Perfecting Fellowship
by John P. Galbraith
Extracted from Ordained Servant vol. 7, no. 1 (Jan. 1998), pp. 2-9
[Based on and expanded from an abbreviated address given at the opening of the Fourth Meeting of the International Conference of Reformed Churches, in Seoul, Korea, October 15, 1997, and summarized in Proceedings of the International Conference of Reformed Churches, 1997, pp. 47-49.]
It is a great joy to me to be back in this great country, sadly divided at present into North and South, but particularly to be again in this nation of South Korea. Here the Spirit of God has worked mightily since Presbyterian missionary work, which was then Reformed, began in the north in 1884. It is said that today between 30 and 40 percent of the people of South Korea profess to be Christians. Thanks be to God!
But given the heritage of this generation of Christians, and in particular the heritage of this Kosin Presbyterian Church who are our hosts for this meeting, this growth does not surprise me. This Church was fed and nurtured—its fathers, its mothers, its children—on the Word of God as the only infallible rule for its faith and life. So, in the early part of this century, under the Japanese occupation before World War II, when the Church and its people were still very young in the faith, they were nevertheless strong. By the thousands they resisted and disobeyed edicts requiring obeisance at the Shinto shrines, risking the price of imprisonment or worse. Then in 1950—now nearly half a century ago, and when the Church was still only about 60 years old—came the Communist invasion. Again they had no question that their loyalty was to God first, and to life last. That’s what the Word of God said. For them it was that simple: “Seek first the kingdom of God” (Matt. 6:33). Then when the Communists soon began systematically to select church leaders, the ministers and ruling elders, for execution, many of them sent their wives and children to the safety of the south while they remained to suffer and die with their people. That is the stuff of which this Church is made. We sit today among children and widows of martyrs—yes, some of those faithful wives are still living—who counted their lives as nothing for the sake of Christ.
Now it is a new day, and you and I are here. We gather in a beautiful church building with the latest modern facilities, we sit in comfortable chairs and pews, and those who have come from around the world feel assured of the safety and well-being of our families left at home. Yet we have something in common with our Christian fathers and mothers, and sisters and brothers, in this land. We have not paid anything like the price that these Koreans paid, yet we are of one heart with them. The very existence of this ICRC and our part in it are testimony to our desire to declare for all to hear and see, that for us, too, God’s Word is our only infallible rule of faith and practice. Most of us, in our home countries, live in the midst of churches that have forsaken God and his Christ. Some of us—I may even say that most of the churches that we represent—have had to separate from churches and organizations that have put other things above obedience to the Word of God. That is why, if I may say so, this Kosin Presbyterian Church feels at home in this body, to have part in its fellowship. And I must add this exhortation: may we be faithful to them. And may our fellowship deepen and grow.
The need for growth in the fellowship of our churches is, in fact, the reason that I am speaking to you on the subject, “Perfecting Fellowship.” In preparation for that I wish first to read to you three brief passages of Scripture which together form the foundation of what I plan to say. I have no one verse as a text; instead I draw on all three.
Reading from the New King James version, the first passage is:
Isaiah 5:1-7. Now let me sing to my Well-beloved A song of my Beloved regarding His vineyard: My Well-beloved has a vineyard On a very fruitful hill. He dug it up and cleared out its stones, And planted it with the choicest vine. He built a tower in its midst, And also made a winepress in it; So He expected it to bring forth good grapes, But it brought forth wild grapes.
And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Judge, please, between Me and My vineyard. What more could have been done to My vineyard That I have not done in it? Why then, when I expected it to bring forth good grapes, Did it bring forth wild grapes? And now, please let Me tell you what I will do to My vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it shall be burned; And break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will lay it waste; It shall not be pruned or dug, But there shall come up briers and thorns. I will also command the clouds That they rain no rain on it.
For the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are His pleasant plant. He looked for justice, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold, weeping.
That is a vivid picture of what has happened in the church from time immemorial, in Israel and in the church of our own day: God planted and nourished it but it turned away from him and brought forth sour fruit. Many times there was repentance and reform, but again departure and unbelief, and again, and again, and again. Thus in this day we see the remnants of many churches all around us—once they were beautiful vines, but now they produce wild fruit. Let us be warned.
