ABOUT THE NECESSITY OF SCRIPTURE…

The Bible is not a volume of literary genius to admire; it is the revelation of divine grace to believe. It is not just one of the ten best books written by man; it is the only Book written by God. It is not the product of religious faith; it is the source of the only true religious faith. It is not the record of man’s search for God; it is the Record of God’s search for man. In short, the Bible is the only way that we and our world can ever get back to God….

“If you are looking for a sure foundation on which you can build in this world of shifting sands, here it is. There is none other. For this Book was written with the precious blood of God’s Son, who sacrificed Himself for sinners on a cross, to save them and their world1 And that’s why this Book is your only security, in life and in death, for time and eternity.”

ABOUT KEEPING THE LORD’S DAY…

One day out of every seven is a Sunday-a Lord’s day. So every seven years we live a full year of Sundays. If you are 21 years old, you have already had three years of Sundays. If you are 35, you have had five years of Sundays. If you are 70, you have had ten years of Sundays. Every one of them is a day of grace, to worship the Lord of the sabbath, Jesus Christ, and to find salvation for your soul in Him. Some day you will have to meet Him face to face, and then He wiIJ want to know what you have done with all of those Sundays. What will you tell Him? Do you realize that your eternal destiny is involved in your answer to that question? The Bible says that heaven will be like an everlasting sabbath for the people of God. So if you don’t want to keep the sabbath day holy here, you can’t very well expect to enjoy it there. Remember, it is the Lord’s day, not yours. If you try to take it away from Him, in the end He will take everything away from you!

     

       

ABOUT CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY IN LABOR RELATIONS…

We are hypocrites if we talk about civil rights for all races while we let organized labor take away the right to work. And yet, that is precisely what many people are doing. The same ones who are so concerned about the right to vote -and rightly so -are too often quite unconcerned about what is happening to the right to work. And some of them are even leaders in this effort of organized labor. It’s hard to believe that they can be so inconsistent. They talk out of both sides of their mouth. They condemn discrimination against a race, but they condone discrimination against a non-union worker….

I’m afraid that too many Christians are merely silent members of neutral labor unions. They join only because they want the benefits, the material gains, the things that serve their self-interest—which means that they are as materialistic as anyone else. They pay their dues and take their orders and keep their mouth shut, even when they can see plainly that the organization to which they belong is engaging in practices that openly and blatantly violate their Christian convictions and deny the basic principles of freedom….

If you find yourself in a labor situation that prevents you from doing your work as a service to the Lord who redeemed you from sin, then you had better do something about it. And if you say there’s nothing you can do, then you are either a very poor Christian, or you are in the wrong job, or in the wrong union. This is a time for Christians to stand up and be counted, not only for the sake of their faith, but for the sake of their freedom and the freedom of all other men.

ABOUT THE “RACE PROBLEM”…

There is no doubt that demonstrations have done a great deal to arouse the conscience of America. They have dramatized the urgency of doing something to give both the rights and the responsibilities of freedom to those who are now deprived of them. And I am sure that Christian ministers have a great job to do in solving the race problem—in fact, the biggest and most important job of all. But I am wondering about ministers who frankly abandon the historic gospel of the cross—I wonder whether they have anything distinctively Christian to contribute, and, indeed, whether they will not actually hurt rather than help the cause of racial justice in the long run.

ABOUT THE CHURCH IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE…

Our churches stand here in the middle of this whole immoral mess. Sometimes it looks like a tidal wave threatening to sweep us away. It even gets into the churches. Unrepentant sinners are permitted to belong to the church and sit in its pews and partake of its sacraments, even though everybody knows they are living in gross sin and loving it, too.

You can be sure that one reason why this has happened to the churches is that they have not dared to condemn the corruption of contemporary culture. Too many of them have gone along with the trend, winking at the sins of their members, and even supporting the sophisticated notions of modem psychology which contends that religion has put too many moral taboos upon the free expression of sex, thus giving people a guilt complex when they were really doing nothing wrong. You will hear religious leaders today who talk about bringing the church up to date by accommodating it to the prevailing moral pattern. Indeed, this is considered to be a sign of progress, which will make the church more relevant, more acceptable to the age in which we live—which is to say, in effect, that because you cannot change the world, you better change the church to fit the world.

