In every generation we who confess the Lord Jesus are confronted with well-established offenses against Him, testing our courage. If we man up, some people will inevitably say we are moving too quickly and causing unnecessary provocation. That might be true. The moral nobility of a cause elevates no one above self-judgment, and crusaders can be the most self-righteous of all. But the lordship of Christ judges everything, including both the offenses He calls us to challenge and our own excuses for not doing so.
Blog Post: Yet They Stood Their Ground, August 10, 2012, Used by Permission.
Show me a place on the face of the earth ten miles square where a man may provide for his children in decency and comfort, where infancy is protected, where age is venerated, where womanhood is honored, and where human life is held in due regard, and I will show you a place where the gospel of Christ has gone and laid the foundation (James Lowell).
It is a tragedy that the Christian religion is in many minds identified merely with pious ethical behavior and vague theistic beliefs, suffused with aesthetic emotionalism and a mild glow of humanitarian benevolence. This is not the faith which first awakened the world like a thousand trumpets and made people feel it bliss in such a dawn to be alive. Men knew what Christianity really was – the entrance into history of a force of immeasurable range.
Thine is the Kingdom, Schribner’s, 1956, p. 22.
