The Wanderer

What follows is from Ted Donnelly, in his book Life in Christ, on what it means to abide in Christ.  He speaks of abiding by faith, by obedience, and by personal and corporate communion with the living God.  With regard to the latter, and specifically the life of the church, Pastor Donnelly writes:

We need also, as churches, to focus on communion with the Lord.  We must give worship, study and prayer first place in our agenda.  Our age is an impatient one, in love with activity, and A. W. Tozer’s words are truer now than when he wrote them a generation ago:

‘The accent in the church today,’ says Leonard Ravenhill . . . ‘is not on devotion, but on commotion’ . . . The adolescent taste which loves the loud horn and thundering exhaust has got into the activities of modern Christians . . . We must begin the needed reform by challenging the spiritual validity of externalism.  What a man is must be shown to be more important than what he does . . . We must show a new generation of nervous, almost frantic, Christians that power lies at the centre of the life . . . The desire to be dramatically active is proof of our religious infantilism; it is a type of exhibitionism common to the kindergarten.[1]

This is not a plea for quietism, defined in the dictionary as ‘a passive attitude towards life, with devotional contemplation and abandonment of the will, as a form of religious mysticism.’  It is simply a recognition of the truth of the promise, ‘they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength’ (Isa. 40:31).  The church which makes a priority of fellowship with Christ will find itself brought by him, as he has promised, to a new level of fruitfulness.[2]

[2] Edward Donnelly, Life in Christ: Walking in Newness of Life (Bryntirion, Wales: Bryntirion Press, 2007), 71-72.