William Temple

One of my favorite quotes about the church.

It was from, it's accredited to William Temple.

He was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

And he said this, he said, the church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of those who are not yet its members.

He wants everybody.

So what does that mean for our living of Christianity, right? What does that mean to be a part of a Christian church indexed, we hope, to the kingdom of God? It was William Temple who had the great quote, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said, "...the church is the only organization which exists for the benefit of those who are not yet its members." The church is the only organization which exists for the benefit of those who are not yet its members, meaning that our church is not a social club.

We do a lot of socializing and friend-making, thanks be to God, but it doesn't exist for my enjoyment or yours solely.

It exists for our enjoyment and for the enjoyment of people whose names we don't yet know.

Exactly.

And the sources bring in this brilliant, piercing definition of true worship from the late Archbishop William Temple.

This serves as the perfect antidote to this transactional mindset, I think.

It really does.

Now we are one in Christ because Christ himself has brought, brought down the dividing wall of hostility.

The late Archbishop William Temple once said, "The church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of its non-members." Did you know that over the last twelve years, we have been investing in practices that not all of us prefer to do personally? We're not here because we exist for ourselves.

Tim Keller famously said that he himself would not have gone to Redeemer Church, the church that he planted, had not been the fact that he planted that church himself.

Because we are here not for ourselves, not for all our preferences and our agendas, but for others, in order to reach a world that doesn't yet know the Lord, in order to open the doors of our family.

If Wallace is right and the idols that we worship are largely hidden from our sight, how do we identify them? Well, in his little book, Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller says that one way is to look at your imagination.

As William Temple once said, your religion is what you do with your solitude.

In other words, the true God of your heart is that thing to which your thoughts effortlessly go when there is nothing else demanding your attention.

What occupies your mind when you are brushing your teeth? Some material possession? Some relationship? Your appearance? Your reputation? Your phone? Of course, one or two daydreams are no indication of idolatry.

Without an outward facing mindset, without the desire to share the good news of Jesus with those who don't know him, without the desire to grow the group of believers that we are a part of, Are we actually being church? What do you think? In the 1940s, there was this archbishop.

His name was William Temple.

And he famously said this.

It's a really provocative statement.

No one ever truly comes to know, honor, or worship God without being changed in the process.

Probably the best definition of worship that I've ever come across was from the former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and it goes like this.

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, and to devote the will to the purpose of God.

Now, in that definition, the attributes of God are foremost.