From the MLJ Archive

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: We come in our study of this 14th chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans this evening to verse 17. The 17th verse in the 14th chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans: "For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." Now, in order to get the connection clear, let me start reading again from verse 14.

"I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died. Let not then your good be evil spoken of: for the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."

Here, you will remember, those of you who recall and have a note of our division of this great chapter and its argumentation, you will remember that in this verse, we come to a new subsection which runs from this 17th verse to the 19th. So, we have just three verses, 17, 18, and 19, forming a kind of subsection on their own. As a part of the one big argument that runs, as we've been seeing, right through the chapter and indeed on into the next chapter.

But this is, again, a fresh point. And the apostle introduces it with this word "for." In other words, it is connected with what he has been saying. It is a continuation of the same general theme, but he is introducing something fresh and something new. I've often before used the analogy of a musical composition to show you the style of the apostle and his method of construction, the way in which the musician has a theme, and then he'll play variations on it.

Then he wants to leave it, and yet he is not going to leave it entirely, but he is going to deal with what is the theme of his whole composition in a new way now, in a slightly different way. So, there is a connection in order to introduce us to another kind of theme or of emphasis. But all of it, remember, is part of one great message. Well, now, that is exactly what the apostle does here. For the time being, he interrupts what I would describe as his pure bit of argumentation.

You remember how we've seen he's been breaking it up into different subsidiary arguments and looking at this question of eating meats offered to idols and observation of days and so on from different aspects and angles, and bringing arguments to bear all along which apply both to the brother who is stronger in the faith and the one who is weaker in the faith. And we've just seen in the subsection that we've been dealing with how he does it there, deals especially with the stronger brother and shows him what he's doing if he tends to ride roughshod over the susceptibilities, the foibles if you like, even or the weaknesses of his weaker brother in this matter of conscience.

Of course, he's been saying tremendous things. He's been telling us, "Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died." There's nothing, in a sense, bigger or greater that can be said than just that. However, the apostle now has finished with that pure bit of argumentation, and he comes now to a more general conclusion, a more general way of looking at the whole thing. So, you might very well translate the word translated here by "for" by these words: "for after all," or "but after all."

That's the kind of connecting link. What's he doing then? Well, what he's doing now is lifting up this whole subject from the realm of particular arguments to the whole position and condition of the Christian. He takes it, in other words, and puts it into its own true context. Now, this is a most important thing as I'm going to try to show you. Here in this verse, we've got one of these great resounding statements of the apostle.

This is very characteristic of his method, that in the midst of a bit of argumentation or exhortation or appeal or whatever it is, he suddenly throws out a great and mighty and magnificent statement which seems to be a perfect summary of the whole of the essence of the gospel and the character and the nature of the Christian life. That is what makes him so fascinating to read. Suddenly and sometimes when you least expect it, when you've been almost trudging along in a bit of argumentation, you stumble across a nugget.

There it is, and you're charmed and fascinated. But it isn't accidental; it is a part of the whole matter that he's had in hand. Well now, that's what he does here. He, as it were, suddenly, having been on the ground, takes his wings and lifts us up to the heavens, and lifts the whole argument right up to the same level. He takes it out of the realm of these particularities and helps us to see it in the context of the whole Christian life.

I can't quite recall whether I've quoted to you an address I once heard by an old preacher who had been asked to preach on the question of Sabbath observance, to speak in a meeting on the question of Sabbath observance. It was clear that he was a bit reluctant to do this for various reasons. He was afraid of Sabbatarianism and so on. But his quaint way of putting the matter to us was this. He said, "You know, the thing to do when you have a subject like this is not so much to consider it in and of itself, but to consider it in terms of the family to which it belongs."

He said, "There are some people in life who are rather difficult, and the best way of understanding many of them is to get to know the family to which they belong, and that'll tell you a great deal about them and help you to deal with them in the right way and in the right manner." Family history can be very important. That's a very good analogy, I think, and it's one which, in a sense, I'm going to work out with you this evening.

Now, this is this great statement, I said, this moving and resounding statement. It's one of those things—I like to repeat this verse, and I do so quite often. It's a kind of slogan. It's a kind of battle cry. "For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." You see there is an element of ridicule here. All this that he's been dealing with and the troubles that it was causing in Rome and in Corinth and in various other places, the great apostle is anxious for them to see that they've been rather petty about it all.

