I am a former Catholic. Should I continue to go to Catholic Church so I can reach people for Christ?

p491 [E L Bevir] DEAREST BROTHER, - I do not expect any large impression to be made on Rome or Roman Catholicism. God has given her time to repent, and she has not repented; but there are precious souls to be gathered out. The agent against popery at present is infidelity, but God is working to gather His own; and how plain it is, that when He opens, none shuts: look at all Europe and everywhere. Here at Pau, a considerable number of Roman Catholics have been converted, and there is a considerable tendency in France towards Protestantism, mixed with liberalism. All this we must leave, and hold fast by Christ. There is a difficulty which I have felt in Ireland: Roman Catholics receiving the truth, and anxious to break with Romanism, but one could not say they were Christians, yet they needed some recognition, some religious place. At - they have formed what they call a parish, a kind of Catechumenal, and thus take them in hand. It is a great thing, in the weak state all is in, to have them out of the hands and power of the priests, and open to receive instruction from the word. If one can bring to the Lord some of those dear to Him - it is already a great thing.

As to the application of this principle at the present day, the greatest care would be needed, for the conditions are different. The errors of Christendom, while frequently Judaistic, are not Judaism: for that had been originally given of God, and He led His people very gently out of it into the pasture of Christianity (John 10). But a lapse back into error is another thing. Again, regard must always be had for the effect our subsequent testimony will have upon Christians in denominations. If they receive us to preach the gospel among them—in their churches—ignorant of our testimony against much that is done among them, may they not say when these things do come out, that we deceived them? Of course we cannot lay down rules for one another, and the Spirit of God is competent to guide in each case, but we think that in the main it is best to let persons know our position before accepting invitations to go into their churches. On the other hand care should be taken not to antagonize needlessly, but to use all grace and gentleness—in the truth. As we said, the Lord alone can guide in each case, and He will.

Bad as it is for a believer to marry an unbeliever, God does not even then say, Come out from the relationship; leave your wife; part from your husband. Apply it to its legitimate object (that is, fellowship with unbelievers in the things of God), and then you have a maxim of deep and urgent importance. I am not to unite with the world in any one thing that concerns the service and worship of God. This is the true meaning of being unequally yoked. "Come out and be separate" is then the special word that applies to any such unholy alliance.

It is plain, then, that the notion now of having a mixed worship of people, some converted and some not, is a direct contradiction of Christianity. It could not be otherwise before the cross. There was then no such thing as God separating His children from those that were not thus related to Him. It would have been a sin for a believing Israelite to have said to an unbeliever, I cannot worship with you, because you are not born of God. But now the sin is to join in God's worship with those who are not His children; and for this simple reason, that the Father is seeking true worshippers, and none but such, to worship Him. I do not mean that it is a sin for those not converted to be in the same place as spectators and hearers. But the attempt to join everybody in the worship of God is a fatal delusion, dishonouring to Himself and destructive to the souls of those that are not true worshippers. But people have not faith to stand separate from the world. They like to have the countenance of men; and, of course, it is trying to have to act decidedly. We are warned of God that, if we seek to please men, we should not be the servants of Christ. We must run the risk of paining them, but faithful are the wounds of a friend. Some confound hearing the gospel or other truth with worship. But they are totally different. In worshipping God, Christians offer up to God services of praise and thanksgiving. Worship is what goes from the believer to God; whereas, in the gospel or other ministry, it is a message coming down from God for the good of souls, for the instruction of believers, or for the conviction and salvation of unbelievers. But whether one or other be addressed, it is always that which comes from God to them, and not what goes from them to God; so that the confounding of these two things is a serious evil. Among many the thing which makes them attached to the old walls and routine is not the prayers, but because they hope to hear something good in the sermon. They entirely thus pass out of the condition of worshippers. Worship is the true expression of the heart's praise and thanks by the Holy Ghost, whether by an illiterate man or not. We know in the case of the apostles that they could not speak correctly (Acts 4); but, for all that, they were the chosen vessels of such a power of God as never visited this earth before or since, in men of like passions with ourselves. And I believe it is so still and always will be so. God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. Although there may be a Paul brought in occasionally, this is the exception, and God never intends that the exceptions should become the role.

In Ezekiel 44:7, we come to another class of worldly fellowship, and that is in religion. One of the crying sins of Israel of old was that they brought in unbelievers in the temple worship, and the prophet is bid to “mark well the entering in of the house, with every going forth of the sanctuary”; and further, “No stranger, uncircumcised in heart, nor uncircumcised in flesh, shall enter into My sanctuary, of any stranger that is among the children of Israel.” Our sanctuary, we know, can only be entered by believers (Heb.10) in reality; but surely this plainly shows that in outward worship we cannot place believers and unbelievers together before God. It is not for us, of course, to try the hearts, and a hypocrite may creep in anywhere; but surely divine worship ought to be confined to the children of God. Indeed, none else can worship; and it is an awful mockery to see those who have no pretensions to be saved (not even the lip profession) joining with God's people in singing His praises. This is strangely like this very sin of Israel of old. We do not now speak of preaching the gospel. At all such services unbelievers have their right place; but these are surely perfectly distinct from the worship of believers, spiritually within the veil. In religion, therefore, we cannot place believers and unbelievers on a common footing.

