monk’’ became a terror to the Florentines of his day, and a thing of derision to the religionists.

Brethren, in the light of the ‘‘bema seat,’’ we had better live six months with a volcanic heart, denouncing sin in places high and low and turning the nation from the power of Satan unto God (as John the Baptist did) rather than die loaded with ecclesiastical honours and theological degrees and be the laughing stock of hell and of spiritual nonentities. Lampooning ‘‘liquor barons’’ and cursing corrupt politicians bring no fire down upon our heads. We can do both of these, and keep our heads and our pulpits. Prophets were martyred for denouncing false religion in no vague terms. And when we too see ‘‘lying religion’’ cheating men in life and robbing loved ones in death, or when we see priests leading them to hell under the banner of a crucifix, we should burn against them with holy indignation. Later, maybe, to lead the way to a Twentieth Century Reformation, we shall burn on martyr fires.

With tears, view this news: ‘‘Palsied Protestantism now hears the Roman Catholic priests commending Protestant evangelists!’’ In all conscience, could you picture the same religionists applauding a Luther, or sponsoring a Savonarola? ‘‘Oh! God, send us prophetic preaching that searches and scorches! Send us a race of martyr-preachers—men burdened, bent, bowed, and broken under the vision of impending judgment and the doom of the unending hell of the impenitent!

Preachers make pulpits famous; prophets make prisons famous. May the Lord send us prophets—terrible men, who cry aloud and spare not, who sprinkle nations with unction-ized woes—men too hot to hold, too hard to be heard, too merciless to spare. We are tired of men in soft raiment and softer speech who use rivers of words with but a spoonful of unction. These know more about competition than consecration, about promotion than prayer. They substitute propaganda for progagation and care more for their church’s happiness than for its holiness!

Oh in comparison with the New Testament Church we are so sub-apostolic, so substandard! Sound doctrine has put most believers sound asleep, for the letter is not enough. It must be kindled! It is the letter plus the Spirit which ‘‘giveth life.’’ A sound sermon in faultless English and flawless interpretation can be as tasteless as a mouthful of sand. To rob Rome and cripple Communism we need a fire-baptized Church. A blazing bush drew Moses; a blazing Church will attract the world, so that from its midst they will hear the voice of the living God.