So, he puts it into the context, and there is an element of ridicule and of sarcasm in the way in which he puts it. But you see, he does this in order that he may direct attention to this great principle that is involved at this point. And what is this? Well, the principle is the vital importance always of preserving a sense of balance and of proportion in the Christian life. That's the principle. That is the theme which he introduces in this resounding statement.

The all-importance of balance and a sense of proportion. In other words, what he's doing is to show them that they're in all this trouble and bother about these matters in the church at Rome because they've lost their balance and developed a kind of lopsided Christianity, manifesting this kind of imbalance. Now, this is indeed one of these all-important matters in connection with the Christian life. One of our greatest dangers is to be so absorbed in and concerned about particulars and details as to forget the whole.

That's what he's saying. Now, this is something that's not confined, of course, to the Christian life nor to the understanding of the Scripture. Our proverb tells us and warns us against the danger of missing the wood because of the trees. You're so conscious of particular trees that you've missed and have forgotten the wood. Or if you like it in yet another way, it is the danger of being so concerned about minutiae and details as to forget great principles.

This has been put once and for all, of course, by our blessed Lord Himself. Listen to Him putting it in Matthew 23:23, part of His castigation of the Pharisees. This was the essential trouble of the Pharisees. That's why they crucified Him. That's why they never understood Him. They were so immersed in details and in minutiae, they missed Him completely. But He puts it like this to them: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel."

What a severe castigation, and yet how true. How true it was of the Pharisees, and how true of many in the church at many times since. How true of many in the church tonight: straining at a gnat and not realizing that they're swallowing a veritable camel even as they are straining at and rejecting this gnat. Well, now, that's the kind of principle, you see, that is introduced in this verse. But the apostle puts it like this: "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink."

There's your gnat. Oh, what is it? Well, it's righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. We cannot exaggerate the importance of this principle. This principle, I say again, of preserving a balance and a right sense of proportion. Now, I think I could very easily keep you the rest of this evening in showing you the importance of this particular point even in the secular realm. I would suggest to you that this is the real explanation of our many, many, and multifarious problems even in this country at the present time.

The difficulties we're in—now why are we in them? Well, you see, the answer that is being given is this. Men are investigating various aspects of our problem. This is not new of today; this is what's been going on, of course, particularly in this present century. And one says it's due to this, and another says it's due to that, another due to that. So you have to constantly create new and fresh government departments to deal with particular aspects, and each one of those then proliferates, and you have to have subdivisions in it.

Particular aspects of the problem now, bureaucracy really comes into being because of this very thing that the apostle is dealing with here: this failure to see the real principles, but to become lost in and immersed in the details. For after all, there's only one real problem that needs to be tackled, and that is the problem of man himself. If only every man in this country had the right view of himself and his duty to God and his duty to work and to be honest and so on, isn't it obvious that most of our problems would vanish like the morning mist?

But you see, that isn't recognized. So you have to have a fresh department, as I say, and one man watches another man, and one man creates another man. And so you get your bureaucracy because they don't concentrate on the centralities, on the real problem. The problem is man in sin and his consequent selfishness and his laziness and all that results from those two basic positions. Well, now, here you see is something then that one can see very clearly even in the secular realm.

It is the tragedy of the world without Christ. It is the ultimate futility of civilization. Civilization is supposed to deal with the problem and to improve man and his whole condition in the world. But it doesn't do it. It has always failed, it is failing today, and it fails because, instead of getting to the center of the problem, it always begins and remains on the periphery. And there they are, arguing as to which segment is the really important one.

And they change and they modify this, but it creates a problem there, and that one creates another. And the whole time, the trouble's in the center. I remember once putting it in this form: Isn't it a sheer waste of money and a waste of energy to be pouring chemicals into a polluted stream when the source of infection is in the lake out of which the stream comes? It's mad, isn't it? But you see, that's what people are doing.

They say, "We are here. Here's the stream, and it's polluted." And so you buy your chemicals, and you put them in. For the time being, it's all right, but then there's another pollution, and you have to keep on and on and on. If only they dealt with the source of the pollution in the source of the stream or the river, the whole thing would soon be put right. But that is precisely what the secular mind and the secular men never do. They never get at basic principles.

