Some years ago Elton Trueblood asked me, “Do you know what the most important word in the Bible is?” Being a spiritual type, I naturally thought of words like “justification,” “atonement,” and “salvation.”
“You’re on the wrong track,” he said. “The greatest word is and. For example, you read, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old,’ ” (Matt. 13:52).
“Renewal,” Dr. Trueblood told me, “always involves both the new and the old.”
—Bruce Larson in The Power to Make Things New
The minister never knows
A minister often thinks he is most effective for God in the pulpit on that Sunday morning when he is preaching an eloquent sermon after hours of preparation. But between the nine and eleven o’clock services when he is in the process of going from one service to another—trying to relax a moment—someone urgently grabs his arm and says, “The superintendent of the children’s department didn’t come this morning!” … He goes in and shares informally something … never knowing as he rushes out to the next service that the mind of a little visitor on the back row was struck by his impromptu words, and offered itself to God. Perhaps a great Christian life has been conceived—and the minister never knows.
—Keith Miller in The Taste of New Wine
Discipleship equals joy
If we answer the call to discipleship, where will it lead us? What decisions and partings will it demand? To answer this question we shall have to go to Him, ...
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