Tuesday 29 May 2012

The Church is only ever one generation from death

 



I thought it would be useful to follow up on my sermon yesterday with some further thoughts about what God might be saying to us at St Andrews and how we might respond to it. If you missed my sermon (where we're you!!!) you can listen to it on www.standrewsclubmoor.org.uk/resources/sermons.


I will quickly summarise the sermon now and then the next few blogs will look at how we can respond. The main points of the sermon were based on what I saw in the disciples as they waited for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

  • The early disciples recognised their need for the Holy Spirit, without him they would be unable to fulfill the great commission
  • They were united and recognise their need of each other.
  • They prayed continuously until God poured out his Spirit on them
  • Every church is just one generation from spiritual death. We see the evidence in churches around us that we're once alive but have lost the spiritual life and power they once had.
I finished by sharing that I felt the Spirit had been saying to me that at St Andrews we were in danger of being on the slow slide to death. It seems to me that the hunger for the Spirit of God is no there in our Church like it used to be. I can hear it as we worship, I can see it in how few people want receive prayer in ministry times and it is evident when so few people want to be involved in prayer. I pointed to the letter to Sardis in the Book of Revelation where the Holy Spirit says "you have the reputation of being alive but are dead. Wake up!". The problem with spiritual death is that it is slow and the church dying doesn't recognise what is going on.We need to change the way things are going if we are to avoid going the way of so many other churches before us. I ended the sermon by asking the church to pray for an outpouring of God's Spirit upon us once again and to pray for a growing realisation of our desperate need of his power. We need to understand that we can never be complacent about the spiritual life of the church, to do so will lead to death. The next few blogs will flesh out our need for the power of the Spirit a little bit more and will look at what we can do.

 

 

No comments: