The Leadership and Authority of the Congregation (part 2 of 2)

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of church government in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

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Exactly the same thing is true in church. If you are known for the profundity of your biblical submission to Jesus Christ, for your hunger and passionate desire to walk with integrity and godliness before the Lord God, you will gain authority without seeking it. And if you seek authority, you will lose it.

If I want to stress the centrality of prayer, I earnestly wish I could spend much more time on this theme. It is not because I am a great example. It is because I am persuaded that far, far, far more work for eternity is accomplished in our closets on our knees than in the committee meetings and board meetings of our congregations.

I speak to you who are in the ministry. When was the last time you prayed thoughtfully, carefully, closely through your membership list? When was the last time you took the agenda of an upcoming church meeting and went over it thoughtfully, carefully, prayerfully on your knees? What is your agenda in prayer? Well, there’s Mrs. Smith with an ingrown toenail. There’s Mr. Jones, and he’s got cancer. “Lord, help them. Cure them if it’s your will. If it’s not, I guess not.”

What are the biblical categories for prayer? When we turn to a prayer like that in Philippians 1:9–11 or Ephesians 3:14–21, what does Paul pray? Amongst other things, he prays that Christians might come to know the length and the depth and the breadth and the height and to know the love of God that is past knowledge.

He isn’t busy praying that more Christians will love God more; he’s busy praying that they will come to recognize his love more, because no Christian can ever be mature until he or she begins to grasp and feel and squirm under the immaculate multidimensional love of God. He knows what will make them mature. He prays for that. When was the last time you prayed that for your people?

We have sometimes gone through tough times at the seminary where I teach. So tough, so difficult, that some were thinking of leaving and going elsewhere. Three or four people got together and began to pray. It involved praying very difficult prayers. I will deal with the question of discipline in the last talk. Beyond our wildest expectation, the Lord has taken a hand in the situation.

In Luke 18, the Lord Jesus Christ insists that as a loving father, he will pour out good gifts upon his people, his blessed Holy Spirit, on those who pray with persistence. To use the language of the Lord Jesus’ half-brother, “It may be that we have not because we ask not.”

1. Positive biblical perspectives for leaders

A) There is the sway of godly example.

When I was an undergraduate at McGill, there was a chap there by the name of Dave Ward, an Anglican, who had the most amazing ability to lead people to Christ. He was one of the finest personal workers I’ve ever met.

A Brethren chap and I started a Bible study in my room in Molson Hall. You can guess who put up the money for that one. We were a little bit nervous. I was only 17. I was studying chemistry and mathematics, not Bible, but because I was probably a little more gabby than my Brethren friend, I was dubbed for leading this Bible study.

We prayed that not too many people would come the first time because we didn’t want to be swamped. We asked three people to come and hoped that not more than two would show up so that we wouldn’t be outnumbered. Unfortunately, three came, and the word got round, and in three weeks we had 16 people coming. I quickly got into all kinds of problems that I just didn’t know enough to resolve, so I began to lean on others in the InterVarsity group.

On one particular occasion, I could sense that two of the fellows seemed (to me at least) to be pretty close to the kingdom. I asked them to come down and spend an evening with me with Dave Ward. So Dave put up an appointment and we went down there and sat around and drank coffee. Dave turned to the first one after a few minutes and said, “Why did you come to see me?”

The chap said, “Well, you know, it’s university. I want to find out about interesting things. I’m interested in Buddhism, I’m interested in Christianity, I’m interested in all kinds of things. I’d like you to express just a little more why you think that I should follow the Christian way.” Well, I hadn’t quite assessed him properly, obviously.

Dave turned to him and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t have time.” I thought, “This is witness?” The fellow said, “What do you mean? I came down here to talk about these things.” Dave said, “Listen, I don’t have time. I’m following graduate studies. I’m talking to people all over this campus who really want to know more about the Lord Jesus. There are people here who can help you. I’ll give you a list of books if you want to find more about it, but I don’t have time to deal with you.” “Why did you come?” he said and turned to the other one.

The second one said, “Well, I was brought up in (I guess what you’d call) a liberal home. We don’t really have your kind of view of Christ and church and all that. We went to church, and we’re good people. We don’t drink. We don’t smoke. We don’t do any of those kinds of things that you think are bad. We’re more upright than most of you Christians. We’re a good, moral home.

Why should I follow Christianity? What is this going to give me that I don’t already have? I kind of like that it can transform lives, but quite frankly, our lives don’t seem to need transforming. We’re as good as you are, maybe better. What’s the difference, then, in your life?” Dave said, “Watch me.” The fellow said, “I beg your pardon?” He said, “Watch me. Come and live with me for a month. My expense. Come and live with me.”

I thought, “Dave, you idiot. You’ve blown it again.” In fact, he hadn’t. He was exactly right, both times. For anybody who lived with Dave Ward could see a person who got up in the morning and prayed for an hour. You would see the kind of profound spiritual experience of the Lord that not every Christian knows. You would see somebody who is following Jesus, who gave himself to people while still producing graduate study work.

This second chap became a Christian. He’s a medical doctor to this day, serving the Lord, married to a Christian wife. Then I remembered the words of Paul, “Be imitators of me even as I also am of Christ.” That’s what the ministry entails. Saying that and not feeling ashamed. If in some measure you can’t say it, you don’t belong in the ministry.

B) The importance of winning spiritual consensus

You see, there is a profound sense in ways that we’ll work out later, in which congregational government is mandated by Scripture, but how does a spiritual leader gain this kind of assent? Because we have been steeped in Western democracy, we think that this assent is gained by so pulling the strings that you gain a 51-percent vote, and then, to make everything seem fair, you impose Robert’s Rules of Order. Then you can rule things out of court, you can raise points of order, you have movers and seconders and so on.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I will say some good things about Robert’s Rules of Order in a moment, but somehow we have come to the strange position of reading in Western democracy and parliamentary rules into the New Testament. Might it not be instead that spiritual leadership in the New Testament finds the leaders walking with a transparent integrity and godliness and evangelistic zeal, which by example and precept leads the church to spiritually-minded consensus about what ought to be done.

Then on occasion when the spiritual leaders go amuck, the church is still responsible, as we shall see in due course, for challenging the leadership. There is a dynamic tension between the church and the leadership. In the New Testament you have neither the corporate IBM model with all the power flowing down, nor the raw democracy model with all the power flowing up. There is, instead, everywhere in the New Testament, a dynamic tension between the two.

You know why? Because both sides can mess up. Nowhere is it truer than in the church that “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So as a result, in the churches with congregational government with most closely aligned biblical principles that I have witnessed, inevitably, the spiritual leadership walks with a certain kind of humility and integrity and seeks to win consensus.

Now let me explain what consensus is not. Consensus is not necessarily winning 100-percent unanimity. It is not necessarily that, because in any church of any size you will find the odd maverick who on general principles will vote negatively because he feels that he’s a prophetic voice. If you aim to win 100-percent agreement on everything, you will do nothing. That’s the truth of the matter. On the other hand, spiritual consensus is not 51 percent, especially when that 51 percent is achieved largely by manipulation.

Let me tell you what a particular church did on a matter that was rather difficult. This was a church in a rather conservative area in England, in fact, where the church was bulging with about 600 people, packed to the doors, absolutely packed out, especially during term time. It was in a university town, where it drew 250 students or so.

The question was, “What does the church do next?” They were in a part of town where they couldn’t expand any more. They were not so well off that they could simply throw up a big building in another part of town, and if they did, then they would be away from the university, and therefore, no longer with that kind of ministry.

They could put in a balcony that was going to cost about 80,000 pounds, but that would leave them with a mortgage for the next 10 to 15 years and which would only at their current growth rate serve them for perhaps 3 years, and then they would be faced with the same problems again. Or they could go to double services, and in England, that’s almost unthinkable … tradition.

Now the elders came to the conviction that on balance it was best to go to the double services and see what God would do. If God gave them more people, if there was consensus in the church to do this and divide the congregation equitably so there wasn’t a youth service and an old-folks service or a town-gown split or something like that, if the Lord prospered this, then it might be a sign the Lord was going to lead them into something more, but it was a kind of test before the Lord to see what would happen.

So they brought it up to the church. They did not say, “Here is a proposition from the board that we’d like to pass tonight.” They said, “Here are our concerns. These are the things we’ve thought about and prayed about and the options as we see them with their strengths and weaknesses. We do not want a decision tonight. These things are too serious. They affect our future too greatly. What is the wisdom of the church on these matters? We would you to talk about them, think about them, pray over them.

