The State of the Church

The famous World Missionary Convention, held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1910, came to the conclusion that the state of the Church was such as to prove itself utterly unfit for the work God put before it. Andrew Murray then wrote a book called The State of the Church, in which he took those assessments and further analyzed the Church as being self-centered with little consecration, vision, spiritual dynamic, or prayer. It is a vivid and scathing assessment.

One hundred years later, the state of the Church has so deteriorated that it little resembles the Christianity found in my Bible. It's predominantly a powerless institution, with its members set on their own personal self-preservation. There are valid reasons why the Church is an impotent institution today that has lost her authority from on high and her influence upon the nation.

I'll give you two reasons this evening, friends, and I don't think too far off the mark in my assessment. The state of the Church today is utterly unfit for the work God put before it because, number one, it is a powerless Church that has sold out to conformity with a pagan society and compromised with preaching of a diluted gospel. I believe Alan Redpath, the former pastor of Moody Church in Chicago during the 1960s, put his finger on the sore spot of the Church in his day when he said, Today the Christian Church is helpless, behind the scenes and away from the public arena.

We are facing powers of darkness too strong for us because somewhere in our personal lives we have forfeited all right to the Spirit's anointing, His authority, and His power. In His absence, all we can do is to substitute planning and organization, schemes and techniques. Alan Redpath recorded that observation, friends, over sixty years ago.

What would the old boy say if he could come back and take a look at the state of the Church today? The state of the Church today is utterly unfit for the work God put before it because, number two, the Church today is a loveless Church. It has no love for its own, much less a society going to hell in a handbasket. In John's Gospel, in chapter fifteen and verse twelve, Jesus told His disciples, This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you.

But we don't love like that today. We don't follow that command today. It's a loveless Church in a sin-loving society.

Only a Holy Ghost revival can come and set things back in proper order and priority today. The main reason why we are a loveless Church is because Jesus Christ is not prominent in our preaching and not preeminent in the life of the Church, and that's because we prefer to have it that way.