“An Alive Church”

“The Letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

A lot of Christians are in the habit of visiting a new church and almost instantaneously making a judgment as to whether that church is spiritually alive or spiritually dead. Haven’t you been with people just after they’d come from visiting a church for the first time and heard them say things like, “Wow, that church was really alive,” or, “Those people were really on fire for the Lord”? Or, “Good grief! I’ve just spent and hour with God’s frozen chosen. What a dead church that was!” Haven’t you heard people make those kinds of judgments? Perhaps, on occasion, those judgments have been heard to come from your own lips.

Jesus once visited a new church. The church’s name was the church at Sardis. And after visiting this church, Jesus sent a terse letter back to its bishop, in which he sized up the congregation in one sentence. He said, “I know your works, that you have a name for being alive, but you are dead.” Now how would you like to receive a letter from the Son of God like that one! That was a pretty tough judgment.

You see Sardis was a church that could convince anyone that it was really alive in the Lord. But the Lord Jesus Christ took one look at it and said, “You’re not alive; you just appear to be alive. In reality you’re just a very animated corpse.”

We all know of churches that have great reputations for being spiritually alive. They’re filled to capacity every Sunday morning. They have pastors who can stir up and motivate the people with their inspiring messages. The people worship with such great enthusiasm for the Lord. The church calendars testify to the frenetic level of their ministries and activities. And don’t get me wrong. These churches may very well be alive in the Lord. But Jesus says that you can show every appearance of being alive, according to man’s judgment, and still be very well dead. You can demonstrate every outward sign that you are a living body in Christ, but still be merely an animated corpse. Pump enough electricity into a corpse and you can get it to dance. Pump enough psychology, enough emotion, enough law into a congregation and you can get it to do a lot of stuff and make it seem very alive. But, in fact, it’s dead.

So what is it that makes an alive church versus one that’s dead?

In our epistle lesson from 2^nd Corinthians, St. Paul says there are two types of ministry that can be found in the Church of any place or time. Not just two different “styles” of ministry. Not two equally valid choices of how to do church, but two fundamentally different paradigms of how the church will operate. And it is according to which one of these two ministries a church practices that judgment will be made as to whether it is truly alive, or just faking it –judged dead or alive, not in man’s judgment, but in Christ’s judgment, which is really the only judgment that counts at the end of the day.

Two ministries: one St. Paul calls the ministry “of the letter,” the other he calls the ministry “of the Spirit.” The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Now I’m sure that at one time or another you have had St. Paul’s distinction between letter and Spirit explained to you something like this: By “of the letter” Paul means the way we do our Christian duties—our worship and our other functions and ministries—as a mere rote exercise, a mere exercise in formality. But what he means by “of the Spirit” is the proper way we perform our Christian duties, that is, from the heart, or with sincerity of spirit. Haven’t you heard it explained to you that way? But now no matter how important that distinction may be, no matter how important it is for us to do our Christian duties from the heart, and not as mere rote exercise, that’s not what Paul is getting at here. In fact, it is precisely Paul’s point that being alive in the Lord has very little to do with us performing our duty towards God; it has everything to do with resting in our faith that Christ has performed all our duty towards God for us. That’s the distinction St. Paul is making. It is the distinction between the Law and the Gospel.

It’s the Law that kills us spiritually, says St. Paul. And it’s the Spirit through the Gospel that gives us life. So churches that only have law ministries will be dead, no matter how excited and animated they seem, because the letter kills; and churches that have gospel ministries will be alive, no matter how meek and lowly they may seem, because the Spirit gives life through the simple message of Christ, and Him crucified.

There are a lot of “great preachers” out there, who attract huge followings because they are dynamic speakers and preach very practical sermons. But the question is: are they ministering life to their hearers? Is their ministry “of the Spirit” or merely “of the letter?” Are they preaching Gospel, or merely Law? And I’ll give you a very simple way of making a determination. After every sermon you hear, ask this question: Did Christ have to die for that sermon to be preached? When all is said and done, did Christ have to go to the cross for that message to have been given? And if the answer is, “No,” then all you’ve heard was mere letter. All you’ve heard was Law. You haven’t been given the Gospel—the Gospel of grace a sinner like you so desperately needs.

Let me illustrate what I mean. A friend of mine once visited a church in his home-town in order to hear another pastor speak, because this pastor has a reputation for being a very good preacher. The sermon happened to be on the topic of Christian parenting. And it started off really well. He talked at length about the fact that our children—even the children of Christian couples—are born with original sin. They are born sinners. They are born in rebellion against God. And he really did a great job, apparently, of establishing this teaching from the Scriptures. But the solution he gave for the problem of original sin is that we need to discipline our children. We need to make sure we don’t spare the rod or else we’ll spoil the child. In other words, the solution to sin, given in this sermon, was better parenting skills.

Now did Christ have to die for the sermon to be preached? Absolutely not! The people were given plenty of Law—and good law, a correct application of the law to show them their sins—but they weren’t given even faintest hint of the Gospel. They were left to deal with the greatest problem their children will ever face – their own inherited sinfulness— on the basis of their own works, on the basis of developing good parenting skills. Where was the cross in that sermon? Where was the message of hope that Christ died for their children’s sins, and that His death could be applied to them in baptism for the forgiveness of their sins and to give them new-birth so that they could respond to discipline? Where was the Gospel in that message? It didn’t exist. Christ didn’t have to die for that sermon to be preached. It could as easily have been preached by a Rabbi, a person who is still under the law.

Now that’s not to denigrate the entire ministry of this man or of is preaching. It’s just an example. But this is what Paul means by the ministry of the letter. The “letter,” in Paul’s vocabulary, is the Law of God as it stands outside of you, and tells you what God demands of you, and shows you all the ways you’ve fallen short, but gives you no power to obey. And Paul says that this kind of ministry kills because it causes you to despair that you can ever please God; that, or it makes you trust in your own works and not in the sufficiency of Christ’s works for your salvation. Either way, you see, you’re dead.

There are a lot of popular preachers out there whose ministries seem very alive. But when it comes right down to it, they have ministries merely of the letter and not of the Spirit.

Paul himself was in competition with some preachers whom he derisively labeled the “super-apostles.” The people flocked to them to hear their brilliant orations. They didn’t preach this business about a cross. They preached practical wisdom. They were dynamic speakers. And they must have had something more important to say than St. Paul, because they even charged money to come and hear them preach. But though these super-apostles could stir up the crowds with their brilliant rhetoric and polished oratory, their messages came down to nothing more than “do this,” or “do that”— very practical sermons that left their hearers dead in their trespasses and sins.

But Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Paul had a ministry that was alive because he preached the gospel, even though he seemed weak and uninspiring in comparison to the super-apostles. Christ was the bottom line of every one of Paul’s sermons: Christ crucified; Christ our righteousness before God. “Through this man is proclaimed to you remission of sins: and by him everyone that believeth is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.” That was the basic Gospel message Paul preached. And if that message isn’t coming through loud and clear every week here, then my preaching is worthless because it’s only “of the letter” and not “of the Spirit.” And I’m not doing what Christ called and ordained me to do, which is to loose you from your sins, and to give you a heart of love for God, by constantly bringing you back to what He has done for you in Christ.

You have every right to expect and demand to hear the comfortable words of the Gospel every Sunday. You get plenty of Law otherwise. What you need is the Gospel.

We will be an alive church so long as we believe, and live, and minister the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and don’t fall back into a ministry merely of the letter. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life through the Gospel. Let it be said that we are a church alive with the gospel – not in the judgment of men, but in the judgment of Jesus Christ our Lord. +