Let’s begin this evening with having some give and take on these matters until we see what the mind of the Lord is for us.” Then the discussion began. There were strong voices with integrity from almost all sides. A few people got angry. Most kept their cool. The board insisted that there would be no motion that night. Then gradually as discussion proceeded, with fair open sharing, it was astonishing, partly because the church was trained this way, but gradually a consensus began.

Finally one person got up who had not spoken before and with the church still very divided said, “It seems to me that of the various options that have been listed, building another building in another part of town and leaving our youth ministry, putting in a balcony for 80,000 quid, and so on, the one that is least irrevocable, the one that provides us with an opportunity to back out if we are making a mistake is to go to double services. Let’s commit ourselves to trying that out, carefully, thoughtfully, prayerfully for one term in the university schedule and then reassess.”

It almost seemed as if that one speech in the wake of all of the other speeches, brought a kind of consensus, but the elders said, “We are not going to vote tonight. We do not want this manipulated. We want you to think about this and pray about this.” In due course, there was a vote on the matter. I don’t recall the exact figures, it was 85 or 90 or 95 percent, in that sort of range, but some people still voted against it, which was fine.

They tried it and in one term ran up 100 extra people. In their structure with a Sunday school operating at the same time as the service, they had to double their Sunday school staff, and that in fact, turned out to be for the good since it brought in more leaders and trained more leaders, and at last count, they’re running closer to 200 to 250 above where they were before. At this rate, in another couple of years, instead of a church with 500 to 600 they’ll be running 1,000 to 1,200, and then they’ll have to make some decisions … again.

Now of course it’s not always possible to do this. I understand that occasionally you get a maverick in the church. A church may not be equipped or used to this kind of thing because it has not been encouraged to think and pray for these things, but nevertheless, as we shall see in the last session, there is profound wisdom in Jesus’ final appeal, “Tell it to the church.” Tell it to the church.

“We don’t trust the church. We trust us. We have the wisdom. We have the training. We know what’s best.” But I submit to you that there is, in most of our churches, more wisdom, more insight, more balance, more perspective if we will simply let things air out. Talk freely. Don’t precipitate things too quickly. Let it work out, and if you can’t win it now, try it again in six months, a year, two years. It’s the Lord’s church. Tell it to the church.

C) In general, you will find the church far more content if it is well-fed than if it is not.

I have an 8 month-old at home. Somehow in the Lord’s great mercy he has given us two children who are far better than we deserve.

With parents like they’ve got, they could have been far worse sinners than they are, but in fact, the Lord has given us remarkably calm, even-tempered, sleep-the-night-through type of babies. But if my 8-month-old, who is in the 100th percentile of size, who eats enough for any three babies, is hungry, God help the foundations of our house. He’s horrid, absolutely awful.

So are most churches that are not well-fed. Some of our problems in our churches are there because ministers are not growing in their grasp of biblical truth. They are not spending hours in the study. They are frittering away their time in reading magazines and organizing committees and writing letters and all kinds of things, but they’re not reading commentaries and theologies right through.

They are not working hard at their sermons. They’re not writing things out. They’re not thinking clearly. They’re not growing in theology. We have sermonettes for Christianettes, and then wonder why we don’t have mature churches.

Of course, there are many exceptions. Do not think me too harsh, but you and I well know that this is too often true in too many of our churches. Men, budget your times, guard your study as carefully as you guard your prayer closet, and feed the flock of God over which he has made you overseers. I will move on now to some remarks for the church. I’m going to skip the question of the lordship of Christ for now and will come back to it in a moment.

2. Negative biblical perspectives for the church

A) Beware of the sin of the prima donna, especially in the rising age of yuppies.

We are dealing now with young high-powered executives who are used to giving orders, who have answers for everything, and sometimes they are wise and sometimes they are spiritually rank amateurs. Sometimes they may be politically and economically very sharp but have no real heart for the Lord. They are simply good executives.

Such people often think that by virtue of their leadership in the community they have every right to expect to be leaders in the church, but it may be that somebody who is a janitor at Sears has more spiritual maturity and integrity in his little finger than the executive does in his whole life. Beware the prima donna.