And so you get this waste of energy, waste of money, multiplication of organizations, and it's, of course, the great characteristic of the age in which we live. I've often referred to this, how everything now is being organized in order to try to deal with this problem. Games are being organized. You not only get education, but you get what they call further education, and on and on and on it goes. But the problem increases at the same time.

Well, I believe that this is more or less what is described these days as Parkinson's Law, isn't it? It's a very good way of looking at this whole subject. But we're concerned here tonight not with it in the secular sense, although you mustn't forget that application. For as we get opportunities, it is good and right that we should be pointing this out to people. They may say to you, "What's the point of being a Christian at a time like this? Why do you waste your time? It's irrelevant. It's got nothing to say to man as he is in the midst of the problems of life today." There comes your opportunity. Say to them, "You know it has. If only everybody in this country was a true Christian, we wouldn't have these problems." And so it gives you an opportunity of evangelism. You show a great principle like this which you find in the Bible, and you show that it can be applied even in a secular sense.

But what I'm anxious to show you is this: how the failure to recognize the all-importance of a sense of balance and a sense of proportion in the Christian life has been more prolific than any other single thing in producing troubles and problems in the long history of the Christian church. Here it was doing it in Rome. It was doing it in Corinth. That church in Corinth, you read that great epistle again, that First Epistle.

It was divided up into sects and groups and divisions and schisms, all because of this very failure, as indeed the apostle shows in the chapter which we read at the beginning, the 12th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. So, this is of vital importance whether if we look at these things merely from the standpoint of church history. In the same way, nothing has done more harm, I sometimes think, to the Christian witness in the world than this lack of balance.

The harm that unbalanced Christians can do in this matter of evangelism is almost incalculable. Because you see, the man of the world, he doesn't judge Christianity in terms of its teaching; he judges it in what he finds in you and in me. He's wrong, of course, but that's what he does, and in a sense, he's even right in doing it. For we should always be exemplifying. "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

The harm that is done because you must have found this a thousand times. You're discussing a principle connected with the Christian faith with somebody, and then they say, "But look at so-and-so." And the lack of balance and the lack of proportion in that person has often been the cause of all the difficulty and has greatly hindered your work of evangelism. Now, I want to show you that this matter of balance is of very great importance right through the Christian life as regards doctrine, as regards church order and government, and as regards our daily practice and conduct and behavior as Christian people.

Now, let me show you the kind of thing that I mean. Let's look at it for a brief moment in this way. Look at the divisions in the Christian church. It's all right. I certainly haven't had instructions from some headquarters to preach on Christian unity tonight because this is the end of this great and much-advertised week about Christian unity. No, no, I'm much more concerned about Christian unity than those people, but I'm concerned about it in a New Testament way and in a scriptural way.

We should all be concerned about unity. It is a scandal that Christian people should be divided. I'm not saying that; our Lord said it: "That they all might be one... and that the world might know," He says. We've no right to be divided. The church is meant to be one, and the world by seeing the oneness and the love is to be attracted. So, schism is a sin. Very well then, why have we got these divisions? Why is the church divided? Why all these various denominations?

Now, I want to say something about this in terms of this principle that the apostle is laying down in this great verse. I'm only going to deal with it in general, remember. There are certain qualifications that have to be made and, indeed, any particular case has got to be considered on its merits. And I'm going to try to give you some rules that govern all this and will help us out to decide these matters. But there are certain general principles that one can lay down in view of the scriptural teaching with regard to denominations.

And here's one of them. A denomination should never be founded on a man. Never. That is always wrong. So that you see, there is a sense in which it is quite wrong to speak of a church as the Lutheran Church. That's in terms of a man. Or the Wesleyan Church, or any other particular church. It becomes still worse, of course, when it's based on a man's money. That's happened many a time. Churches have come into being simply because a man happened to be difficult and at the same time wealthy, and he was in a position to start a cause of his own and to pay for everything: minister, manse, church building, everything else. It's a terrible thing that. It's a very wrong thing.

And all sections of the church have been guilty of this. I remember when we had a discussion in our Puritan reformed conference some years back, and the Countess of Huntingdon, I ventured to say that at that time, it seems to me that it was quite wrong that that great lady, great as she was and great Christian as she was, should be controlling chapels. She had the money, and she could build a chapel, and she could determine who the minister was going to be. It seems to me to be utterly in contrast to the New Testament teaching. She should have handed her money over, and it could have been used by others more competent to do so. Well, there's that's one principle. A church or a denomination should never be founded on any man.

