Perspectives on restoring the church

ISBN-13: 9781537704876 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 244 str.

Prof Louis E. Labuschagne

Opis

What the church really needs now is revival. We need God to deliver us from our poverty of spirit, and for his name's sake to cleanse and revive us. However revival is a sovereign move of God and not something we can ever engineer. But by cleansing the temple that is God's church, we would be creating an environment where the return of His glory was more likely. This then is the aim of this book: to pause, take a good look at scripture, get back to basics, and carefully consider what it means to be church, and how this organism that is the church should actually function. As such this is then not a "how to" book, but rather an attempt take a fresh look at the biblical paradigms for church government and the basic Christian disciplines. It is a challenge to all to help remove the modern Asherah poles and the altars to Baal from the temple that is God's church. Before we can begin to speak of restoration of the church, we need to be clear of what we actually mean by this phrase. With this in mind the first three chapters set the scene by firstly addressing the issue of what the church actually is, and what we mean when we speaking of restoration, before going on to review some biblical examples of restoration. The rest of the book may roughly be divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 4-7) consider the core issues of the authority of scripture, preaching, worship, and the grace of God for us who believe. In the second part (chapters 8-12) we consider some crucial personal disciplines like living holy lives, prayer, and tithing, as well as God's equipping of the believers to function as ambassadors of Christ in the form of the gifts of the Spirit and his empowerment for the work reaching out to a dark world. Then in the last 5 chapters we consider some matters of a more corporate nature, namely our pilgrim status here on earth, the aspect of "loving one another" that should characterise the church, how the different members of this body could and should function as a unit the manner in which this flock should be shepherded, and how as a body of Christ we can be faithful to the challenge of the great commission. The ideas presented in this book are not perfect, and I invite others to help find the way forward. On its own such steps are not enough. What we really need to do, is to return to the Lord and cry to him for healing and revival. However giving serious thought to how best to cleanse the temple, is an indication of the sincerity of our desire for revival.