April 25, 2006
You're in Good Hands
Often our older folk worry about what will become of the church if the next generation doesn’t step up to the plate and start getting more involved. You’ll hear them say, “Who’s going to replace us when we’re gone.” Actually, I think the generation prior to theirs probably said the very same thing about them! Understandably, when we love the church and have labored for her, we want to know we’ve left her in good hands. Biblically speaking however, our responsibility isn’t to find our own replacements. The Apostle Paul says in 1 Cor 3:6-7, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” The church is indeed in very Good Hands.
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Gail,
When I was a child Dad was the janitor at a country school. One of his duties was to service the coal furnace in the evening. He would remove the spent coal from the furnace while it was a bright yellow-orange glowing lump that he called a clincker. I was facinated with those clinckers because they looked like giant donuts (about as big around as a serving platter), yet they were so bright they looked like they were made of glowing fuzz-bunnies. As they began to cool, dark areas would start forming on the outermost points and would then slowly spread until the surface revealed its true rough, cottage-cheesie, bubbly texture. I would watch through the caverns and holes of its structure as the orange glow receded back into the core of the clincker, its more exterior places now taken over by varying shades of brown to black.
Today, whenever I think of the church and its relationship to the Lord and the truth of His Word, I think of those brownish-black clinckers with their cores still glowing through the cavities of their more visible, porous, and dark structures. Often when we engage in good conversation about the church, the necessity will arise to distinguish between the true church and the visible church. The true church is were the heat is. It is where the Lord meets the heart of the humble individual who looks for Him there. That individual maintains contact with others in whom he recognizes the pattern. Together they glow.
Though they are not controlled by man, these individuals do have to form organizational structures that are, if they desire the Lord to benefit most from their collective efforts. And as these structures grow in complexity the glow of the Lord becomes less apparent in their outward visibility than does the darker directing efforts of the men who must inevitably set the courses and ways for the structure to fulfill its goals chosen by them.
We all want to claim that the Lord controls the structure, but He does not directly. He directs the men who, only by their humility, then bring that direction to their decisions concerning the structure.
The degree to which the glowing heat then fills the structure is directly proportional to the humble submission these men have to the Word of God and the Holy Spirit.
Like the clincker, at the heart of the glow, where it is the brightest - maybe not in zeal but certainly in likeness to the Lord - generally you find the older Christians. They are those who have steeled their faithfulness on numerous years of difficulties, battles, and anguish. They have learned the spiritual ropes; they have refined the processes of spiritual life into those pithy phrases that catch you by the heart. And when you give sincere and undivided attention to them, you alsmost invariably walk away feeling like a little bit of the true church has been passed along to you. We all need to collect as much of that church as we can before they pass on to Home.
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