Onward Christian Soldiers

The main trouble with the Christian Church today is that she is too much like a clinic, too much like a hospital; that is why the great world is going to hell outside! We are all suffering - to quote Charles Lamb - "with the mumps and measles of the soul" and feeling our own pulses and talking about ourselves, and our moods and subjective states. We have lost the concept of the army of God, and the King of righteousness in this fight against the kingdom of evil . . . Holiness is a matter of service, not of feelings and subjective moods and states, not a matter of experiences. We are meant to be serving the living God with the whole of our being; and no part of us is ever meant to be used, and must not be used, in the service of sin. We must not fraternize with the enemy. That is the New Testament way of teaching holiness. What most of us need is not a clinic, but to listen to the sergeant-major drilling his troops, commanding them, warning them, threatening them, showing them what to do. The New Testament teaching is altogether different from the sentimentality and subjectivity that have controlled holiness and sanctification teaching for so long, and which tell us that it is "quite simple". But it is not easy. "Fight the good fight of faith," says the New Testament. Play the man. "Quit yourselves as men"; "Put on the whole armour of God"; "Stand in the evil day". Those are all military commands; there is nothing of the clinic about them. We must get rid of that notion of the clinic and the hospital; and we must look at these things more in terms of God and his glory, and the great campaign which he inaugurated through the Son of his love, and which he is going to bring to a triumphant conclusion.

--D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones