Avoiding the Personal Sin of Sectarian Loyalty

Can this sectarian influence be avoided?

It is not so much what happens to us in life that matters—it is how we take it. A minister and his wife were discussing these things. “It seems like that men are just not able to hold these truths,” the wife remarked to the husband, and he agreed. Since they felt that nothing could be done to halt the inexorable slide among the people with whom they labored, they resigned themselves to living with the letting down, while resolving to keep clear of it, themselves. By not letting down themselves, i.e., by carefully preserving their own spiritual light and standards in their personal walk with God, they hoped to escape the flood of compromise around them and keep the Lord’s approval upon their lives. It was common for them to say, “I don’t approve of such-and-such.” “I don’t have anything to do with that.”

In trying to keep to high standards of spiritual conduct and values, they were blessed and successful, but in avoiding the growth of the sectarian influence, they failed completely. One of the major objectives of the group spirit is to capture and appropriate the influence of spirituality in men’s hearts and to utilize this to the greater glory of the movement. Well did Peter say, “And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you.”* (2 Peter 2:3)