But I'll go further. A church should never be founded on a particular doctrine. Now, be careful. When I say "particular doctrine," I don't mean the doctrine that is particular to the true evangelical faith. I mean one particular subsidiary doctrine in the general doctrines of the faith. What am I thinking of? Well, now, at the risk of being misunderstood, but I think I can demonstrate what I'm saying, I have always said and taught and contended since that the church should never have been divided on the question of the mode of baptism.

You see what I mean? The church has been divided over this as to the way in which you baptize. I'm suggesting it is wrong to speak of a Baptist Church. It is equally wrong to speak of a Seventh-day Church. I'm not saying that I regard the Seventh-day Adventists as Christians, but even granting that they were, it is surely wrong that a church should announce itself in terms of "Seventh-day." This one thing, this is the thing that hits you and that strikes you.

The kingdom of God is not the mode of baptism; the kingdom of God is not which day you observe. That's the argument. You've taken a particular, and this is what you've done with it. Or, let's be quite clear about this, there are churches that have been founded on a particular holiness teaching. Now, they're good men, but there are holiness churches in America and in this country, and they announce themselves in these terms. And there are other churches that announce themselves in the same way and because they really have been brought into being because of a lack of balance and an overemphasis upon certain spiritual gifts.

Now, I think of the term "Pentecostal." It—that carries a particular localized significance. And what I'm criticizing is not so much the particular views with regard to these matters as the forming of a church on the basis of these particular doctrines. I suggest that that is to contravene not only the teaching of this verse but the general tenor, indeed, of the whole of the New Testament. Now, don't jump to conclusions, and if any of you are offended at this point, I want to challenge you.

Come back and listen to the rest of the argument. If you don't, you are not behaving as a Christian. You're behaving as a prejudiced person, like the very people Paul was dealing with. I'm simply putting the statements before you tonight, and I'm hoping to show you the justification for them. I don't care which particular doctrine. Well, let me put it—let you see where I stand. I was brought up in a church which gave itself the name of the Calvinistic Methodist Church. I think that's equally bad. A church shouldn't be named after John Calvin. A church should not be founded on Calvinism alone. It's equally bad. So you see, I don't care which particular doctrine. I was only giving examples and illustrations which were most likely to be familiar to you.

But the principle is that you must not found or establish a church either on a man or on a particular doctrine. And I would add a third: that it is equally wrong to found or establish a church on a particular view of church government. Now, you see, I've chosen these three things because they historically have been the three commonest causes of divisions in the church, the arising of denominations which have become hardened and crystallized. All this to me is of very great importance at the present time. This ecumenical movement, to which I don't belong and in which I don't believe, as I'm never tired of saying, does give us a marvelous opportunity of undoing certain things that we evangelicals have done wrongly. It is a time, I think, when we've got a great and a glorious opportunity of coming together as evangelicals and not being bound by divisions which came into being in the past, so often as the result of the failure of good and godly men to remember the teaching of Romans 14:17.

Well, what I mean is this: that if a church does establish itself in terms of one particular view of church doctrine, I suggest that it is already in error. Now, you've got to have some church order. That's the problem. You've got to have discipline. You've got to have church order. You've got to have a church polity. And it's an extremely difficult matter to decide this. All I would say is this: that anybody who tells me it has got to be episcopal is already wrong. Or a man who comes to me and says it must be Presbyterian, I say he's equally wrong. As Oliver Cromwell discovered, that the new presbyter could at times be as bad as the old prelate or the old pope. All these insistences upon that "it must be this or that" is what I am suggesting contravenes this principle.

And this is something, as I say, that I hope to elaborate to you in detail when we come to work out this great principle itself. But for now, but I'm putting it tonight in a very general form for you to see the scope of discussion which is raised by the principle of this verse. So, having put it in terms of denominations, I now come in the second place to put it in terms of movements. And if what I've been saying has been true of denominations, how much more so is it true of movements.

Indeed, I take leave to question the legitimacy of movements at all in the Christian church. I think they can be justified on one ground only, and that is when the church becomes apostate or when the church is failing to perform her functions. I think movements then may be justified. That's the justification of the book of Kings. There was such a—such a terrible time in the history of Israel, there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And God rebuked that nation and its folly and its ignorance by even raising a woman as a leader to ridicule them and to bring them to their senses.

