The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily demanded of us is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of personality which the life of the Body encourages. Those who are members of one another become as diverse as the hand and the ear. That is why the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared […]
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Author: Rick Shrader
To What Are We Accountable?
“One out of four Americans (23 percent) state that religious beliefs and teaching are the single, most significant influence on their thinking about whether or not there is such a thing as absolute moral truth. The next most prolific influence is said to be the Bible (15 percent). Other significant sources of influence about moral […]
And Can It Be That I Should Gain?
Take heed of being offended at the cross that thou must go by before thou come to heaven. You must understand that there is no man that goeth to heaven but he must go by the cross. The cross is the standing way-mark by which all they that go to glory must pass. John Bunyan, […]
Things Indifferent
For the church, wherever she appears in human society, the constantly recurring question must be: What shall we unite with and from what shall we separate? The question of coexistence does not enter here, but the question of union and fellowship does. The wheat grows in the same field with the tares, but shall the […]
Is The Gospel Social?
Christianity will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world, but if it is accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity. Christianity will combat Bolshevism; but if it is accepted in order to combat Bolshevism, it is not Christianity. . . Christianity will produce a healthy community; but if it […]
Facing Legalism and License With Truth
Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is. Winston Churchill The German Anabaptist Hans Denck said, “Therefore, as God wills, and so much as in me is, I will not have my brother as an opponent and my Father as a judge.”1 In […]
Telling The Old, Old Story
Christian literature, to be accepted and approved by the evangelical leaders of our times, must follow very closely . . . a kind of ‘party line’ from which it is scarcely safe to depart. A half-century of this in America has made us smug and content. We imitate each other with slavish devotion and our […]
The Election In The Mirror
Christianity could be transformed into a cultural religion. Instead of attending to otherworldly concepts such as individual salvation and everlasting life, the church would focus upon this world. Moral pronouncements, social involvement, and political activism would become the work of the church. Such ‘cultural Protestantism,’ to use H. Richard Niebuhr’s term, came to dominate 19th-century Protestantism […]
Repeat His Mercies In Your Song
Give to our God immortal praise; Mercy and Truth are all His ways; Wonders of Grace to God belong, Repeat His mercies in your song. Isaac Watts I have never been a musician in any technical sense of the word. I can play C, G & F on a guitar and sometimes D, A & […]
Are We Hurting Or Helping?
For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted of the word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify […]