The Church: Commotion, Not Devotion

...and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a still small voice.—1 Kings 19:12

"The accent in the Church today," says Leonard Ravenhill, the English evangelist, "is not on devotion, but on commotion." Religious extroversion has been carried to such an extreme in evangelical circles that hardly anyone has the desire, to say nothing of the courage, to question the soundness of it. Externalism has taken over. God now speaks by the wind and the earthquake only; the still small voice can be heard no more. The whole religious machine has become a noisemaker. The adolescent taste which loves the loud horn and the thundering exhaust has gotten into the activities of modern Christians. The old question, "What is the chief end of man?" is now answered, "To dash about the world and add to the din thereof."...

We must begin the needed reform by challenging the spiritual validity of externalism. What a man is must be shown to be more important than what he does. While the moral quality of any act is imparted by the condition of the heart, there may be a world of religious activity which arises not from within but from without and which would seem to have little or no moral content. Such religious conduct is imitative or reflex. It stems from the current cult of commotion and possesses no sound inner life. The Root of the Righteous, 84,85.

"Lord, if this was true in Ravenhill's and Tozer's day, how much more true today! Quiet my heart today, in the midst of the rush and din of church busyness, that I might be able to hear the 'still small voice.' How desperately we need to hear it, but how seldom we're able to listen. Amen."