Zinzendorf and the Moravians proved that an entire communion of believers (call it a church or a denomination, if you will) can find reason for being solely on the basis of missions to the lost and unreached multitudes of the world. Their fellowship existed solely to send out laborers into the harvest. Everyone and everything pointed to that missionary purpose. For them, missions was not an adjunct to church life, it was church life.
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Feast of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, c.326 If one could talk absolutely humanly about Christ, one would read more
Feast of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, c.326 If one could talk absolutely humanly about Christ, one would have to say that the words: "my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" are impatient and untrue. They can only be true if God says them, and consequently also when the God-Man says them. And indeed since it is true, it is the very limit of suffering.
Feast of Thomas the Apostle If God doesn't bring judgment on America soon, He will have to apologize read more
Feast of Thomas the Apostle If God doesn't bring judgment on America soon, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Commemoration of Richard Baxter, Priest, Hymnographer, Teacher, 1691 Each of us individually has risen into moral life from a read more
Commemoration of Richard Baxter, Priest, Hymnographer, Teacher, 1691 Each of us individually has risen into moral life from a mode of being which was purely natural; in other words, each of us also has fallen -- fallen, presumably in ways determined by his natural constitution, yet certainly, as conscience assures us, in ways for which we are morally answerable, and to which, in the moral constitution of the world, consequences attach which we must recognise as our due. They are not only results of our action, but results which that action has merited; and there is no moral hope for us unless we accept them as such.
Feast of English Saints & Martyrs of the Reformation Continuing a series on the person of Jesus: We might read more
Feast of English Saints & Martyrs of the Reformation Continuing a series on the person of Jesus: We might have said beforehand, if we had been told that God was coming into a man's life, ... "That must be something very terrible and awful. That certainly must rend and tear the life to which God comes. At least, it will separate it and make it unnatural and strange. God fills a bush with His glory and it burns. God enters into the great mountain, and it rocks with earthquake. When he comes to occupy a man, He must distort the humanity which He occupies into some inhuman shape." Instead of that, this new life into which God comes, seems to be the most quietly, naturally human life that was ever seen upon the earth. It glides into its place like sunlight. It seems to make it evident that God and man are essentially so near together, that the meeting of their natures in the life of a God-man is not strange. So always does Christ deal with His own nature, accepting His Divinity as you and I accept our humanity, and letting it shine out through the envelope with which it has most subtly and mysteriously mingled, as the soul is mingled with and shines out through the body.
A teacher appears--for whom no one was prepared, and whom no one could have expected. The argument from prophecy, on read more
A teacher appears--for whom no one was prepared, and whom no one could have expected. The argument from prophecy, on which the early apologists laid so much weight, was all ex post facto. No one beforehand could have conjectured a tenth of it. But without the background of Jewish prophet and psalmist, of Jewish national history, it would be hard to understand Jesus. If prophet and historian and legislator did not in type and enigma foretell in detail the story of his life, he was none the less their heir. None the less was he their heir in that he was not in bondage to his inheritance, but... a "minister not of the letter but of the spirit", and the whole of his activity lay "in newness of spirit". Without conjecturing what he might have been on another soil or of another stock--a type of guesswork always futile in history--we have to recognize the... immense spiritual wealth that lay ready to his hand.
Holy Saturday When Jesus Christ shed his blood on the cross, it was not the blood of a read more
Holy Saturday When Jesus Christ shed his blood on the cross, it was not the blood of a martyr; or the blood of one man for another; it was the life of God poured out to redeem the world.
Commemoration of Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, spritual writer, 1893 We feel that other churches must accept, as read more
Commemoration of Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, spritual writer, 1893 We feel that other churches must accept, as the pre-conditions of fellowship, such changes as will bring them into conformity with ourselves in matters which we regard as essential, and that a failure to insist on this will involve compromise in regard to what is essential to the Church's being. But for precisely the same reason, we cannot admit a demand from others for any changes in ourselves which would seem to imply a denial that we already possess the esse of the Church.
Grant that I may never rack a Scripture simile beyond the true intent thereof, lest, instead of sucking milk, I read more
Grant that I may never rack a Scripture simile beyond the true intent thereof, lest, instead of sucking milk, I squeeze blood out of it.
Pentecost Every time we say, 'I believe in the Holy Spirit,' we mean that we believe that there is read more
Pentecost Every time we say, 'I believe in the Holy Spirit,' we mean that we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.
