Of People ... and the God they want

Christians have fallen into the habit of accepting the nosiest among them as the best and the greatest. They too have learned to equate popularity with excellence, and in open defiance of the Sermon on the Mount they have given their approval not to the meek, but to the self-assertive; not to the mourner, but to the self assured; not to the pure of heart who seek God but to the publicity hunter who seeks headlines.

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As long as people can hear orthodox truth divorced from life they will attend and support churches and institutions without objection. The truth is a lovely song, become sweet by long and tender association; and since it asks nothing but a few dollars. And offers good music, pleasant friendships and a comfortable sense of well-being, it meets with no resistance from the faithful. Much that passes for New Testament Christianity is little more than objective truth sweetened with song and religious entertainment.

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With Bibles under their arms and bundles of tracts in their pockets, religious persons now meet to carry on services so carnal, so pagan, that they can hardly be distinguished from the old vaudeville shows of earlier days. And for a preacher or writer to challenge this heresy is to invite ridicule and abuse from every quarter.

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... the whole evangelical world is to a large extent unfavourable to healthy Christianity. And I am not thinking of Modernism either. I mean rather the Bible-believing crowd that bears the name orthodoxy. We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone. Large and influential sections of the world of fundamental Christianity have gone overboard for practices wholly unscriptural, altogether unjustifiable in the light of historic Christian truth and deeply damaging to the inner life of the individual Christian. They have imitated the world, sought popular favour, manufactured delights to substitute for the joy of the Lord and produced a cheap and synthetic power to substitute for the power of the Holy Ghost.

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Much that the church - even the evangelical church - is doing these days she is doing because she is afraid not to.

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The quest of the modern Christian is likely to be for peace of mind and spiritual joy, with a degree of material prosperity thrown in as an external proof of the divine favour.

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In this world men are judged by their ability to do.

 

Of God ... and the people He needs

We are a part of that great Christian body that goes back to Pentecost. I believe in a true kind of apostolic succession, not a succession of bishops and men with names and positions, but a living organism vitally a part of the true church of Christ that began when the Holy Ghost came upon a body of believers and made them one, making them God's people in a way that none had been before.

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True religion is removed from diet and days, from garments and ceremonies, and placed where it belongs - in the union of the spirit of man and the Spirit of God.

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... mortality and temporality are written all across the church of Christ in the world today because so many persons are trying to do with human genius and power of the flesh what only God can do through the Holy Spirit.

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The best way to keep the enemy out is to keep Christ in. The sheep need not be terrified by the wolf; they have but to stay close to the shepherd. It is not the praying sheep Satan fears but the presence of the shepherd.

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When Christ came with His blazing spiritual penetration and His fine moral sensitivity He appeared to the Pharisee to be a devotee of another kind of religion, which He indeed was. If the world had only understood.

All of us who love our Lord Jesus Christ are facing such great changes in this period before His return that we are going to have to recall and have back upon us the kind of spiritual revival that will eventuate in new moral power, in a new bestowing of the enabling of the Spirit of God.

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A free Christian should act from within with a total disregard for the opinions of others. If a course is right he should take it because it is right, not because he is afraid not to take it. And if it is wrong he should avoid it though he lose every earthly treasure and even his very life as a consequence.

Let us not be shocked by the suggestion that there are disadvantages to the life in Christ. There most certainly are. Abel was murdered, Joseph was sold into slavery. Daniel was thrown into the den of lions, Stephen was stoned to death, Paul was beheaded, and a noble army of martyrs was put to death by various painful methods all down the long centuries. And where the hostility did not lead to violence (and mostly it did not and does not) the sons of the world nevertheless managed to make life tough for the children of God in a thousand cruel ways.