Can moth and rust destroy your Church? Can thieves take your treasure away?

If we find ourselves in love with the Church that loves 'activities,' loves 'bells and whistles,' loves 'showiness', loves all the excesses of needless technology , loves to showcase personalities and performances, lets stop and examine why we love these things. And lets be honest about it; is it really for 'winning souls' and for 'serving the Lord' that we do it, or is it that we love it becauseit provides us with a continual experience that should give us enough of an emotional 'high' to keep us going.

And let us ask ourselves one more very crucial question- if tomorrow, these things were taken away from the Church, and we had nothing but the Bible in our hands and His song in our hearts, would we still follow Him? Remember, when Jesus asked the rich man to sell all he had and come follow Him, that man went away sad. If Jesus comes one day soon and asks His people for their 'bells and whistles' (or just takes them away), that day will not be one of an emotional high for them, but an emotional low, and that will be a time of great danger and risk for the people of God.

What Jesus said for the individual, He also says for the Church at large: Matt6v19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Jesus makes a marked difference between earthly treasures and heavenly treasures, and yet much of the Church today has heaped the two together and said, 'They are the same for Christ's sake.' But Jesus doesn't say that. In fact He says that you can't serve both Jesus and mammon. It's time to stop making excuses and to stop making fine sounding arguments in this regard, only great harm can come from ignoring this truth.

Reflection

There is nothing to fear from honest self-reflection as a Church. Shying from it out of a feeling of fear that we'll be found guilty is misguided, as there is now no condemnation to those in Christ. Therefore all we can do is gain from seeing ourselves in the truth. But such reflection is today often called 'judgmentalism' and is treated as the furthest thing from true love. This misguided understanding of love is used as a fortress against the sword of the Spirit that wounds in order to bring life. We automatically shy from wounds, but the Christian life is an ongoing process by which the Great Physician opens us up in order to fix, to mend and to bring greater and greater life. If we are already perfected, there is no need for a Great Physician, but we know that we are not there just yet. In Christ we must be vulnerable in order to be strong, we must be weak in order to shine forth His strength. This great paradox is something that by and large is rejected today because it is not understood. And so reflection upon ourselves is reviled and those that speak up are outcasted as strange and unloving. And yet the whole Word is a magnifying glass for us, for it is not men who can assess each other, but it is the Word only which should have the great and final say.