The Church's Confused Effects and Purposes

Isak Dinesen famously expressed a cynical regard for man by asking “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
It takes a remarkably low opinion of man to so confuse the effect of his drinking with the purpose.
I have a woodstove in the den. That little metal box is a wonderful device for reducing an acre of forest into a bucketful of ash.
And what is a gun but a remarkable device for separating bullets from their casings. Loudly.
This trick of identifying an obvious but secondary effect and pretending it's the purpose is not a particularly impressive trick, though it can seem clever when done on purpose.
But you wouldn't think it clever if you went to visit a friend in January and discovered his house to be inhospitably frigid. Coming into the house through an open door he greets you with a blanket and offers you an ice cube to suck on, all the water in the pipes being frozen. You note with perplexity the windows left open and ask him if he doesn't have a woodstove, having noted the piles of wood, cut, split and stacked beside the door.
He smiles broadly. "Haven't I! And it's a real beauty. I keep it going all the time." He takes you downstairs to show off his hard-working stove and you discover that what heat is not going up the flue is heading out the open windows. But it's not the heat that your host is pleased about. He wants to draw your attention to the buckets of ash he is proudly displaying. "Just look at all this ash! And I've got piles more ash outside. You want to go see the ash pile?"
Well, I'm afraid that we can come across that way in the church sometimes. We've been given the fuel of God's Holy Spirit to produce the warmth of God's glory but we are carelessly indifferent to that glory, reveling instead in the byproducts of that holy combustion, the programs of the church the increases in attendance, etc. But those things are, at best, an evidence of the good things that have happened and not the good things themselves.
I have made the mistake at times of measuring the church by the size of the ash pile and not by the spiritual temperature, and I'm embarrassed to admit it.