The second passage of Scripture is also from an Old Testament prophet,
Jeremiah 1:7-8, 17. But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am a youth,’ for you shall go to whom I send you, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of their faces, for I am with you to deliver you,” says the Lord.... And Verse 17, “Therefore prepare yourself and arise, and speak to them all that I command you....”
There are the King’s orders to his ambassador: speak the words that I reveal to you. Speak all the words.
The final passage brings us into the new dispensation where Christ has died and risen, the Holy Spirit has been poured out on the church, and the gathering of his elect is expanding to all kinds of people to the ends of the earth.
Ephesians 6:10-18. Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand, therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints....
In God’s great wisdom and power and grace he distributes to his church the equipment she needs to become the mighty body of Christ on earth that shows God’s power over sin, over earthly and spiritual powers and, yes, over death itself. Your church and mine are called to be such churches.
With these three passages there is set before us a lesson in how pervasive and destructive is the tendency to rebel against God, not only by the world but also by those in the very church of Christ. In Jeremiah there is set before us the obligation of the messengers of the Lord to declare one message alone, whatever he commands by his Word. And in Ephesians is revealed the gracious provision that God has made for the triumph of those who by the Spirit follow and obey him. Keep those in mind as we move forward.
Earlier I said, We are here. We have come from many distant parts of the world—from Asia where we are gathered, but also from “Down Under,” from Africa, Europe, North America. Our churches have spent the Lord’s money to send us here, and we have put our own time and energy into it. And I challenge you to think again, Why are we here? Why did we come all this way? For fellowship with those whom we have come to love in Christ? Indeed so. Some of our churches find that in our Reformed faith they are largely isolated, and in coming together here they find a refreshing strength in the common bonds of our faith. Do we come to bear witness to the world, and even to the worldwide church, that the Reformed faith is vital today and lives in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator? Yes, that too. But also, as our ICRC Constitution says in a variety of ways, we come together to encourage and help one another to become more like the churches that we ought to be. To do that we need to improve and deepen our fellowship. And that, in Perfecting Fellowship, is where I am aiming. We must understand the need and find ways to help each other grow into the likeness of Christ. In the past, churches have collapsed from within and been blown apart from without. Churches have departed from the faith, and their ecumenical organizations have both followed and led them. That is the past. This is the present. And we must look ahead to the future. Here I want to pay tribute to those who had the foresight to begin the ICRC and to lay its foundations in the unchanging Word of God rather than in the speculations of man. We in this meeting have the opportunity to build, as we depend upon the Holy Spirit, on that foundation. We may not just sit placidly together and nod our heads pleasantly in greeting to each other. Our need is to work at the task of strengthening one another so that in our own places of ministry, and together, we shall stand fast. We shall demonstrate that the gospel is indeed “the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16). That is just another way of saying that we must perfect our fellowship. It is that, if we are to be an effective instrument in the hands of our covenant God, that I believe we must be stirred to see and to do. The past does not have to repeat itself; our churches do not have to collapse. Let the ICRC, by the grace of God, be an instrument to help us to prevent our breaking down and, rather, to exhibit God’s power.
With these things in mind I wish you to look with me at Our Foundations, Our Purposes, and Our Responsibilities. Or, again, who we are, why we are, and what we are to do.
Our Foundations
So, who are we? If I may say so, we are people of God who are consumed by a desire to follow him, and to follow him as he has revealed himself and his will to us in his Word. We are churches that have a foundation. Just as the foundation of a building is composed of rock and a cementing agent so is the twofold foundation of the church of Jesus Christ: (1) God, in Christ, is our rock, the root, the first cause, the omnipotent Creator, the sovereign Ruler, the gracious Redeemer of all that we are and hope to be, and (2) the Word of God in which he reveals himself to us and declares his will for us. On this we build. Yet not we but the Holy Spirit working in us and through us.
Our God is not some imaginary ideal that man carries in his mind. Nor yet a nebulous force that somehow exerts itself in our universe. God is a person, the living God, who is eternal in his being. “In the beginning God,” says the very first verse in the Bible; and not only so, but also “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” adds that same verse. Our God speaks, he hears, he acts. And so we here believe. “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God,” the inspired psalmist says (Ps. 90:2). Here we of the ICRC stand also. For though we live in a day when the evolutionary hypothesis has spread like wildfire we know from his Word and proclaim that God created the immense cosmos and this little world in which we live. Nor is our God absent from this world that he created. He rules it by day and by night. He is its King, its sovereign: “he does according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth” (Dan. 4:35).
