I Need a Bigger Church Sign

Our church sign usually is used to announce upcoming events.  Occasionally, I will put up a short quote from Scripture or my reading.  Unfortunately, it’s not big enough for this quote:

It is now common practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend meeting where the only attraction is God. One can only conclude that God’s professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments.

So we have the strange anomaly of orthodoxy in creed and heterodoxy in practice. The striped-candy technique has been so fully integrated into our present religious thinking that it is simply taken for granted. Its victims never dream that it is not a part of the teachings of Christ and His apostles.

Any objection to the carryings-on of our present golden calf Christianity is met with the triumpant reply, “But we are winning them!” And winning them to what? To true discipleship? To cross-carrying? To self-denial? To separation from the world? To crucifixion of the flesh? To holy living? To nobility of character? To a despising of the world’s treasures? To hard self-discipline? To love for God? To total commital to Christ? Of course, the answer to all these questions is “no.”

A. W. Tozer

Quoted in He Is Not Silent by Al Mohler

The great irony of that quote is that it was written four or five decades ago. How prophetic. If Tozer were alive today, I wonder what he would have to say about contemporary Christianity.