One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
Interpretation
A true church requires vibrant faith, not just organized membership.
Aiden Wilson Tozer emphasizes that mere organization and numbers do not define the essence of a church. True life and spirit are essential; without genuine faith and vitality, a group cannot fulfill its purpose, just as a football team requires living players to function.
In practice
In a sermon about the essence of community, one could quote Tozer to highlight the importance of spiritual vitality over mere attendance.
Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity.
The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness.
Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. If we understand our first and sole duty to consist of loving God supremely and loving everyone, even our enemies, for God's dear sake, then we can enjoy spiritual tranquility under every circumstance.
The church that can't worship must be entertained. And leaders who can't lead a church to worship must provide the entertainment.
Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind
People who are crucified with Christ have three distinct marks: 1. they are facing only one direction, 2. they can never turn back, and 3. they no longer have plans of their own.
In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.
[T]o preserve the republican form and principles of our Constitution and cleave to the salutary distribution of powers which that [the Constitution] has established . . . are the two sheet anchors of our Union. If driven from either, we shall be in danger of foundering.
One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.
The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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