PARAGRAPHICAL THESES

To require men to do anything else as a condition of salvation except to receive with meekness the engrafted Word which is able to save the soul, is to reflect on the efficacy of the Gospel.

Taking a stand for Christ, holding up the hand for prayer, going forward and bowing at a mourners' bench or altar, repairing to an inquiry room, card-signing, assenting to the evangelists' or personal workers' syllogism, choosing the pastor and joining the church of one's choice, memorizing the catechism, going through the process of confirmation, or Decision Day, studying the commandments, hitting the saw-dust trail, shaking the evangelist's hand, being baptized in a certain mode, appearing before the Presbytery, joining the probationers' class, are in no sense essential to salvation. Repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ only, are essential, though in some instances, the mentioned means have been instrumental in leading souls to Christ, yet are they unnecessary circumlocutions to salvation. The Lord requires submission, surrender, obedience, repentance and faith. "Now is the day of salvation." He who believes is immediately forgiven, whereas many of the false methods necessitate some time for their accomplishment.

Card enrollment and the writing down of one's name in heaven are not identical; the saw-dust trail and the glory trail are not always the same; a new name is not always written down in glory when it is entered on the church record. How pathetic is all this when we realize that "Whosoever was not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire."

Healing the bodies of disease and the soul of selfishness, are not always synchronous; "mere miracles which only cure the flesh are not enough to stand the final test." The writer was once made most unwelcome (he was put out) in a home where the body's healing was the chief topic, for speaking of:benevolence also as a fruit of rightness with God; an experience in bodily healing is a poor substitute for righteousness in all realms of life.

More is needed than a mental culture which ignores the heart. More is needed than persuasive, eloquent preaching; eloquence cannot imitate the unction of the Spirit; human pathos is a poor substitute for Divine unction; so-called applied Christianity in effective philanthropy will not touch the deep heart need; neither will a genius for organization supply the place of the need of life in Christ Jesus.

"At the outset, the early Church was not even recognized as a definite society; outsiders noted those who belonged to Christ merely because they lived a certain way which differed from the custom of the times; with us, worship is public and conduct is sometimes private; with them it was the other way around -- conduct was apparent and worship was concealed behind closed doors." The early church was not a legally incorporated body -- their records were in heaven; their great secret needs to be ours -- applied Personality. Fellowship with God and with His Son through the Spirit! All else secondary.

Reverence for special leaders was unknown in the early church. No leader was called "The Big Chief" or "The King of Missions." "There were no genuflections or bowing the knee to the great. The creeds were as yet unwritten save in the heart; they had no church parades, pageantry or publicity; the catechism was not thought of by them as an essential to salvation -- it came later. They had no prayer-books, only prayer; no theories of power, just power."

Unless we repent and turn to Christ, coming generations, if the Lord tarry, will have to pass much of our history over to get a picture of pure Christianity.

A modern church, filled only with socialized activities is as destructive of pure Christianity as the churches filled with the abuses of the Dark Ages. The church of Christ is not a social club -- bowling alleys, pool and billiard tables, swimming pools and gymnasiums are not mentioned among the Bible elements of power from on high. A missionary, home on furlough, broke down in tears as she entered a large city church where she was to speak and saw, near the pulpit, a case filled with silver cups, won by various church and Sunday School "teams." "Oh, " she said, to her sister who accompanied her, "you spend your money to send us to the foreign fields to ask the natives to throw away their idols, and we come home to find them installed, and proudly displayed, in your church auditoriums."

Sacred concerts are in no adequate sense a substitute for the preaching of the Gospel with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, for it is not by music that men are born again but by the Word of God which liveth and abideth forever. That which is secondary should not be made paramount to the Gospel.

The Gospel's call is not primarily to life service or to readiness for "any work in any world;" it is to repentance and holiness or fitness for it. Unsanctified men will more readily respond to a call to dedication for work, than to fitness for the work, because the one ministers to their pride and the other calls for its crucifixion. Hence our need is not so much for twenty guiding principles to life service as much as it is complete surrender to the One Guiding Hand. The sanctifying baptism with the Holy Spirit is more essential to success in Christian service than graduation from the Seminary without the Holy Spirit. Yet reverent scholarship aflame with the Holy Spirit's anointing, makes a combination of untold potentialities for good.

Responding to the influence of mob psychology in Hippodrome Revivals, human mesmerism, hypnotism and personal magnetism, aided by the entrancing spell of embellished music, is not identical with submission to the Holy Spirit's voice; the one exalts the creature, the other the Creator. The man of fine physique and exceptional mental endowments is not always the Lord's choice to herald the Gospel, since the sum total of all the activities of the flesh is nothing. God often chooses the weak and foolish things to confound the mighty, that no flesh should glory in his sight.