That means that we need to develop systems of election and appointment for leadership in our churches that measure spirituality and not executive efficiency. That means that almost every time before you head into an appointment period in the church (Incidentally, it doesn’t have to be every year. Who says that things have to be every year except our constitutions, which are only marginally biblical?) make sure you spend two or three or four sermons on spiritual leadership and its characteristics so everybody knows what to look for.

B) Beware the sin of the party spirit.

Oh what harsh things Paul has to say about the party spirit in Corinth. “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Cephas,” “I belong to Apollos, the eloquent one,” and then the most supercilious of the lot, “I belong to Christ.”

This kind of party spirit can breed a kind of factionalism in the church that is not only destructive of the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace that we examined last night, it is destructive of the ability to hear the reforming Word of God. The only thing that is heard once factionalism sets in is what fosters that party. Beware the party spirit. I would love to say more about that, but I’ll press on.

C) Beware the sin of political manipulation.

You see, this is almost endemic to congregational government as long as congregational government thinks of itself first and foremost along merely democratic lines, but if instead the democracy of the New Testament is in terms of spiritually, corporately discerning the mind of God so that the passion of the leadership and of the church as a whole is to know what God wants us to do, then there will be fewer voices trying merely to pull the strings.

Then when such strings are pulled, the leadership can quietly, humbly, gently lay out all the issues before the church. “Tell it to the church.” Don’t try and pull strings back. “ ‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord, ‘I will repay.’ ” It’s his church. There may be need for discipline. We’ll come to that in the last talk, but meanwhile, do not try to gain your way by a kind of even more clever string pulling. “Tell it to the church.”

3. Positive biblical perspectives for the church

A) The church needs to grasp the entailments of the priesthood of the believer and the distribution of the Spirit.

Let me spend a little time on that one, and the rest I will just briefly touch upon.

Under the old covenant, the relationship between God and his people was, in a sense, tribal. Even at the institution of the covenant at the Exodus, at Sinai, the people finally concluded, “We do not want to approach this terrifying God, but you, Moses, you be the mediator between God and us.”

So in the structuring of the old covenant, God pours out his Spirit on prophet, on priest, on king. He pours out his Spirit on special leaders like Bezalel with assigned tasks, but you do not find under the old covenant that provision is made to pour out the Spirit univocally on all people without distinction. “Ah,” you say, “but aren’t you suggesting that old covenant people weren’t regenerate?”

I will say, “It depends what you mean. If you mean by regeneration that special enduement of the Spirit that comes precisely and exclusively in the wake of Jesus’ triumph at the cross and his ascension, his exultation to the right hand of the Majesty on High, no, they were not regenerate.” You cannot read the pulsating anticipation of the end in the New Testament without recognizing that the New Testament Christians are aware of something profoundly new taking place. The Spirit is now given as the down payment of the promised inheritance. It’s new.

If, on the other hand, by regeneration you mean, “Did God so work by whatever means he choose in the hearts of some that amongst the covenant community there was a faithful remnant true to him with some personal knowledge of God?” then I have no quarrel so long as you allow that there is something fundamentally different on the relationship between the individual and the believer under the new covenant. After all, is that not what you find in the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and others?

In the old covenant, when David sins, the whole people are dragged into the punishment, for God’s relationship with his people is tribal. Thus, God raises up prophets and pours his Spirit out upon them and withdraws his Spirit and pours it out upon another and so on. His relationship is through mediators, priests, prophets, kings, and specially appointed people upon whom the Lord pours out his Spirit.

But, we are told by the prophet Jeremiah, “ ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will plant the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the offspring of men and of animals. Just as I watched over them to uproot and tear down, and to overthrow, destroy, and bring disaster, so I will watch over them to build and to plant,’ declares the Lord.

‘In those days people will no longer say, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Instead, everyone will die for his own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—his own teeth will be set on edge. ‘The day is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.

It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant though I was a husband to them,’ declares the Lord. ‘This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,’ declares the Lord.

‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the Lord. ‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.’ ”

That, according to Peter, was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost in the prophecy of Joel which likewise promises a time when the Spirit will be poured out on your young men and on your women and they will dream dreams and see visions, on your men servants and your maid servants, not just on the prophet, priest, and king but on everybody who belongs to the Lord under this new covenant. This Jeremiah passage then is explicitly applied to the church in Hebrews 8 and Hebrews 10 under a grand typology.

