Every time I move to a new community, I find a church close by and join it--committing myself to worship and work with that company of God's people....Every one turns out to be biblical through and through: murmurers, complainers, the faithless, the inconstant, those plagued with doubt and riddled with sin, boring moralizers, glamorous secularizes. Every once in a while a shaft of blazing beauty seems to break out of nowhere and illuminate these companies, and then I see what my sin-dulled eyes had missed: word of God-shaped, Holy Spirit-created lives of sacrificial humility, incredible courage, heroic virtue, holy praise, joyful suffering, constant prayer, persevering obedience. I see "Christ--for Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men's faces."
I hope you caught the surprise of how he describes a church that is really "biblical through and through." You only have to read of the headaches and disciplinary issues that Paul dealt with in his New Testament letters to know its true.
This excerpt is from Leap Over A Wall. I'm reading it in preparation for a sermon series on David. The poem he quotes is from "Inversnaid," by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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