ABOUT COMMERCIALIZING THE CHRISTIAN FAITH…

And we have these religious hucksters in broadcasting too. In fact, they are so numerous and so unscrupulous that many stations have adopted a policy of refusing to sell time for religious broadcasts, which means that many other respectable programs are also put off the air. The principle of religious freedom certainly includes the right to purchase broadcasting time for the gospel, but it also demands that those who exercise this right are worthy of it, that they will not be guilty of exploiting it for money. The stations may be discriminating against the honorable broadcaster when they refuse to sell time for religion, but the religious profiteers are giving them a powerful argument in defense of that policy.

Commercial religion on radio and television is a dreadful thing, and it is all done in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, with plenty of pious phrases to make it sound like real orthodoxy. You are told that the program is a work of faith, dependent upon the gifts of God’s people. And you are made to feel that if you don’t send in a sizeable contribution, the program may have to go off the air, and that will put you in the same class with all the other evil forces in this world which are conspiring against religious broadcasting.

What you don’t know is that in many cases these hucksters are independent operators who are accountable to nobody but themselves, apart from the churches and without any reputable religious organization behind them, and yet preying upon church people who have a genuine sense of responsibility for the spread of the gospel of Christ. Obviously, the money does not come from the unchurched. It comes from sincere Christian people who are easy victims of the commercializer. They think they are helping the cause of the gospel, when actually they are hurting it.

ABOUT THE LOVE OF MAN FOR FELLOW-MAN…

You see, we are at odds with each other because we are fundamentally at odds with God. And so we cannot learn to love and to live with each other until we learn to love and to live with God. That’s why Jesus said the first commandment is to love God above all, and that the sec. and, like unto the first, is to love our neighbor as ourselves. And that can be done, by the grace of God, for He has given us His Son to perform the miracle of reconciliation between God and man. We can meet Him in Christ, by faith; and when we do, well, that’s where we meet each other tool When we get back to God, we get back to each other! Christ is the meeting-place—not only for God and man, but for man and man! And that’s the only way it can really be done -not superficially, but way down deep in the sinful heart of man -not in the color of a man’s skin, but in the color of his soul!

ABOUT THE COMING DAY OF THE LORD…

The final judgment day will be our Lord’s execution and demonstration of the sentence that has been passed upon all men and upon all the world. It will be a public day of reckoning for all of us, when the lines will be drawn for eternity. It will be the high point of our Lord’s redemptive work, His ultimate and conclusive triumph over all the powers of evil. In that day no one, not even the devil, will have any doubts about who is the victor in this conflict. All the living and the dead wiJI be brought publicly into the world’s greatest courtroom, and there He who was judged by chief priests and rulers, by Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, and by every human heart that has ever confronted Him—He will be the Judge, separating the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, gathering the sheep into His heavenly fold, and the wheat into His everlasting garner. That’s the day we’re waiting for, and working for! If you don’t believe it is coming you are in for a painful surprise!

ABOUT THE PREACHING THAT REALLY COUNTS…

If the preacher does not believe in his own heart that the Bible is fact, he will most certainly present it as though it were fiction. And then he cannot preach with divine authority, as Jesus did. He will sound like the scribes. And that kind of preaching will never move the souls of men to seek the grace of God as Calvary’s cross. It may get a following, and even fill the church to overflowing; it may make a tremendous impression, and even get into the headlines. But it will not be the power of God unto salvation for lost sinners and a lost world. It may be a success in the Sight of man, but not in the sight of God. For it will be at best the word of man, not the Word of God.

Isn’t it remarkable that Jesus Himself—the Son of God, the second person of the holy trinity, God in the flesh bound Himself by the Word of God in His preaching? He was not too big to accept it as fact, and to preach it that way. He said plainly that He did not come to destroy the Old Testament law but rather to fulfill it. He did not question the authorship of the prophecies and doubt their validity. He took them as His infallible text when He preached the gospel. He did not look upon the Scripture as myth but as truth. And remember, He had come to fulfill everyone of its promises, and He could look down the years and see how that gospel of fulfillment would be written in the New Testament. The whole Bible was really there in the pulpit when He preached, part of it written and part of it yet to be written. This was the Word of God by which He bound Himself in His preaching. Isn’t it presumptuous for mere men to do otherwise?

