Classic & Contemporary Excerpts from April 17, 1987

All the wrong questions

The ultimate questions people of our day are asking are these: What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose behind my life and my destiny?

What questions are we evangelicals asking? Is dancing a sin? Should we immerse, sprinkle, or pour? Who is the next logical candidate for Antichrist? While we are busy at conferences and conventions, talking with ourselves about the need for Christian aerobics, or coming up with four new and painless steps to victorious Christian living, the world is taking its business elsewhere—to merchants who apply their philosophy to the deep, essential questions of human life.

—Michael Scott Horton in

Mission Accomplished

Prayer’s alchemy

Prayer makes common things holy and secular things sacred. It receives things from God with thanksgiving and hallows them with thankful hearts and devoted service.

—E. M. Bounds in The Best of E. M. Bounds on Prayer

Truth-telling or problem-solving?

Nothing undermines the quality of one’s prose so badly as a dogged determination to be upbeat and problem-solving. Compare, for example, the latest self-help book, Christian or secular, with Corrie ten Boom’s Prison Letters or Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and you will see, I think, the difference between problem-solving and bearing witness to the truth.

—Virginia Stem Owens, “On Eating Words” in The Reformed Journal (June 1986)

Brightest and best

The highest Christian love is not devotion to a work or to a cause, but to Jesus Christ.

—Oswald Chambers in The Place of Help

Let’s give God a hand!

Applause is like a wet puppy—once let in the house it is difficult to control. Some aspects of vitality are not appropriate in a worship service. Also, vitality has a short shelf life: applause can become as perfunctory as any other ritual.… Church should provide opportunities for participation that are less directly tied to encouraging performance. Congregations are not audiences, and leaders of worship are not performers. The role of the liturgist (and of the choir, organist and ushers) is to enable the congregation to participate, not to win people’s approval.

—Laurence A. Wagley in The Christian Century (Dec. 3, 1986)

Leaving our expectations with the dog

Beware of the mind-set in looking to see if the church will meet your needs.… When my family is ready to leave for church, we take certain expectations about what we want to receive and leave them home with our dog. Consequently, everything we do receive is a blessing.

—Luis Palau, “Here’s the Church, Here’s the People,” in The Covenant Companion (Feb. 1987)

Masked Christians

I think we are unreal about ourselves, even as Christians, because we are afraid that if people find out what we are actually like inside, behind the mask, find out that we really don’t honestly want to be with them socially as much as we imply, they will not accept us and therefore we won’t be able to fulfill our self-centered needs through our associations with them.

—Keith Miller in

The Taste of New Wine

Our “godly” quest?

Ever since the Garden, we have been indiscriminate suckers for the enticement of omnipotence. We are cerebral voyeurs, unable to accept the idea that some knowledge may lie outside our legitimate purview. At its worst, this insatiable curiosity shows itself in our morbid love for trivialities—we are information junkies who cannot discern relevance from immediacy. But even in more respectable garb, we feed our prurient interests with a “godly” quest for apologetics. We have swallowed the lie that certainty requires exhaustive knowledge. We want to be able to “prove God” so that everyone can really know and quit worrying—especially us. God demands active faith; we seek irrefutable certainty.

—James Sennett in The Wittenburg Door (Aug./Sept. 1986)

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