Our Supreme Business

 David Alan Black

Years ago I read, “The church is the only institution in the world that carries within it the seeds of its own reformation.”

This is true. The seeds, of course, are the Scriptures, which serve as a continual antidote to the pride and jealousy, the irresponsibility and restlessness, the lethargy and apathy that inevitable hamper all institutions.

If there’s one thing we need in our inerrantist, Bible-believing churches it’s a renewed commitment to kingdom expansion, a new priority on reaching the globe with the Good News, a new realization that this tumbleweed of an institution we call the “church,” with all its potential as well as its crazy complexity, possesses a wonderful, life-changing message based on the existence of a Man who bled away His young life on a Roman torture tree and who was raised to life three days later.

Our supreme business is not success or self-satisfaction but being faithful to that message, to death if necessary.

As we “submit to one another in the fear of God” and as we “serve one another in love,” let us learn what lessons we can from the past, forget what we ought to forget, and reach forth unto those things that are before us. All that is ours in Christ, all the service that remains for us to do, all the land that remains to be possessed – let us reach for these while we press toward the mark, proclaiming the Gospel with towel and basin in hand.