But you will see at once that the purpose of all this [Christian morality laws] is simply to set a limit to sin and to the results of sin and wrongdoing. All I have been describing can do nothing more than control sin and keep it within bounds. I think it is obvious that it is an entirely negative work. All of these enactments and all councils and committees concerned with morality, and the Lord’s Day Observance Society, and all these movements, can never make anybody a Christian. It is a very great sin to confuse law and grace.
It is because of this, then, that I go on to say that really these laws and regulations and various other things have nothing to do with Christians as such, and that is why I said earlier on that these things are not primarily the business of the church. That is also why I, as a minister of Christ and as a minister of the church, never speak on any temperance platforms. I have never spoken for any one of these organizations designed to observe the Sabbath, nor have I ever spoken on a morality platform. My reason is that it is the business of the church to preach the gospel and to show what I would call, with Paul, “a more excellent way.” That is why the church must always be very careful to ensure that nothing she does or says should ever detract from or compromise her message and her gospel.
The church, in other words, must never hide behind the law of the land and she must never try to enforce her message by using the law of the land, for that is to compromise her gospel. It is to make the unbeliever out in the world say, “Ah these people are trying to force this upon us, they are using law in order to get it done.” No, at all costs the church must keep her message pure and clean, and she must take her stand on the purity of the gospel nd upon that alone.
D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Sanctified through the Truth (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1989), pp. 14-15.
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