That’s a question that needs to uncomfortably confront any of our commitments and loyalties. We don’t stand at the foot of Sinai in the shadow of the golden calf, but there’s plenty of calves erected in our society and hearts and many are willing to break loose before them — there are idols before whom we celebrate, laugh, and dance.

On top of Mount Sinai, Moses received a revelation of Jehovah. The one, true, and living God delivered to him two tablets of stone inscribed by the divine finger that summarized his moral will — epitomized in a love to God and a love to neighbor. But as Moses tarried on the mountaintop the people of Israel grew restless and fashioned for themselves a golden calf and celebrated, laughed, and danced. Moses’ anger burned hot and in a symbolic gesture he shattered the tablets of stone at the foot of the mountain – the covenant was broken. Then he challenged the people of Israel asking: “Who is on the Lord’s side” and only the sons of Levi crossed over, and that day three thousand men on the other side were killed at their hands.
Who is on the Lord’s side? That’s a question that needs to uncomfortably confront any of our commitments and loyalties. We don’t stand at the foot of Sinai in the shadow of the golden calf, but there’s plenty of calves erected in our society and hearts and many are willing to break loose before them — there are idols before whom we celebrate, laugh, and dance.
As summer fades and we slip into our fall routines there’s nothing that will dominate the first day of the week like professional football. Beginning with the NFL draft and marching toward “Superbowl Sunday,” there will be more than 100 million viewers of America’s most popular sport — with last year’s end of the season game drawing 115 million viewers. With religious excitement and commitment the masses will gather in stadiums or around screens to watch what the Wall Street Journal estimated to be a per-game average of eleven minutes of actual action. Those eleven minutes will determine how many Americans decide to spend their Sunday orienting hours around them.
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Praying
Recently, I began to read a book that I found interesting in its concept, purpose, and accomplishment. A woman named Berenice Aguilera discovered a copy of John Calvin’s commentaries and realized that the original transcriber of his sermons—more than four hundred years ago in St. Peters, Geneva—also transcribed and printed his closing prayers. These brief living intercessions are printed in most of Calvin’s books of sermons. Berenice was so moved in reading them that she proceeded to gather them together, and she seems to have published them herself in England—because there is no name of a publisher to be found anywhere in a 255-page book that she has titled Praying through the Prophets. Publishing the book herself would have required not only cash but a strong conviction that there was something very valuable in listening to John Calvin speaking to God after he had spoken to the people in his congregation. This one book contains more than three thousand prayers of the Genevan Reformer at the close of each of his sermons on the Major and Minor Prophets from Jeremiah to Malachi.
I initially dipped into these prayers and found them refreshing. In daily readings, I am in the latter chapters of the prophet Jeremiah and Lamentations, so I have begun, at the end of the verses apportioned for each day, to read the prayers of Calvin on that chapter. These latter chapters of Jeremiah contain both a relentless declaration of the forthcoming destruction of mighty Babylon and also words of encouragement to the Lord’s people in captivity there. Let me give an example of a portion of Jeremiah as he seeks to encourage the people of God in their long exile from Jerusalem, and then the prayer of John Calvin when he finished preaching on them:
You who have escaped from the sword, go, do not stand still! Remember the LORD from far away, and let Jerusalem come into your mind: ‘We are put to shame, for we have heard reproach; dishonor has covered our face, for foreigners have come into the holy places of the LORD’s house.’ Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will execute judgment upon her images, and through all her land the wounded shall groan. Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify her strong height, yet destroyers would come from me against her, declares the LORD (Jer. 51:50–53).
This is the prayer of John Calvin after he has preached on these verses:
Grant, Almighty God, that when you hide at this day your face from us, that the miserable despair that is ours may not overwhelm our faith, nor obscure our view of your goodness and grace, but that in the thickest darkness your power may ever appear to us, which can raise us above the world, so that we may courageously fight to the end and never doubt that you will at length be the defender of the church which now seems to be oppressed, until we shall enjoy our perfect happiness in heaven, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
What simplicity, theocentricity (God-centeredness), humility, and submissive yearning that expresses the oneness of the redeemed. That spirit is what we long to experience when we are hearing public prayer. Christians meet at the mercy seat. When we all bow there in the presence of our Lord in prayer, we are never closer together. There are Christians who will refuse to read anything that was written by John Calvin. They are missing so much. He was a man of prayer. You will never understand or appreciate the Genevan Reformer or realize his impact in the world until you grasp how there was a part of his life lived at the throne of grace. I often heard Ernest Reisinger say, “It is a sin to preach and not to pray.”
When one visits the Martyn Lloyd-Jones Trust website, one discovers that five examples of the congregational praying of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones are recorded there. They are most moving, comprehensive, and deeply reverent as spoken by one addressing the almighty Creator of the cosmos through what His Son Jesus Christ has achieved. The first recorded prayer was prayed on the opening Sunday of a new year, and so it is the longest—fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The others average between ten and eleven minutes, but all are so gripping and relevant that the last thing one thinks of is their length. Little wonder people looking back sometimes said that when they went to Westminster Chapel for the first time, it was the praying of the Doctor that moved them more than the preaching. Only a man who knows the Scriptures, prays privately, and who walks in the Spirit could pray for that length, gripping and lifting a congregation of 1,400 into the presence of the Holy One. John Owen said, “If the word does not dwell with power in us then it will not pass with power from us.”