Let me press this also upon you, as self-evident, that if you are mingled, Christians and no Christians, men of the world and believers in Christ together, there cannot be worship in spirit and in truth. There never was, since the Lord announced its nature, real Christian worship where such mixture exists. The effect of the attempt is not that worldly persons are raised upward to the ground and power of worship in spirit and in truth, but that Christians must go down to the atmosphere of the worldly. That is to say, you abandon (and for what? or on whose authority?) all your own proper privileges. There are few things so dreadful as putting such language, the language of Christian nearness, into men's lips that are far from God. Among many, even among some called evangelicals, worship is in practice, as in principle, scarcely known. Persons who have outward forms do maintain it in name; but it is earthly and almost wholly false, being for the most part a kind of galvanic movement kept up among the dead; it is fatal for man, and profane in the sight of God. No, it is divine life and redemption that must be the basis of worship; and the Spirit of God alone is the power of carrying it on. As it is addressed to our God and Father in the name of the Lord Jesus, so is it offered on the principle of the unity of Christ's body. It is essentially above the pettiness of a sect, and its true character dies and vanishes before it can be made to express peculiar views. When God formed His church upon earth, there was no such thought as men making a draft of doctrine or a code of rules; neither should there be now. The church of God is the best school of doctrine: practically, we learn ourselves, and others, there as nowhere else; but it is God's doing while we are there, not before going in.

This principle can certainly be applied to a denominational association. Many denominations have been so mixed with idolatry that any Christian should discern this clearly, and have no fellowship with such things. The very effort to exalt and justify a certain denomination, has in it the element of idolatry; for it puts the denomination in the place of Christ. Certainly we are to love those Christians who may be deceived by such things, but the thing itself we should avoid.

If a man therefore finds himself involved in subjection to an unscripturally formed ministry, for instance, or, again, in any prostitution of an institution of the Lord (say the Lord's Supper), let him have done with it at once. The Lord does not warrant His servant's sanction of what is contrary to truth and holiness. Why should I, as a Christian, endorse any ministry which is not of God? Why should I be a party by my presence to a desecration of the Lord's Supper into a sacrament made a means of grace for the world, for anybody, for every one? He that possesses but little knowledge of God's word about either, knows perfectly well that they cannot be defended by Scripture, and that they frustrate the Lord's will in these grave matters. Am I then to abandon the Lord's Supper? Am I henceforth to do without the ministry of the word? Certainly neither the one nor the other, if wise and obedient. What one has to abandon is the abuse of these things. I am to have done with that which, as being without Scripture, is clearly to the dishonour of God. I do not give up Christian ministry, therefore, I do not give up the Lord's Supper; but I judge according to the word of God, as far as enabled by His grace, what is His will in these respects. The same principle applies to every other. Do you think of worship, for instance? I must search the Scriptures to judge what is Christian worship according to God's word for us now, as a Jew used to do from the Old Testament. Am I not bound so to do? Am I not to follow His will?

No work of God towards man is worship; nor any testimony respecting Him and His grace. Preaching the gospel to the unconverted is not worship. It may produce it, as being the means of communicating that knowledge of God in grace which awakens the spirit of adoration in the heart; but the preaching itself, properly speaking (how blessed soever it may be), is not worship.*

89 The gospel is a testimony rendered on God's part to man. Not recognizing it as worship does not derogate from the value of such preaching; without it, no Christian worship could exist, for the gospel makes known the God who ought to be adored, and, through the power of the Spirit, it leads the soul into the state in which it is able to render true homage to God, even that worship which is in Spirit and truth. But it is not, therefore, the less true, that no sort of testimony addressed to man from God is worship rendered to God by man. A sermon is not worship; though it may be the means of producing it. The ministry of the word is a distinctive characteristic of the Christian economy. The Jewish people were regarded as already in relationship with God; externally they were so. There was no question about bringing them to God. They were already His people; and God dwelt in the midst of this people as those whom He had redeemed. But now the kingdom of heaven and the grace of salvation are proclaimed to sinners; and there is a ministry of the gospel for inviting them to enter into relationship with God, as in Israel there had been a priesthood for the maintenance of the relationship which had been already formed.

1 Corinthians 9. The apostle was exposed to the accusations of false teachers, who asserted that he carried on his evangelisation and his labours from interested motives, and that he took the property of Christians, availing himself of their devotedness. He speaks therefore of his ministry. He declares openly that he is an apostle, an eye-witness of the glory of Christ, having seen the Lord. Moreover, if he was not an apostle to others, doubtless he was to the Corinthians, for he had been the means of their conversion. Now the will of the Lord was that they who preached the gospel should live of the gospel. He had a right to take with him a sister as his wife, even as Peter did, and the brethren of the Lord. Nevertheless he had not used this right. Obliged by the call of the Lord to preach the gospel, woe unto him if he failed to do it! His glory was to do it gratuitously, so as to take away all occasion from those who sought it. For, being free from all, he had made himself the servant of all, that he might win as many as he could. Observe that this was in his service; it was not accommodating himself to the world, in order to escape the offence of the cross. He put this plainly forward (1 Corinthians 2:2); but in preaching it, he adapted himself to the religious capacity and to the modes of thought belonging to the one and to the other, in order to gain access for the truth into their minds; and he did the same in his manner of conduct among them. It was the power of charity which denied itself in all things, in order to be the servant of all, and not the selfishness which indulged itself under the pretence of gaining others. He did so in every respect for the sake of the gospel, desiring, as he said, to be a partaker with it, for he personifies it as doing the work of God's love in the world.