The driving force behind the devil’s temptations is less the hope we’ll get hooked on some illicit pleasure, more the power he wields when he is able to accuse us. With the temptation his forked tongue whispers, “Go ahead, what could go wrong?” And when we do he responds, “How could you? You call yourself a Christian. How could God ever love someone like you?” We grow discouraged, despondent.
One of his cleverest and most potent weapons is our own sanctification. As we grow in grace we grow increasingly aware of how slowly we grow, how dimly we reflect His glory. The better we get the more aware we become that we are not so good. The closer we get to glory the better we understand how far we have to go.
This is true of each of us individually and all of us corporately. The promise of God is that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus (Phil. 1:6). The same God who makes this promise, however, also assures us that our corporate Husband is about the business of washing His bride the church with the water of the Word (Ephesians 5:26). In the same way that each of us knows better how bad we are the better we get, so the church becomes more aware and more ashamed of its weaknesses the stronger it grows.
To believe that Jesus is washing His bride is not to take a prideful perspective on the church. It is certainly not to boast that we have arrived. Rather it is to trust our Husband. We trust Him as He leads us in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. We must, as always, ask ourselves this question- are we going to believe our lying eyes, or the promises of our Lord?
Nostalgia and myopia tend to cloud our eyes. With the former we look back with rose colored glasses, thinking the church in the past was so much stronger, healthier, so much more faithful. The truth is that in the United States and across the western world, sixty years ago the majority of pew-sitters were being preached to by men who didn’t believe Jesus was raised from dead.
Does the evangelical church in our day have boatloads of weaknesses? Oh yes. Is one of them disbelief in the resurrection? Not at all. The church of the previous generation consisted of the same kinds of sinners that populate it now.
On the myopia charge consider this- most of us when we read about the church “in the United States and across the western world” think we are reading about the church. The real church consists of all of God’s people across the globe. His Spirit is active in places we give little thought to.
If we would be part of a new Reformation we must believe that Jesus is reforming His church. He is, because He so promised, and He is always true.