The Power of Godliness

For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come. 1 TIMOTHY 4:8

One of Catherine Booth’s books bears the title Godliness, and the word suits her. It is not a word her age used much. People spoke of being religious, of being church members, of holding sound views, of being serious. She wanted a word that meant something harder to fake. Godliness, in her mouth, meant God-likeness: a life actually changed at the root by the God it professed to know. And she set it, again and again, against its great counterfeit, which was not irreligion but religion without power.

A well-made corpse

Her favourite image for the church of her day was a body with the life gone out of it. In her address The Holy Ghost she described the professing Christianity around her as “like a very pretty corpse” — nothing obviously missing, every part in place, and yet no breath. In Adaptation of Measures she turned the image on individuals. The Pharisees had kept the forms of the law while losing its spirit, and she saw the same thing in the pews of Christian England: people with the creed of Christ and none of His character. They were, she said, “Pharisees with a Christian creed instead of a Jewish.”

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. MATTHEW 23:27

It is worth noticing what she did not mean by this. She did not despise creeds; she argued from Scripture with great care and held the doctrines of the gospel without apology. She did not despise churches; she spent much of her life in them. What she refused was the idea that holding the creed, or attending the church, was the same thing as knowing God. She had met too many people who had done both for years and were, in her phrase from another address, slaves of sin all the same. The form was not the enemy. The form mistaken for the power was.

They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him. TITUS 1:16

The standard pulled down

What alarmed her most was not that Christians failed — everyone fails — but that they had lowered the standard to match their failure. In Aggressive Christianity she accused the devil of having persuaded the church to accept what she called an “Oh, wretched man that I am” religion: a Christianity that expected defeat, explained it, and even took a certain comfort in it. She did not mean that believers should pretend to be better than they are. She meant that the New Testament holds out victory over sin as a real possibility, and that a church which has stopped expecting it will soon stop seeking it.

Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil. 1 JOHN 3:7–8

She quoted that passage constantly. Her reasoning was simple. If Christ came to destroy the works of the devil, then a Christianity in which the works of the devil go on undisturbed is not the Christianity He came to bring. As she put it in one of her Exeter Hall addresses on holiness, He has not given us a religion we cannot practise.

What the world is watching

The second reason she pressed for godliness was the world outside. She believed, and said bluntly, that inconsistent Christians did more damage to the gospel than any sceptic. Speaking of the half-hearted religion around her, she said: “I believe this kind of Christianity has made more infidels than all the infidel books ever written.” Thoughtful people, she thought, were not driven from Christ by arguments. They were driven from Him by Christians who professed everything and did nothing.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. MATTHEW 5:16

The remedy was not a better apologetic. It was a better life. “Show the world a real, living, self-sacrificing, hard-working, toiling, triumphing religion, and the world will be influenced by it,” she told her hearers. The world is not impressed by religion. It is impressed, sometimes against its will, by godliness.

How the power comes

It would be easy to read all this as a call to try harder, and some of her hearers doubtless took it that way. That was not her meaning. Godliness, for her, was not the product of effort but of God: a new heart given by the Spirit, and then kept by Him. The form is what we can manage by ourselves; the power is what only He can give. That is why her preaching on godliness always ended in the same place — at the cross, in repentance and faith, and in the reception of the Holy Spirit, which the next several chapters will follow.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17

She could be too quick to decide who had the power and who had only the form. There is a tenderness in the New Testament for the bruised reed and the smoking flax that her preaching did not always leave room for, and some of her hearers who were genuinely converted, but weak, must have gone home wondering whether they were saved at all. A reader of her books should take the searching without the despair. But the question she asked is the right one, and most of us would rather not be asked it. It is not whether we believe the right things, or attend the right church, or say the right words. It is whether anything is actually alive.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. 1 TIMOTHY 6:6

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Describe your religion as an outsider would see it this week — not what you believe, but what you do. Does it look like power or like form?

2. Identify one area of habitual defeat that you have come to accept as simply the way things are. Bring it back to God as a thing He came to destroy.

3. Ask someone who knows you well, and is not a Christian, what difference they think your faith makes. Listen without defending yourself.

4. Keep one outward form this week — a prayer time, a Sunday service, a grace before meals — and ask God before it to fill it with His presence.

5. If you are weak and afraid you are only a form, do not despair: bring the fear itself to Christ, who does not quench the smoking flax.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have learned the shape of religion very well. I can say the words and keep the hours, and I am not always sure anything in me is alive.

I have lowered the standard to fit my failures, and called it realism. Forgive me, and lift it again.

Give me the power and not only the form: a new heart, Your Spirit within, and a life that the world can see is Yours.

Let no one be driven from You by me. Let someone, somewhere, be drawn to You because of what You have done in me. Amen.