The whole point of the discussion of the “marks of the church” is to help ordinary people make judgments about the church–especially which one they ought to attend. Thus there are three things which should be present: 1). The pure preaching of the gospel 2). The pure administration of the sacraments 3). The practice of church discipline.

Reformed Confessional Teaching on the “Marks of the Church”
The discussion of the marks of a true church is important—especially in our day and age—because of the competing claims of various religious bodies and organizations to be “Christ’s church.” There are a myriad of churches who make such a claim–some associated with recognizable church bodies. Other groups who identify themselves as “churches” are more the product of the American entrepreneurial spirit, possess a trendy name, and an undefinable identity. They see themselves as radical and relevant, not stale and stuffy.
Reformed theologians have understood the marks of the church to be an especially important matter since multiple church bodies claim to be the only (or the true) church, yet their various claims are questionable in terms of biblical teaching and doctrine. This raises the question under discussion here: “how do we distinguish valid claims to be a true church from invalid claims?”
Louis Berkhof points out that there was not much of a need to consider the marks of the church when it was clearly one (i.e., during the apostolic church), but after heresies arose it became increasingly necessary to speak in the terms of a true/false, biblical/unbiblical dichotomy of any assembly of people professing to be Christians and followers of Jesus. Responding to heresies requires a response and doctrinal explanation. Oftentimes these explanations lead to further division.[1]
James Bannerman, a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, puts the matter well in his highly regarded book The Church of Christ (1869).

In the case of a number of organized societies, no less widely differing from each other in profession and in practice, in the confession of faith that they own, and the form of order and government they adopt, yet all of them claiming in common to be called Churches of Christ, and not a few of them denying that name to any body but their own, there must be some criterion or test by which to discriminate amid such opposite and conflicting pretensions . . . [2]

In our time, the traditional marks which were thought to identify the “true church” have been eclipsed by pragmatic, and experiential “marks.” Many now understand a church’s size, how they felt and what they experienced, a charismatic, celebrity preacher, and the church’s social media presence, along with a menu of activities as indicators of places where “God is working.” The category of a “true church” is long forgotten or ignored as a sectarian relic of the past.
The Belgic Confession (1561)
The longest statement on the question of the “marks of the church” in the commonly used Reformed standards is The Belgic Confession, Article 29. The article on the marks of the church makes clear the occasion for the questions: “What is the true church?” “How do we find it?” “What do we look for?”
To start with, the Belgic Confession (BC) clarifies that this is not a question about hypocrites within the church, but rather about how to distinguish among Christians assemblies which make competing claims to be “the church.” Then the BC lists three marks that give assurance of recognizing “the true church”
1). The pure preaching of the gospel
2). The pure administration of the sacraments
3). The practice of church discipline
After a brief discussion of the marks of true Christians who belong to this church (something not to be overlooked), the BC moves on to describe “the false church,” which manifests the following three characteristics:
1). The false church assigns more authority to itself than to the Word of God, and does not subject itself to the yoke of Christ
2). The false church does not administer the sacraments as commanded in the Word, but adds to or subtracts from them
3). The false church rebukes those who live holy lives and rebukes the true church
The last statement is striking: these “two churches” are easy to recognize and distinguish. This was true at the time the BC was written (1561), because the author knew only of the Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and Anabaptist churches, a matter which is far more complicated now.
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563)
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) does not address this issue explicitly, but Q&A 83 of the catechism calls preaching the gospel and discipline the keys of the kingdom
Q 83: What are the keys of the kingdom?
A. The preaching of the holy gospel and Christian discipline toward repentance. Both of them open the kingdom of heaven to believers and close it to unbelievers.
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647)
The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) chapter 25 approaches the subject somewhat differently from the BC.
CHAPTER 25 – Of the Church

1. The catholic or universal church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.
2. The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.

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