That will is not only sovereign but also gracious. In 1 Pet. 2:6 God says, “I lay in Zion a chief cornerstone... and he that believes in him shall not be confounded.” As soon as man had sinned in the Garden of Eden, and even before he was ejected from that paradise, God interposed with mercy. For right then and there, as recorded in Gen. 3:15, he revealed his plan to send a Redeemer to save his people from their sins. At the core of that plan was that that Redeemer would be his own Son, the very second person of the Trinity, who would, as Matt. 20:28 says, “give his life a ransom for many.” That is mercy: that he himself would pay the price for our sins. What mercy, what love! As Isaac Watts said it,
See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down:
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?We stand there, also. And lest anyone misunderstand, God adds in Eph. 2:8-9, “by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works....” And if we need still more to see the graciousness of our salvation he tells us that, “he chose us in (Christ) before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4) before we had done good or evil. We have a name for that, don’t we? We rightly call it sovereign grace. Further to compound it (it piles up, doesn’t it?), someone asked Jesus, “How can we know the Father?” Jesus said, “no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Or, again, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). And one final witness, from 1 Cor. 3:11, “other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
So we begin with God in creation and we come back to God in salvation. “God,” said the psalmist, “is my Rock and my Fortress.” Here we all stand.
However, I used the word “foundations” (plural) for this subject, advisedly. For although all that exists is founded on God he chose to reveal himself in a particular way, that is, through a written revelation. In Old Testament times they called that revelation “the law and the prophets.” Today we call it the Bible, or Scripture, composed of the Old and New Testaments. It is the very Word of God. By his Holy Spirit he moved men to write exactly what he wanted to reveal. Precisely that. And nothing else. And as John 17:17 says, that Word “is truth.” We have a name for that, too. in inspiration; or plenary inspiration, if you will. The Bible is entirely God’s Word, and nothing else. It is God speaking to us to tell us what we need to know about him and the world that he made, about ourselves, and about what God wants us to believe and the kind of lives he wants us to live, and what is in store for those who believe and for those who do not. Scripture is the sole place where we can learn infallibly about God and his will for us.
So, although God is the One from whom all life comes, Scripture is the foundation of our faith. The Presbyterians’ Westminster Shorter Catechism says that “the Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.”
With a far higher, and a qualitatively different, authority God himself says of his Word, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Tim. 3:16).
However, God has not revealed all his will to us. There are, he says in Deut. 29:29, “secret things” that belong to him alone; nevertheless he has revealed all that we need to know which, he says, “belong to us and to our children.” They are the things that we need, in order that “we may do all the words of (his) law,” as that same verse puts it. Our faith and our responsibilities to God are to be found there and there alone.
Remember, if you will, the passage that we read from Jeremiah. The prophet is given a very careful and explicit instruction: “Whatever I command you, you shall speak” (v. 7), and v. 17, “Speak to them all that I command you.” It is interesting to note that the last words of Jesus to the New Testament church, recorded in Matthew chapter 28, v.20, were a command almost identical to that of Jeremiah: “teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.”
Do people want to know about God? Teach them the Bible. Nothing else. The Bible. Do people want to know what is right or wrong? Teach them the Bible. What do you preach in church or wherever else you have opportunity? If it is anything other than the Bible you are on the wrong track, you are failing God. God says, Teach what I have commanded you. Teach them my Word. And bear in mind the warning he gave to Jeremiah: “Be not dismayed before their faces, lest I dismay you before them.”
This living, inspired Word, this Word alone, of all the writings ever written in all the world and in all ages is, being the Word of God, without error. This is the Word that is the foundation of our faith. And if I were to ask all who agree with that to say, Amen, you would as with one voice say so. Here also we stand. These are our foundations. Without them the ICRC would not be, and you and I would not be here this evening. But if we all agree, why have we come together? What purpose can there be in that?
So now we move on to our purposes.
Our Purposes
Why are we here? We posed this question before, and we ask it again, Why are we here?
We are here because we all have a ministry that comes out of our foundations, God and his Word. The Constitution of the ICRC states several purposes, but in general they focus on a ministry of each member church helping all the others, and the body as a whole. And that is right. Yet I would remind you that there is no longer such a thing as isolation. If anyone ever did live in a vacuum, surely none of us does now. We are in contact all the time with other churches and the world, and we must as churches minister to them, too. In a very real way we have a threefold purpose or ministry—to each other, to the worldwide church, and to the world.