But it was an utterly abnormal time, and it is only such times that give any justification at all for movements. But now, then, if you do have movements for those reasons, there are certain things that are always wrong with regard to movements and extremely dangerous. They should not, for instance, be a separate evangelistic movement in the church. That's wrong in principle. You don't form a movement on the one question of evangelism. You mustn't isolate evangelism. In the same way, you mustn't have a holiness movement.

This is quite wrong, judged by this verse. It's particularizing. It's failing to keep your balance. And you can see the consequences that follow, and they have followed, of course. The people who go to holiness movements and their meetings, they are so often guilty of spiritual pride and they cause divisions. This is all wrong. The mistake was to form a movement to isolate a doctrine instead of preserving this balance and this proportion of which the apostle speaks.

And it's exactly the same with regard to a prophetic movement in the church. I want to show you, as we go along, why these things are wrong. Tonight, I am just making my general statements, I'm laying down the case before you, and as I say, will later proceed to my justification of what I'm saying. Now, let me give you another one, a third.

It is equally wrong to regard religion as a subject. Have you ever thought of that? I have never believed in the teaching of religion in schools for this reason. It's not a subject. There are many other reasons why I don't believe in it, but that has always been sufficient in and of itself as far as I am concerned. Scripture is not a subject in a school syllabus. I remember once many years ago being in the United States and having to go and speak in a conference.

Somebody had failed to turn up, and I was available, so I went. And it had started as a great religious conference in 1874, had been founded by a bishop to teach Sunday school teachers. But when I got there, it was a great conference that boasted that it could teach you any subject that you could conceivably be interested in. And I remember seeing the list of subjects that were taught, and I saw number 16: "Religion."

So, I spent most of my week there in pointing out how wrong that was. Religion is not a subject. Scripture is not a subject amongst subjects. The moment you say that, you've already gone wrong. But let me go still further. Bible study should never be regarded as an entity in and of itself. What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is this. I call this meeting every Friday night a service. It is a service.

I don't recognize a special service, a Bible lecture or anything like that. I—I don't understand that; I don't believe in that. There is only one way to expound the Scriptures, and it must always be the same way. Now, some people don't agree with that. They say, "Oh no, no, you need Bible lectures, and you need Bible instruction, and you don't apply it, and you don't preach." I think that's absolutely fatal. It is always to be preached; it is always to be applied.

Still less do I believe in holding examinations on people's knowledge of the Scriptures. You set an examination as you do in geometry or chemistry or history or anything else on your Bible knowledge; it is asking for trouble, asking for antinomianism, and it generally produces it. These people have got this knowledge; they've got it all classified and divided, and it's all been purely intellectual, purely academic, purely theoretical. It's all wrong. It was wrong as an idea because it's guilty of the very thing the apostle tells us in this verse we should never be guilty of.

And so, I come to this: that the church has often got into trouble through neglect of this principle in the matter of theological seminaries or theological colleges. You know, the common thing that you'll find evangelical people saying today is this: that the trouble has been in the colleges. And, of course, you're perfectly right; that's where it has been. But here is the question: Why has the trouble been in the colleges? And the answer is that so often this has arisen because theology has been taught as a science.

You see, the old people used to boast that theology was the queen of the sciences. What they really meant by that was that it is the most interesting and the most profound of all the studies that a man can ever be engaged in. And, of course, that is right, but they should never have put it into competition with the others. It doesn't belong. You don't say it is the greatest of the scientists, of the sciences—the queen of the sciences. No, no, the thing you've got to say is that theology is different from every other study.

Why? Well, I'll tell you why. With every other study, you can be objective, and the more objective you are, the better it is. You're detached; you look on. But if you study theology like that, it would be better for you not to study theology. What is theology? Well, theology is the study of God. And can you study God objectively? Can you just look on intellectually at—you can't, it's impossible. You can't study God in—in any sense to be strictly accurate.

But if you try to get knowledge about God and to know God, well, this is worship immediately. Your whole attitude is different. When you're studying your sciences or your history, well, if you like, you can lounge in a lounge chair; you can do it on your back in bed, I don't care how you're doing it. But you shouldn't study theology like that. Because this always involves a relationship with God. And we must never forget this. And you see, it is because this has been forgotten.

