Note quickly the desperate need of discipline. Don't tell me how it's going to do. I know. Don't tell me how John Calvin sought to exercise it. He is dead. Don't tell about the Puritans. They are dead too. Tell me how this generation of church people in the pulpit and the pew can speak to this lawless in for hell generation, when they can't be any more lawless than we are as church members. The one statement that characterizes Calvinist Baptist churches is “that every man is a law to himself”, and “every man does what's right in his own eyes. “
No preacher and no church that ignores that fact that one of the central heart things that makes a church is the exercise of new testament discipline. It is silly to talk about being a church of Jesus Christ without it. And while we're cussing out everybody else, we need to face the fact that only that congregation that bears as a body in its body the marks of willing glad subjection to the authority Jesus Christ as its expressed in that local church has got anything to say to anybody else.
How can we demand of this lawless generation total surrender unless we've come to love the chastening rod of the Savior's discipline in our own lives?
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