We all recognize that the world around us—the unchurched world—is the devoted enemy of Christ. Surely in remote places where the gospel has hardly, or not at all, been preached, where primitive paganism has been in control as long as men can remember, surely there Satan and his minions hold obvious sway in the hearts and minds of the people. But enmity toward Christ is not limited to such societies. It is prominent also where the gospel has long been preached. Sometimes it is subtle, but often the world’s enmity to Christ is quite straightforward. Blasphemous lives are lived openly, and often right in our faces. Schools and universities despise and attack the basic Christian doctrines of God, Christ, and salvation. Government laws are adopted that make sin increas ingly easy for those who want it. Entertainment daily strikes at the heart of Christian morality. Many of the same things can also be said of religious groups that call themselves churches, but are, as Jesus labeled them in his day, synagogues of Satan. Often in such churches the idea of an eternal, living, personal God is denied, along with his work of creation, his miracles, the substitutionary atonement, the resurrection of Christ, and the reality of heaven and hell. So-called science has become the god of many. The sinfulness of mankind and sin itself are widely rejected, so that personal holiness, the value of human life, and the worship of God are scorned. Yes, all around us, in the world and in other churches, a ministry awaits us.
That, however, in no way negates the purposes of the ICRC, which focus on helping one another. As a matter of fact the prevalence of unbelief in our world increases the need for us to help one another. For one thing, the ICRC is not itself a church, nor church generically. It is but a place where churches confer, as “Conference” implies. Its function is to seek answers, through conferring, to such questions as, “How can our churches best minister?” Secondly, however, and more importantly, it is those anti-Christian conditions in which most of us live that should give impetus to the “conference” purposes of the ICRC. We need to overcome the tendency, the all-too prevailing tendency, to go it alone, to try to solve problems with our individual knowledge and experience, sometimes stumbling, sometimes falling on our faces, probably doing our job only partly as it should have been done. We need to humble ourselves and say to each other, “We need you.”
Through the course of Christian history it has been through acceptance of interdependence that some of the greatest advances in the church’s understanding of the Christian faith have come. Through Councils such as at Jerusalem in the time of the apostles, and later ones such as Nicea and Chalcedon basic doctrines of our faith such as the person of Christ and the Trinity became established. They benefited the whole church then and through the centuries since. We should see ourselves as working not only for our limited memberships but together to speak to and edify the whole church of Christ wherever it is today or will be in the future. Some might exclaim, “Such arrogance! To think that this little group of Reformed churches could teach the worldwide church.” But let me remind you of the power of the Word of God in the hands of his Spirit. There was that day in the midst of the titanic struggle about the person of Christ and the Trinity when some friends of Athanasius, who proclaimed both the full humanity and the full deity of Christ against Arius, came to him to warn him of the futility of his battle. They said to him (somewhat reminiscent of Job’s friends), “Athanasius, the world is against you.” To which Athanasius replied, “Then I am against the world.” Because lonely Athanasius stood upon the foundation of the Word of God, and taught it to his generation, we more than a millennium and a half later are upheld by his teaching. Do not underestimate what the Spirit of God can do with and through the ICRC. Those purposes propose to have us help each other as churches to fulfill the ministries that God has laid before us. This ICRC, with all of us building on the same foundations, is just what we need.
We turn now to our responsibilities.
Our Responsibilities
Our Constitution speaks of helping each other with our “common problems.” There is at least one difficulty with that idealistic statement: either we do not know what our common problems are or there are no problems that we have in common. Since the previous ICRC meeting four years ago our church has not conferred with any other member churches about problems that have confronted us, nor have we conferred with any of you about your problems. We get along fine; we don’t trouble each other!
That is not my idea of getting along well nor of helping one another. It reminds me of the couple who were celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Someone asked the husband how they had been able to get along so well for all those years, and he replied, “When we were married we agreed that I would make the decisions on all major problems, and my wife would decide all the others, and it has just so happened that in all these years we have had no major problems.” But in the life of our churches there are problems, some major and some less major, and we would all benefit if we would confer about them.