Persecution is more indicative of rightness with God than popularity with men; persecution for righteousness sake and not because of fanaticism and idiosyncrasies. Persecution in the days of the Inquisition was dressed in red and operated in the open at the stake; today it wears a robe of self-righteousness, is not so violent and operates in secret. The man of God with a burning message is as unwelcome in many of our present-day churches as John Wesley was in his father's church. Tombstones will give him a warmer welcome than formal ecclesiastics. If he preaches his God-given convictions he will soon have a revival of pure religion or a new field of labor.

It is still true as Emerson says, in church organizations as well as in society, that whoever would play the man must be a non-conformist, as both are a conspiracy against the manhood and liberty of their devotees. To know the sect a man belongs to is to be able to apprehend his line of argument; he is bound hand and foot to defend his system and may not talk in original language. The Master, however, cannot have His work demonstrated by the cowardly.

There is no more salvation inherent in any Protestant Church organization than there was in the ancient Papal system; God does not dwell in systems or temples made with men's hands, but in hearts. He is represented in the Laodicean Church as outside, knocking at the door of individual hearts, saying, "If any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in to him and sup with him."

Ancient or modern popes, Catholic or Protestant, (for there may be the spirit of popery where no title of Pope is given) are powerless to remit sin. The Protestant Church, without Christ, is as poor a substitute for Christ, as was the church of the Dark Ages.

Salvation is not by syllogism, however unanswerably logical; it is not even by naked faith, but by saving faith, with the conscious objective: "Receiving the end of your faith even the salvation of your souls."

The least need of the modern church is money; her greatest need is the kingdom of heaven in the heart. The Fundamentalists say -- "Both men and money are offering themselves to carry on the fight against modernism in the church and rationalism in the schools." But "men and money" is not enough, since "the battle is not ours, but the Lord's." Again, "Fundamentalists are as thoroughly committed to the denominational program as any other." Let us, as Christians, rather, "Commit our way unto the Lord, trust also in him and he will bring it to pass." And yet again the Fundamentalists say, "It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is our business as loyal supporters of the Word of God to hold on to the machinery of the truth." There should be no machinery in Truth. Truth is a Person, for Jesus Christ said-"I am the Way, the Truth -- ." Let us rather hold to Him. Again they say -- "The money which founded our schools and established our churches was given by loyal believers." We are told in the New Testament that "the Lord added to the Church daily such as should be saved" and upon Peter's confession of Him as the Christ, He uttered those words which we do well to remember in these days of apostasy -- "On this Rock (Christ Jesus) I will build my church."

Efficiency in the superintendency of the machinery of the institutionalized church, and the Upper Room equipment for service, are at antipodes. Said a prominent pastor of an Institutional Church which during his seven years' incumbency spent seventeen hundred thousand dollars -- "I am through; I have been no more than a superintendent of machinery -- I am going back to the Upper Room."

The Lord has always had an elect in the various ecclesiastical organizations down through history; in Israel they were found in the synagogue and temple of Christ's time; in the Church of the Dark Ages, in the Roman Church after the Reformation; in the Episcopal or Anglican Church of Wesley's day; and in the various church organizations (and without) in our day, can be found those whom God has reserved, who have not bowed the knee to Baal. The true man of God rejoices, as did his Master, in faith and character, wherever it is found; and though he wars in the flesh he does not war after the flesh, and though he is in the world he is not of the world, he keeps himself unspotted from the world and from that which is false in the Church organization, crying aloud against sin everywhere, within and without.

It is suggested that in the concern of God and our souls, ecclesiastical and church governors, have no control over us, since every man must give account of himself to God. He must, through conscience, the Word and Spirit of God, arrive at the will of God, and value all churches and religious leaders only as they help him arrive at this result. Thus all good in men raised up for leadership in the Name of Jehovah, is of God, and the strongest men are but God's weakest instruments; they are not the originators or creators of their respective epochs; the Word of God does not originate with them any more than it does with others -- it came only unto them. The excellency of the power is of God that God, through Christ Jesus, in all things may be glorified.

How suggestively appropriate to the church which Wesley founded are his words of reproof on the perversion of the office of Bishop in the English Anglican Church, which made it the head of the Christian ministry, whereas in the Apostolic Church it. certainly was a limited and inferior office appointed by the apostles and evangelists for the care of a particular church flock, only while they continued to minister to them.

Camouflaged Bondage

Napoleon was as despotic as the kings he unseated -- an imperialistic democrat!

Wesley's keen observation of the actual conditions (rather than professed) of the Dissenters from the Church of England, led him to say that he was sure that the Church of England, with all her blemishes, was as near, or nearer right with the Scriptural plan, than any other Church in Europe. Could not in all fairness, this be said of many of the Churches of our time, from which dissenters separate?

A man who has since learned better, said that his church was the most spiritual church in a radius of one hundred miles! But, comparing ourselves among ourselves is not wise, Paul wrote. If we insist on comparison let us measure ourselves by the Standard, Christ, by whom God will judge the world, and then let us hunt some secluded spot and weep out our sorrow at our unlikeness to the Pattern. "Not he who commendeth himself is approved, but whom the Lord commendeth."