What is being said by this? That we don’t need teachers in the church? How can that be when Jesus, in fact, is a teacher and promotes teaching. When there are teachers ordained in the New Testament to teach, why then under the new covenant are we told, “In those days they will no longer say, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know me”? “No man will teach his neighbor,” we are told.

What is being said? What is being said is that the teacher is no longer mediator, the teacher is no longer a central figure who has an exclusive enduement of the Spirit of God. It is no longer the case that the teacher, prophet, priest, king, or anyone else, comes and says, “Know the Lord. Do this: Tear down the Asherah poles. Throw out the Baals. Rebuild the temple. Purify it.”

Under the structure of the new covenant, they all know the Lord, and it’s not just the leader who has the Spirit. This new covenant distinction bears on a whole set of relationships. We no longer have a Levitical priesthood. Under the new covenant, the antitype is either Jesus the Great High Priest or it’s all Christians everywhere, for we all have the Spirit now, and thus, we are all priests before God, standing between God and the world, intermediaries, priests, for we have the Spirit. This is the structure of the new covenant.

Thus, the priesthood of the believers is not in the first instance an organizational question; it is in the first instance a new covenant reality. It is an experienced privilege, and if then within that framework there still remain teachers in the church (After all, what on earth do I think I’m doing standing up here?) it is not because intrinsically I have a greater enduement of the Spirit, nor is it because I declare to you the Word of God in some special unction that you cannot possibly enjoy. I stand under the Word to be corrected by it as you do.

I made a decision when I went to Richmond Baptist Church, wisely or unwisely, 16 years ago, that if I preached a sermon on a passage where later light showed me I was fundamentally wrong about the interpretation of that passage I would go back and re-preach the sermon and get it right. I made many mistakes at Richmond. That wasn’t one of them.

I preached a sermon on the temptation of Jesus, and I got it all wrong. I wasn’t mature enough. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t understand it well enough. Two years later I got it right, and I went to the congregation and said, “Two years ago I preached such and such, and this was roughly what I said. It was wrong for this reason and this reason and this reason. In fact, this is what the text says, and this is how it applies to us.”

Let me tell you, it did not diminish my authority. This was not why I did it, but it did not diminish my authority. Rather, surprisingly, in fact, it enhanced it (although that’s not why I did it), for the congregation responded by saying, “We perceive that you see yourself as under the Word.”

Now then, because of this great doctrine of the priesthood of the believer and the distribution of the Spirit that we looked at last night, it behooves us to work very hard, very hard, to get Christians serving the Lord. The problem is that very often Christians think that serving the Lord means standing up behind the sacred desk and preaching Scripture; it’s got to be a public task.

But serving the Lord can take on such a wide embrace of activities, and it may be that if some have some of these special kinds of gifts you can edge them into a Bible study. Test out their gifts and see if they’ve really got something. Move them into an adjacent community and start a Sunday School. Or perhaps it can be a gift of encouragement where someone has a particular job to look after 20 old people and visit them at least monthly and pray with them and listen to them and bring them baskets of fruit.

Find ministries for people. Let them discharge their gifts. Watch what is going on and who has which gift, and portray something that is being discharged in the name of Christ for the whole church. This is part of the exercise of our priesthood. Let me simply articulate these last points without going on at them at length.

B) Within the framework of the kind of leadership that you find in the New Testament, the congregation is beholden to respect and obey its leaders.

The language in some of the passages is extraordinarily strong. Listen to these words from Hebrews 13:

“Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. […] Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.”

C) On the other hand, we are also exhorted to discipline our leaders.

We are told in 1 Timothy 5, “Do not entertain an accusation against an elder unless it is brought by two or three witnesses. Those [elders] who sin are to be rebuked publicly, so that the others may take warning.”

Now in fact, we have often handled this the other way around. If some poor little girl gets pregnant in our church, there’s a showcase. If it’s one of our ministers, he’s allowed quietly to resign and slip away. That’s not biblical. We do not entertain charges against leaders lightly, but those who sin must be rebuked publically, and that’s the responsibility of the church. We will examine this later in some detail.