First we should be concerned for one another. On the one hand we should not think that the other churches would not be interested in our problems nor, on the other hand, should we think that we don’t need the others. Scripture enjoins the believer (how much more, bodies of believers) to “let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others” (Phil. 2:4). We need to cultivate a sense of empathy with one another. We are not talking about sympathy and clicking our tongues, saying, “We are so sorry that this has happened to your church.” We are talking about participating in each other’s feelings, feeling what the other feels, putting ourselves in the place of another, and asking, “What can I do to help? How can we work on this together?” It is: “Don’t just stand there. Do something.” That is fellowship. That is being members of one another. That is what I hope that the ICRC is going to be, and I fervently hope that you do, too. As we thus help each other to stand fast in the faith we are, in a sense, taking out insurance on the future of the ICRC.
Also hear God speak of our need of each other in 1 Cor. 12 beginning at v.14: “The body is not one member but many... (21) and the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’; nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’.... (24) But God composed the body (25) that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another.” I am sure that it was just those principles that lay behind the origins of this body. It is to help us achieve our goals, to perfect that fellowship, that all that I am saying this evening is directed.
Secondly we must use the armor that God has given us. Let me now backtrack for a few moments. Back to “common problems.” All of us share one common problem. Yes, I am sure you have guessed it: sin. And Satan, the author of sin, the great deceiver, is out to mislead the church and destroy its ministry, just as he tried to destroy Jesus himself and his ministry. We are in a war! Not a physical war, but a spiritual war, as Ephesians 6 reminded us. And God has armed us for that war, as we read earlier. Well armed us, from head to foot, from the helmet of salvation to the gospel of peace for our feet, with truth, righteousness, and faith in between. With this armor he protects us from destruction by Satan’s fiery darts that might pierce our hearts, and places in our hand a weapon to defeat all his and our enemies. He calls that weapon the “sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God” (v. 17).
A “sword.” Not a physical sword, but spiritual. The Word of God. Only the Word of God. No other offensive weapon. Just the Word. It is, he says, “sharper than any two-edged sword”; so sharp that no unbelief or any sin can hide from it, for it discerns “the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). We return to the thought of our foundations: it is on this Word, the Word of God, that repentance and faith are built. And it is not our sword. It is part of the armor that God had given to us, but it is not ours. It is the sword “of the Spirit”; it is the Word of God. As we take that sword in our hand, as we proclaim that Word, it is the Holy Spirit who—not we—takes it and drives it to its intended destination in the hearts of men, whether as a savor life or of death (2 Cor 2:16).
After giving the effects of his sword-thrust—life or death—he asks the rhetorical question (really an exclamation!), “Who is sufficient for these things?” To which we should each reply, “Not I”; and to which each of our churches should reply, “Not we.” So, in the third place, we need to recognize our own weakness. Our insufficiency is not limited to our lack of power to change the hearts of men, which God alone can do. That question/ exclamation is saying that we lack wisdom also. We do not know the answers to the problems that come to us. No, we may not have the answers; but maybe our brothers across the seas, or in our own country, may know something that we do not. Yet we draw back from asking them, fearing to inconvenience them since it is not their problem; or perhaps it does not even occur to us to ask them. But it should not be that way: your “interests,” as the Scripture said, should be mine and mine should be yours. And a warning against pride: How can they help us? We need to cultivate humility and learn the hard lesson to “esteem others better than himself” (Phil. 2:3). Understanding and applying these truths moves us in the right direction: we will call on one another for help.
Fourth, we need to put our fellowship into better practice. Although the ICRC gives us true fellowship with each other, and I think that everyone here feels that, there is nevertheless a sense in which we stand off from each other, thinking our own thoughts, wondering how these meetings and this organization will help us. Perhaps we came not so much denying that we each came to help others, but as if more on our minds was you helping us. But fellowship is a two-way street; the traffic must flow in both directions. I remind you that the first stated purpose of our Constitution is “to express and promote the unity of the faith” of our member churches (Art. III.1). We are here in these meetings, to help each other, to avoid the need for each to try to go it alone. But a meeting every four years for ten days, no matter how much we may do in those ten days, is not enough. That is small fellowship indeed. We need to help each other between our quadrennial meetings. Sometimes when we fail to ask help before decisions are made we discover our mistakes when it is too late, though other of our churches, through knowledge or prior experience could have prevented it. The result of not asking has been seen throughout church history and within our own experience. That result is that we go our direction and you go yours and in the course of time our directions have become so divergent that unity is broken, division occurs. In the six decades that I have been privileged to minister in Christ’s church I have seen the sad results when churches disregard the help that others of like faith could have given them if they had not chosen to go their own way, with their own limited wisdom. Our own church has had just such an experience with another church for several years, and especially in this past year.
