Those whom God uses as human instruments to build up, uphold, strengthen,
and encourage the church through preaching, prayer, and pastoral care have
sometimes been described as ‘pillars’, given the weighty burdens borne by such individuals in their service of the Lord and his people. But these ‘pillars’ belong to the Church; they do not bear it, since they themselves are
borne.
Archibald G. Brown (1844-1922) preached to crowds of 3000 when he
was pastor of the East London Tabernacle – every church gathering was packed,
from prayer meetings to Sunday services, and hundreds often had to be turned
away. Maintaining a gospel focus, Brown combated the social deprivation of
Victorian London’s East End by establishing two orphanages (one for boys and
one for girls), a soup kitchen, and by sending out a team of missionaries to share
the gospel and minister to people’s needs at their houses. Brown knew a lot
about heavy burdens, but he trusted in the faithfulness and power of the Lord.
In 1892, Brown took up the matter with which we are now concerned, posing the
question ‘Who bears the pillars?’ His prophetic answer is as follows:
The
church does not rest on man or on any number of men. And if the day should come
- and personally I believe that some of the younger people here may see it –
when a faithful man will be so scarce that you will have to hunt for him, and
there shall be apostasy on the right hand and on the left, and the pillars of
the churches (not of the Church) give way on every hand, and it seems dark
beyond all power of exaggeration, even in that day the Lord will say unto his
people, “I bear up the pillars of it. My church is not dependent upon man. I
live eternally and my eternal life is her eternal guarantee.”
I believe that God is working powerfully in and through his people in
this place. It is at such times they we are perhaps most susceptible to the
devil’s attacks. He could attack us with procrastination and a proneness to
indecision, so that some people always talk and never do. He may attack us with
prejudice, creating enmity between people within and without our local
fellowship and stirring up needless division and strife. He could attack us
with a gospel-void pragmatism that marries professing Christians to the world
and makes them irrelevant to the lost. But I want to stress at the present how
Satan might rather choose to attack us with the pride that goes before
destruction, and cause individuals to think of themselves more highly than they
ought to think, that in some way the church depends finally upon them, their
time, their money, their participation. While the members are vital to the body
of Christ, it is God who vitalizes those members, and he does so through
Christ, the head. Or, to return to the imagery of a building: the pillars are
pointless without a foundation, and ‘no one can lay a foundation other than that
which is laid, which is Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 3:11).
This was printed in the worship bulletin of Grace Baptist Church (Wood Green) on 05 January 2014
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