There is a considerable tendency among Christian people, in serving Christ, to aim at making a fair show in the flesh.

    Among professing Christians, there is a desire to build church buildings notable for their architecture and beauty. We must have no more barns! Our meeting houses must exhibit our improving taste! If possible, our chapels must be correctly Gothic or sternly classical in all their details, both without and within!

    As to the service, we must cultivate the musical and the tasteful. We must not to be barely decent, but to aim at the sublime and beautiful.

    Our public worship, it is thought, should be impressive if not imposing. Care should be taken that the music and singing be conformed to the best rules of the art, and the preaching eloquent and attractive.

    Brethren, there is something better to be aimed at than the outward and the external.

    We judge no man, yet we fear the tendency is to imagine that mere externals are precious in the Master's sight.

    Jesus counts it a very small matter whether your church building is a cathedral or a barn!

    To the Savior it is small concern whether you have organs or whether you have not; or whether you sing after the choicest rules of psalmody or not. Jesus looks at your hearts, and if these ascend to Him, He accepts the praise.

    Jesus would be better pleased with a grain of love, than with a heap of ostentatious service!

    All that you can give to Christ in any shape or form will not be so dear to Him as... the offering of your fervent love; the clinging of your humble faith; the reverence of your adoring souls.

    Do not neglect the spiritual for the sake of the external; or else you will be throwing away gold to gather to yourself iron; you will be pulling down the palaces of marble that you may build for yourselves hovels of clay.