Cloaking Cowardice with Custom-Made Bushels

Don’t know who wrote this at Ligonier, but this is excellent:

Martin Luther declared that a new Christian must withdraw from the world for a season, but upon reaching spiritual maturity he must embrace the world as the theater of redemptive activity. His message was, “Away with the cowards who flee from the real world and cloak their cowardice with piety.”

Perhaps the greatest need for our day is the need to market Jesus Christ. The church must become expert in marketing, not in the slick Madison Avenue style but in an aggressive, yet dignified way. The marketplace is where we belong. It is where needy people are found. It is not enough for the church to hang a welcome sign on her door. We dare not wait for the world to come to us.

God never intended the Christian community to be a ghetto. The church is not a reservation. Yet the pervasive style of modern evangelicalism is that of a reservation or a ghetto. We can argue that it is the secularist agenda to put us there and keep us there. But such arguments won’t do. We are there because it is safe and comfortable to be there.

The secularist hates the light and is quite willing to offer us a bushel for it. Shame on us when we buy custom-made bushels and willingly place them over our candles. To hide the light or to restrict it to a reservation is to do violence to the gospel and to grieve the Holy Ghost.

Church-as-reservation, custom-made bushels, doing violence to the gospel, cloaking cowardice instead of embracing the world as God’s theater of redemptive activity–I think we can all respond with “Ouch!” and “Oh me!”  But seriously, this little devotional raises some huge issues in the life of the church as well as our personal lives that call for repentance and faith.  May God help us to never to hide from His mission in our man-made bushels while grieving the Holy Spirit!