Is the Christian church adaptable? As I see it, the tragedy is that we still seem to be clinging to the forms and the methods of the Victorians. Nothing is more extraordinary than to see men who have forsaken the Gospel long ago still clinging to the methods and the forms and ceremonial of the Victorians. It is not surprising that people no longer attend churches. The people who have forgotten the gospel cling to the old forms and methods; and the world scoffs. The whole thing is ridiculed. And, indeed, we have no right to complain of the ridicule.
I do not want to be unfair, so let me balance my statement. We are not going to fight this modern battle successfully by repeating the sermons of the Puritans verbatim, or adopted their classifications and sub-divisions, and their manner of preaching. That would be futile. We must learn to hold onto the old principles but we must apply them, and use them, in a manner that is up-to-date.
Forgive a personal reference. I am going to do what the Apostle did in the 11th chapter of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians. I am going to be a fool, and to say something about myself. I remember how, in the very first year when I began to preach, I was preaching in a service with an old preacher who was over eighty years of age. Having listened to my feeble effort, and having heard me for the first time, the old man made this comment which encouraged me greatly. He said, “Though you are a young man, you are preaching the old truths I have been trying to preach all my life.” He went on, “You are preaching the old truths, but you have put a very modern suit on them.”
That is what I am trying to say. We need the old truths in a modern suit. You must not clothe them in the old staid terminology or manner or method that was appropriate in the past. The moment we become slaves to any system–I do not care how good it was in its age and generation–we all are already defeated, because we have missed this whole principle of adaptability. So we do not need gramophone records, not even of the Puritans! We need the truth that was preached by the Puritans, but preached in a manner that will show its relevance, its adaptability to the most urgent modern situation. God forbid that our methods should deny the very message we are trying to preach, either by imitating the latest methods of worldly entertainment or by methods that are so archaic as to make our message irrelevant.
D. M. Lloyd-Jones, The Christian Soldier (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977), pp. 290-91.
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