The church must be an object of beauty for the sake of its witness to a lost world, but above all because this is pleasing to the Lord. Christ wants his church to be a colony of heaven on earth, and to begin to show those graces which will be seen in a perfect form in heaven. Believers do not live in isolation and holiness cannot be practiced in isolation. Although we exist as individuals and our thoughts are private and each one views himself as distinct, yet we are not complete without each other. We have been given the remarkable ability to build relationships with one another, to overcome the distance between us, to exchange thoughts and to share what is most precious with others. The building of relationships is something that can only be achieved by careful and sustained work. All of the graces named in this verse involve other believers and how we relate to them. The church is beautiful because it is a community in which the gap that lies between us is bridged as a result of the love that unites us to each other.
There’s a trend coming in into the Christian world, which seems to arise from some of the well-known Internet preachers in the USA. There are vast numbers of nominal Christians in the USA – we trust there are many true Christians also, but the USA is still in our late Victorian age in some limited respects – and so Internet preachers in the USA can command huge viewings and hearings, and audiences. But there are some among them – and among those who are on the whole sounder – who seem to be all taken up with this novel idea of Christian manliness, which seems to mean being authoritative, aggressive, dogmatic and unyielding about everything you say. This apparently is Christian manliness, and it's coming in, and it's a tragedy. It is completely contrary to everything that we read in the Scriptures. Romans 12 is a better definition of Christian manliness. There’s much more gentleness and meekness, and serving spirit in Romans 12. But Christian manliness seems to be more a matter of behaving like a parade ground sergeant major, on a bad day. They shout a lot: shrill, screaming, yelling; it's all aggression and dogmatism. It is contrary to what we are exhorted to be like in the Scripture. It’s contrary to Christ; it’s contrary to the apostles, but it's the new fashion, and people are picking it up. It makes you a parade ground pastor, a parade ground preacher, a parade ground sergeant major elder, a parade ground sergeant major husband, a parade ground sergeant major parent. The strange thing is that these men who are so manly turn out to be very weak in the very areas where they should be manly. So for instance, the great invasion of the church by worldliness today, turning services into pop concerts, bringing in all the trappings of worldly behaviour into the church – its instrumentation, chord forms of music. Where they should stand firm they yield, and they are as flaccid as jellyfish, and they give way to it all, and adopt it all. That's the measure of how manly they are. Are they defending the great principles of Christian behaviour and worship of the Lord, and so on – the really important exhortations of the word. And the answer is, they are not.