What is the church? Well, the very first thing about the church, God's elect, is this, that it is the embodiment of the superlative power of God in terms of a difference of life and nature, a difference in the inward being, a distinctiveness of character. That is the church, and if that is not true at its beginnings and progressively, anything that bears the name of the church is a misnomer; that is not true; that is not the church. But, oh, what this involves! To what depths God has to take us in order to make us know that any change in us is a matter of His superlative power. How He has to exhaust all our resources of strength to make a difference in ourselves. How He has to bring us to an end of every kind of resource to change our nature, in order to make the slightest difference to us at all. But by that way He does it and shows that His power is greater than ours, greater than any other power known to us to do this thing.
