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.
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