So there is inevitably some tension then. We respect our leaders. They work at leadership through example and integrity. If either side goes amuck, the leaders, then, will command, and if the leaders go amuck, the church will rebuke. Meanwhile, Paul exhorts the churches to intercede for him. He insists on the responsibility of all Christians to minister, to serve. He insists on the responsibility of the churches to support the leaders.

He assumes that the eldership will be fiscally supported, and in fact, he generally takes the stance that those elders who do well should receive extra support. God help the situation where the minister is always concerned about salary and the church has the attitude, “Lord, you keep him humble and we’ll keep him poor.”

The ideal situation is where the church says constantly, “Pastor, we may not give you what you’re worth, but boy we’ll give you what we can, for we love you and we want you to be free of these things.” And the ministers for their part say, in effect, “Frankly, I don’t get what I get and I’ll gladly drive a bus or chop wood to help pay expenses if only I may serve you for the sake of Jesus Christ.”

For you see at the end of the day, it is Christ’s church. I don’t know what else the lordship of Jesus means within the context of the church, Christ’s church. We can get so bottled up with our fears, our insecurities, our problems, and our programs that we forget that at the end of the day it’s Christ’s church.

That means not only that he is the supreme model of sacrifice and service but also at the end of the day we go to him with our concerns and our cares, both from the clergy point of view and the laity point of view, and ask that he, the Lord of the church, may bring renewal to his church. It is his.

Although we pour ourselves out in passionate service, at the end of the day, only that will stand which he blesses by his Spirit. It is his church. It is within that framework that the church, then, is to stand before a watching world as the outpost of heaven, the community of the redeemed not yet transformed completely, but transformed principally and growing from glory to glory in conformity with Jesus Christ.

There will always be trouble in the church. You cannot read the pages of the New Testament without seeing that there will always be trouble in the church. Paul’s worst problems were with churches. He could take the kind of suffering that he got from outsiders with a fair bit of pugnacity, with a fair bit of courage and strength, but what tore him up inside was trouble in the churches.

“Beyond all the other sufferings that I have borne,” he says in 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, “I bear daily the pressure of the concerns of the churches upon me. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is offended, and I do not burn?” That’s no mere professional talking. That’s a spiritual leader.

But although there will always be such troubles in the church this side of the Lord’s blessed return, there are ways of discharging leadership in the midst of this endless host of problems that conform for the service of Christ and the example of the apostles and there are ways that are merely false stereotypical analogies drawn from a pagan world that does not know what spiritual leadership is all about.

If we would have spiritual renewal at the level of leadership in our church, we must reassess our understanding of spiritual leadership that promotes a profound level and bring our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Let us pray.

Merciful God, have pity upon us. We sometimes feel like the church in Laodicea. We think we are strong because we have a heritage of orthodoxy, and we do not discern the many areas in which we are so weak. We think we see clearly because we grasp certain corners of the truth, but we do not understand as we ought to.

We think we are rich, but we have a heritage of freedom, little tangible opposition, enough wherewithal to make reasonable decisions, and we have forgotten the first beatitude which says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Lord God, have mercy upon us.

Drive us to our knees so that in intercession we beseech you daily for that renewal of the Spirit that brings transformation, a hunger for biblical truth and for conformity to Christ, a humility before him and a profound attitude of service towards others that always characterizes the church when it is receiving a powerful enduement from on high.

Work in us to make us dissatisfied for what we have achieved and grant that we may hunger so to press on to conformity to Jesus Christ individually and in the corporate life of the church that every sin will grieve us and shame us, and every strength we will instantly ascribe to your gracious working amongst us.

Forbid it, Lord, when we who are leaders stoop to being mere professionals. Forgive us, Lord, when we who are not assigned the primary task of the eldership and teaching so begin to manipulate and twist and play power politics that our opinions are somehow sanctified by your authority in our minds. O Lord God, help us to walk before you with holy fear, understanding that to this one you will look, he who is of a contrite spirit and who trembles at your Word.

Renew us, we pray. Break us out from our complacency and make us hungry indeed for the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness, so that every fiber of our being cries with the church in every age, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Even so, come.” Help us then to occupy until he comes. This we pray for the glory of the Son and for the good of the church for which he gave his own life. In his name we ask it, amen.