In other words, if I may use the apostle's verse, I could put it like this: the kingdom of God is not logic chopping about particular theological points of view or definitions; that's not the kingdom of God. But it's my relationship to God: righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. Now, you will find if you go into the history of these matters that the old men, say, 200 and 300 years ago, who formed academies and colleges for the training of preachers, they always realized this danger. Always. It's a very difficult subject this, and I don't want to go into it in too much in detail.

But it is obviously necessary that a man who is to preach and teach should be rendered capable of doing so. He may be a good Christian man, he may be a highly spiritual man, but he needs a little more than that in order to be a teacher. He needs a certain amount of help and a certain amount of training there. That's all right. But the history of this matter shows very, very clearly that the moment you do have such a college, you're doing something that is dangerous and that has got to be watched very carefully.

Now, the old men, I say, of 200 and 300 years ago, they recognized this. So they reduced the course to the minimum; they tried to make it as practical as they could. But, and this was the most important thing of all, they always conducted it in an atmosphere of worship. So that your lecturer on theology would never dream of starting his lecture on theology without prayer, without worship, without adoration, without reminding these students that the ultimate object of it all was to bring them to a greater knowledge of God in order that they might impart this truth better to others.

They always kept this thing living. I'm thinking of the independents like—like Philip Doddridge and others who started their academies. I'm thinking of William Tennent who started the famous Log College, which later became Princeton University in America and the Princeton Seminary and so on. And many others in this land and in America. Now, they always safeguarded this. But the trouble is that as the years passed, and as the spirituality of the professors and the teachers went down and down, all this element of worship was forgotten.

And theology became an abstract science, and it was handled like any other subject whatsoever. And so, you get into the condition in which the colleges are the source of the pollution and it affects the life of all the churches. And I'm not only talking about past history. You will find that evangelical people in this century fail to remember this principle, and they become more concerned in academic qualifications and results and degrees and diplomas awarded by secular universities than they are in the spirituality of the men they turn out. They pack them with a theoretical knowledge, and often a man who goes in with his heart ablaze with the truth and the desire to preach it and to propagate it comes out as a man whose head is full of knowledge, but he's lost the fire and he's neither a preacher nor really an adequate teacher.

Now, here, you see, it seems to me, are some of the problems and the questions that are raised for us by this great statement of the apostle's. I'd intended going further this evening, but I see my time has gone and I think we'd better leave it at this point rather than that I should start to look at these various problems. Now here it is. This is what we're dealing with: the importance of balance and of a sense of proportion everywhere in the Christian life.

In our personal lives, in our lives together in the church, in our training men for the ministry, in our whole view of a local church and its relation to other churches, it controls, as I can show you so easily, all these matters. The troubles have arisen in all these respects because men have forgotten that "the kingdom of God is not" this, that, or that, "but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." And you've had a—a divided church and a dead church and a quarreling church and a scandalous church, generally throughout the centuries simply because this great principle has either been forgotten or has not been implemented.

Well, we'll go on, I say, to consider this now in greater detail in the light of that context. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we come to thee once more. And oh, we are aware of our smallness and our fallibility and indeed of our sinfulness. Oh God, have mercy upon us. We see how we all like sheep have gone astray in some respect or another, due to the very thing that we've been discussing together. Oh God, have mercy upon us. Keep us humble, we pray thee. Yea, Lord, it may be that some of us need to be humbled. Take from us all arrogance, pride, carnal assurance, reliance upon our own abilities and powers and understanding. Oh God, help us to see that thy word to us at all times is "Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God," and we would do so this night.

We are grieved, oh Lord, at our own condition, at the condition of thy church, especially at a time such as this. And we long to do thy will, to know thy way clearly and to walk in it perfectly. Oh God, keep us humble, we pray thee, and then show us by thy spirit the meaning of the teaching of thy word, and give us grace to put it into practice. Hear us, oh Lord, receive our humble praise and thanksgiving for the fact that thou hast continued thy church and thy work in spite of men and women such as we are.

And receive our adoration as we realize that this is thy work and that nothing can finally spoil it, still less destroy it, but that He which hath begun a good work in us will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. Lord, receive our prayers.

And now, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship and the communion of the Holy Spirit abide and continue with us now this night, throughout the remainder of this our short and certain earthly life and pilgrimage, and evermore. Amen.