Yes, of course, to preach the whole Bible as the inspired and infallible Word of God is considered to be naive and unscientific and unscholarly these days—even though some of the world’s greatest minds have done it and are still doing it today. As Paul said, “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness.” But however that may be, that’s the way Jesus preached-without making any concessions to His critics. And the whole world was compelled to reckon with His preaching. It still is today, 1900 years later. His pulpit is veritably the pivot of human history. For He was Himself the Word of God which He preached.

ABOUT THE EVILS OF SABBATH NEGLECT…

A third foundation stone which is rapidly decaying is the Christian sabbath, an institution without which no civilization has ever remained strong and secure. But for us it is increasingly a day of business-as-usual, of pleasure and sports, part of the “week-end”—which for many people is a lost week-end, spiritually speaking. Even the government does a lot of its work on Sundays, work that could just as well be done on some other day in the week. Why is it that so many public ceremonies and high level conferences have to be held on the Lord’s Day? So too, labor union meetings, business conventions, educational seminars, military exercises, and a lot of other functions that make it almost impossible for many people to keep the Sabbath day holy.

Most of our people don’t want to go to church anymore, and many of those who do, go only occasionally, and often with skeptical hearts and cynical minds. This, incidentally, is one reason why we use radio to preach the gospel it is one way to reach these unreachables, for radio is a very essential part of their way of life—much more essential than the church—they even carry it with them wherever they go. And this is also the reason why some preachers today, instead of taking pulpits and churches, take jobs in stores and shopping-centers and factories, in places of amusement and recreation, in tenement slums and fashionable apartments -so they can somehow get next to these people, right where they are, where they live and work, buy and sell, suffer and die.

But all of this is compensatory in a culture where the Christian sabbath has been so largely lost, where men no longer go to God’s house to worship Him in spirit and in truth. And it goes without saying that you cannot build a Great Society with people like that.

ABOUT SOWING AND REAPING…

The Bible says: “Be not deceived; God is not mockcd; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

We know that’s true in the realm of nature, and we’re grateful for it. But we tell ourselves that this law doesn’t work in the realm of the spirit. If our farmers would pay as little attention that that law in nature as we do in spiritual matters, the whole output of our fertile fields would be something far from edible, unfit for either man or beast. We know that we cannot gather grapes from thorns, nor figs from thistles, as Jesus said. If you want corn, you don’t plant poison ivy. And likewise, if you allow the weeds to grow and multiply, and go to seed again, you don’t say when you see a new crop of weeds coming up: Well, imagine that! I was expecting corn!

But when we get into the area of morality and justice, that is precisely the way we behave. Men travel the road that leads to hell, and then they want to believe that somehow they will end up in heaven. They plant the seeds of sin and expect an altogether different harvest. They break every commandment of God’s law, and then they complain when they have to suffer the consequences. They want justice when they plant corn, but not when they plant sin.

ABOUT EDUCATION WITHOUT GOD…

If there is a God, and if He made the world -as most of us profess—then it would seem to follow, wouldn’t it, that the more one learns about the world, the more he will learn about God, and the closer he will come to Him. As one’s knowledge of the universe increases, his knowledge of God should also increase, simply because this is God’s universe created by His wisdom and understanding.

But that’s not the way it works in much of modern education. Instead, the process of learning in many of our schools is calculated to lead the coming generation farther away from God. The more they learn about the world, the less they believe in God. Some of them even claim, quite frankly, and even proudly, with an air of liberation, that their education compelled them to give up their faith in God.

What’s wrong here? Is there something wrong with our logic? Isn’t it true that the more one learns about the world, the more he should learn about God? Or is there something wrong with our education? Doesn’t it do what it is supposed to do?

Well, maybe there is something wrong with us. Maybe we don’t really know what education is supposed to do. And maybe we don’t care -as long as our children get good jobs with all the material security they want, or achieve some position of influence which commands respect and recognition. Yes, of course, we would like them to acquire a few worthy ideals, too, and we expect education to do that for them. But beyond that we have no good reason for sending them to school. It’s all right with most of us if the schools omit all reference to God, and even deny everything the Bible says about divine creation. No, it doesn’t bother modern parents and modern educators to see children walking through all the fields of learning with their eyes shut, blind to the supreme fact in this universe: GOD!