Eighth Letter by Lloyd-Jones

You may have heard of the Eighth Letter event coming up here in Toronto:

The book of Revelation contains seven letters addressed to 1st century congregations struggling to find their identity.  Nearly two thousand years later we are asking some of the world’s leading thinkers, people you’ve never heard of and, well…you: what is your message for the Church in North America?

You’ve got 15 minutes to communicate your most pressing message to the Church. What will you say?

I haven’t had a chance to blog my eighth letter. But I hope Martyn Lloyd-Jones wouldn’t mind if I submitted this on his behalf:

It is being said that the chief need of the Church today is to repent because of its “lack of unity”…we would suggest that before she repents of her disunity, she must repent of her apostasy. She must repent of her perversion of, and substitutes for, “the faith once delivered to the saints.” She must repent of setting up her own methods against the divine revelation in Holy Scripture. Here lies the reason for her lack of spiritual power and inability to deliver a living message in the power of the Holy Spirit to a world ready to perish.

I realize that sounds negative, cranky even. But there’s some truth there. I find myself continually tempted to be distracted from the main thing and to focus on other issues of secondary importance. But lose the main thing and you lose everything.

To put it another way, the greatest need of the church is to rediscover the gospel and to be shaped by it. Everything else comes out of that.