One great danger is in the change of the form and label of our bondage without deliverance from the fact of it. Early in the days of the Lutheran Reformation, those of keen spiritual discernment saw the potentiality of a new pope in Luther and the danger that Lutheranism might lie as hard upon them as had Romanism. A Lutheran preacher told the writer what he had previously and frequently observed, that modern Lutheranism was rapidly reverting to the type it had originally rebuked -- justification by works rather than justification by faith, as pure Lutheranism had taught.

Several Free Methodist girls testified to the writer that they were in as horrible bondage to that church and its form as a Catholic was to the priest and the system he represented. Bondage is bondage, and there is little difference whether one be bound by a Roman, Protestant, Holiness, Alliance or Pentecostal church. One has as much right as the other to lord it over men's consciences. Christ makes men free from all and while they may worship with one, they love all and are equally ready to serve one or the other, but they are bound by none, owned by none, worship none. "ONE IS YOUR MASTER EVEN CHRIST."

A Lutheran preacher was lamenting to the writer how sad it was that good, conscientious men and women of the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches had placed their consecrated money to endow the educational institutions of these churches and that now many of them were hotbeds of destructive criticism, evolution and infidelity. That is indeed deplorable and reprehensible, when heterodoxy supplants orthodoxy. He further advised us that if preachers in his church were heterodox, they would promptly be ejected from the synod without ceremony. We would suggest that doctrinally he might be, as he supposed, perfectly orthodox and yet dead in his orthodoxy. Indeed this seems to be the condition of much of our present day Protestantism. Even correct truth may be held down in unrighteousness and in powerlessness as a dead intellectualism, after all the power to transform lives has departed from it. In other words, to quote Professor Shaw, "We may be as spiritually dead (in the light) while holding correct intellectual views of truth as others are dead in the dark of wrong views." The death touch may be on our orthodoxy.

Modern density as to spiritual propriety and fitness is often as great as it was in the Dark Ages. A Presbyterian young man gambled and won money, then gave it to the church and thought it was thus hallowed.

A Vision Of Jesus And Its Effect

In some quarters we hear much about searching out sin. That is the Spirit's work and not ours. He reveals Jesus Christ to us and testifies of Him. There is no sin in the catalog that will not come to light When we get a clear vision of Himself. Take the case of Peter who had denied his Lord twice with oaths -- when he saw Jesus, he jumped into the sea, girting his fisher's coat about him and crying for the Lord to depart from him because he was a sinful man.

The vision of Jesus has the same convictive effect on uncleanliness. The woman at Simon's house silently wept over her guilt at His feet. The sight of His spotless purity broke her heart. He said no word to her about adultery. A power went out from Jesus which, when men and women looked on Him, made them see all their guilt.

Again take the case of the woman at the well, guilty of polyandry -- plural husbands -- "Come see a man which told me all things that ever I did." He told her only one thing, but when she saw Him she saw all her sin.

Isaiah, before his vision of the Lord Jesus, had visions of the needs and diseases of others, but when he sees face to face, Him who is fairer than the sons of men, he discovers his own hidden heart corruption and cries, "Woe is me for I am undone -- I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips."

In the case of demon possession; when the man of Gadara saw Him, he was released and restored to his right mind. At the sight of Him, seven devils went out of Mary Magdalene.

Take conviction and general revival power: His name was preached in Samaria, and unclean spirits came out of many that were possessed by them, and there was great joy in that city.

Paul had been a blasphemer and injurious, a persecutor of the saints and had consented to the murder of Stephen, but God vouchsafed to him on the Damascus Road, a vision of His Son, the Bright and Morning Star, with hair as fine wool and eyes as a flame of fire, feet like brass, and a countenance like lightning, a voice as the sound of many waters. Paul looked on His face, bright as the sun, heard his voice, and his heart broke and immediately he volunteers for service. The Lord gave him no credit, nor does he ask it, for all his former Pharisaical works, his tithe paying, fasting groaning, praying, or alms-giving. Paul would have died in his religious blindness but for the sight of Jesus. But Paul's type of conversion is abiding, lie says, "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision." He never got away from it. He would have been poor material for a modern "Book of Numbers" -- type of evangelist, out of which to build a reputation, lie did not have to hunt a mourners' bench after getting one look at Jesus -- there was all needed motive power in the Vision of Christ to carry him without swerving to the head-man's block. Let us not forget this type of heavenly-vision conversion when deploring the instability of modern sham conversions.

John said -- "Whosoever seeth Him sinneth not." The vision of Jesus ends the practice of sin, whether it be that of profiteering, avarice, extortion, spiritual pride, or any other sin. Zacchaeus saw Jesus coming down the road and he felt his hard heart melt within him and his covetousness left him, resulting in four-fold restitution and fifty percent division with the poor.