Even right at home in my own church we have been wrestling for several years with a discipline problem concerning evolution. Perhaps that is not a “common” problem, though we never found out, because we never asked you. But what if it is an “uncommon” problem? Maybe we need even more help on that kind of problem than we do on the common variety. In any case, did we seek your help? No. But we should have. Think of the accumulated wisdom in the whole body of Reformed churches in this ICRC that might have supplemented the more limited wisdom of our one church. Now that the decision has been made, it is too late to ask your advice.
There have also been interchurch bodies similar to the ICRC that have failed to give adequate help to their members, and the whole body has eventually foundered. We must try to not let that happen to us. That means that we are going to have to work at it. Just the fact that we exist, calling ourselves a conference of Reformed churches, guarantees nothing. I am trying, then, in this message, to seek, through the Spirit of God, to stir you up, and through you your churches, to understand better not only who we are and why we are here, but also what we need to do to fulfill the purposes that our Constitution—not to say, the Word of God—sets before us.
As we are gathered here in the name of unity and fellowship I want, before I close, to make a concrete suggestion as to how we might move toward perfecting that fellowship. I suggest that when we deal with a problem, whether it be doctrine, ethics, or church order, we immediately seek the help, wisdom, advice of each other. And the other side of the coin is that when asked for help we will give it even as we would like it to be given to us. Although it is hard to imagine that there is anything new under the sun, I do not know if this has ever been done. I do know that it was not done in my own church’s previous interchurch affiliation, and it has not been done so far in the ICRC fellowship. Outside the ICRC the OPC has been testing the waters of such an effort; we are finding them warm and encouraging. Yes, when the ICRC meets every four years we read papers that touch on needs and we discuss them for an hour or so, and they are probably helpful to all of us at the meeting but do they work their way into the life of our churches? Also, problems in the churches do not wait until every fourth year, and the papers do not necessarily get at some very pressing needs. To put it another way, we need to scratch where we itch. We do that by telling the churches what is troubling us, when it is troubling us, so that they may tell us how they believe the Word should be applied to the problem.
Surely each of our churches has experienced times of both triumph and despair. We should not go through those times alone, and if we are one in our faith as we profess to be, we should not have to pass through such times alone. Scripture tells us (Rom. 12:15), “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” To do so we shall need to know what is going on in each other’s church life and that, in turn, will require us to share our lives with each other—our difficulties, our victories, our disappointments. We need to be one, as well as to claim it.
All these things being said about our need to help each other we must remember that the church’s battles have never been won by the strength of men. The battle is the Lord’s. However wise we may think ourselves to be, our hope is in the name of the Lord. And that is what God is so careful to say to us in Ephesians 6. After having told us of all the armament that he has given us for our use in the warfare he then places the capstone on it with these closing words, “praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit” (v. 18). The Lord is our “light and salvation... the strength” of our life (Ps. 27:1). As someone has already said, “The church must march on its knees.”
We are all dying, and the day will come when we can no longer speak. Obversely, others are dying who will no longer hear. It is obvious that we should speak “as a dying man to dying men.” The ICRC should not be a cozy little club for our own comfort and pleasure but it should be, as it was intended to be, an instrument in the hand of God to build each other up in our common faith and to help each other church to do better the task that he has given us to do. Let us help each other, going out of our way if need be, to wear God’s armor well and to wield faithfully the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God. May we be faithful to speak to each other, to all the church, and to the world, while he gives us time.
May we be faithful until Jesus comes. Amen.
John P. Galbraith was present at the first General Assembly of the OPC. His ministerial career has therefore spanned the entire history of our denomination. He was three times elected Moderator of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod (RES), and has always had a great zeal for faithful Reformed ecumenicity. It was therefore fitting that he was asked to give the opening address at the recent International Conference of Reformed Churches (ICRC) as it met for the fourth time in Seoul, Korea. It is our hope that the ICRC will live up to the high purpose so eloquently set forth here by Rev. Galbraith.